19 / 52
n’t Franklin “notice all the naked men
cruising on the river?” That’s a good ques-
tion. “This bathhouse stuff,” Fred declares,
“is of monstrous historical importance.
Schiff has a case of what YRH calls Ron
Chernowitis, of Doris Kearns Goodwinism,
denying a truth writ so large she should
choke on it.” You do have to wonder: how
did
Schiff shrug off
Franklin’s daily gay-bathhouse regime?
Or take Meriwether Lewis of Lewis and Clark, who mapped
the Louisiana Purchase. “Lewis, a lifelong bachelor for whom
the company of other men is more congenial than real life, is ...
very much in love with Clark. ... This love will eventually de-
stroy him.” Fred upbraids Lewis’ biographer, StephenAmbrose,
for failing to see this. “How can any sentient person read any-
thing about Lewis without realizing the man was gay? Not a lit-
tle bit, not just sometimes, but totally and wholly gay?”
Then there was Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain to his mil-
lions of fans. Clemens extolled the “stalwart, muscular, daunt-
less young men” of the Nevada mining country, “none but erect,
bright-eyed, quick moving, strong-handed young giants ... a
splendid population.” Fred notes that these men outnumbered
women eighteen to one. Clemens was the lifelong close friend
of a travel writer named Charles Warren Stoddard, “as flam-
boyantly gay as they came.” Fred quotes Clemens: “Charles is
tender and he touches me in spirit as well as body.” Fred has a
lot to say about Clemens’ gay love life. But the great author’s
“well-received” biographer, Ron Powers, is silent on the sub-
ject. Indeed, Clemens’ “undoubted homosexuality has never
been explored by
any
of his biographers.”
Wait a second! the hardheaded reader might exclaim. Is any
of this really proven? Isn’t it all just innuendo, and rather out-
landish at that? Maybe it’s a good thing that Fred Lemish re-
mains a novelistic creature. He isn’t, after all, an actual
historian. Precisely, says Lemish. “God save us from the het-
erosexual historian!”
This is a good place to take a step back and ponder the fact
that the evaluation of historical evidence has always been a mys-
terious business. It’s not nearly as clear-cut a process as one
might like. Here’s an example: Fred modestly omits from his
narrative an exchange between Larry Kramer and the late histo-
rian David Herbert Donald. It culminated with Kramer remark-
ing that Donald was a “dried old heterosexual prune at Harvard.”
The accusation so impressed Donald that he quoted it in his
final book,
We Are Lincoln Men: Abraham Lincoln and His
Friends
, in which Donald sought to refute claims that Abe and
his friend Joshua Speed were sexual lovers. A line of evidence
that Donald cited was this: in the American 19th century, gay
sex affairs “were not merely infrequent; they were against the
law.” Donald went further, pointing out that the historical record
contains love letters between 19th-century male adolescents:
“The letters between such male lovers are full of references to
sleeping together, kisses, caresses, and open longing for each
other. There can be no doubt that these were erotic relationships,
but with rare exceptions, they do not appear to have been sex-
ual relationships.” Oh really? And what is this based upon?
These letters don’t support Donald’s claim that gay sex was
rare in the days of Lincoln, but they very strongly favor the op-
posite conclusion. Notes between teenage “lovers” talking about
bedtime and kisses and caresses and open
longings? If that isn’t what we call a “smok-
ing gun,” what is?
What would it take to persuade straight
historians that Sam Clemens had gay af-
fairs in the Wild West? We could start by
pointing to the lopsided male-female pop-
ulation ratio and talk about typical sexual behavior in hyper-
male environments such as prisons or the open seas. Next,
review Clemens’ tributes to lads’ beauty in the Nevada mining
camps. Work up to attested intimacies between Clemens and
Charles Stoddard and other men. Would that put homosexual-
ity on the table for these historians? Probably not.
But why not? How can evidence add up to such different
things for the gay eye and the straight? At one level the answer
is obvious: in some circumstances gay observers know what to
The American People
Volume One: Search for My Heart
by Larry Kramer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
775 pages, $40.
May–June 2015
19