In 1995, just after Bob Dole rejected campaign contributions from the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay GOP group, Log Cabin member W. Scott Thompson was quoted in the New York Times as saying that gays should feel welcome in the party, "given that the founder was gay."
Was Lincoln Gay? By W. Scott Thompson Mr. Thompson is a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University.
In his early thirties, before either he [Abraham Lincoln] or his love-object Joshua Speed married, they lived together in cramped circumstances over four full years; not to put too fine a point on it, "the young men slept in the same bed every night," according to a very straight and conventional source. [1] Perhaps we are meant to accept this habit precisely for its openness--since it is not covered up--as necessitated by frontier privation rather than erotic preference: an inference more in the category of the anxious denial of the historian rather than the compelling illogic of the evidence--a memorable avoidance indeed, since it does not even pass the straight-face test.
[1] Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia (1982), p. 284.
In "Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years" (1926), Carl Sandberg wrote that their relationship had "a streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets," which some have taken as a veiled reference to homosexuality. In 1995, just after Bob Dole rejected campaign contributions from the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay GOP group, Log Cabin member W. Scott Thompson was quoted in the New York Times as saying that gays should feel welcome in the party, "given that the founder was gay."
At the risk of being unkind, Lincoln's wife Mary Todd was a shrill, shrieking, perpetually unhappy soul, and just as DE's aging congressman Mike Castle entered a marriage of convenience before running for Congress, I think it's quite likely that Mr. Lincoln understood that "single men don't get elected" and he and Castle both married a couple of purty little thangs! ;)