nathan1977 said:
Fourth -- it's interesting how a lack of evidence is used now as evidence that something is true -- the classic rhetoric of conspiracy theorists.
i think you make some good points, and no one knows to know for sure about this, but i do encourage you to read all of andrew sullivan's review of the book on The New Republic website (should be free ... if there's sufficient interest, i can post the whole thing, but it is pretty long).
however, your fourth point is pretty much the basis of Queer Theory. remember, it is "the love that dare not speak it's name." as most gay people will tell you, what you omit is as important as what you say, since until recently it hasn't been acceptable to live "out" as a homosexual, and all things considered -- Lincoln is still very recent history and subject to many of the same norms that we are today.
also ... Lincoln had a troubled marriage well before the Civil War, so i don't think your first point holds much water.
your second and third points are well taken in a holistic sense, but there's much more in the excerpts that i've read of Lincoln's letters. since i haven't read the book, i'll just post an important part of Sullivan's review:
"He slept with his first major love, Joshua Speed, for four years. True, this was not as odd as it might seem today. But sleeping with him the very day they met? And doing so for four more years--when an aspiring young lawyer could easily have found lodgings of his own? No one denies that their friendship was intense, that they were often inseparable, and that when Speed finally left town, Lincoln had a complete nervous breakdown. (This last, vital fact is omitted from Brookhiser's review.) Speed's and Lincoln's letters detailing their approach to marriage are redolent of white-knuckled panic. Any gay man who has experienced the agony of a lover being propelled by social pressure to marry a woman will recognize the emotional power of this moment in Lincoln's life. (Speed couldn't actually consummate his own marriage.) Yes, the panic could have been because Lincoln's fitful, reluctant engagement to Mary Todd had fallen through. But he had never shown that much interest in her, and had been distant and ambivalent in the courtship. He and Speed, however, were inseparable. "Yours forever," Abe's letters to Speed always ended. And when Speed left him, Lincoln wrote: "I am now the most miserable man living ... whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forbode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me." In fact, of course, Lincoln suffered from acute bouts of depression for his entire life. It seems loopy to ignore the possibility that this was related to his being denied a real or meaningful love life. But then if you're heterosexual and have never experienced such emotional desolation, why would you look in the first place?"
and i have to post this part, just because:
" The usual suspects have weighed in aggressively to counter these facts. The Weekly Standard, from its sophomoric cover-image of a simpering gay caricature of Lincoln, to its hiring of a crank to denounce the book as a "hoax" and "fraud," is a useful exhibit in the degeneration of conservative discourse. But what's interesting to me is that even if you gloss all Lincoln's male relationships as homosocial or homoerotic rather than homosexual, they still paint a picture that would offend today's Republican establishment. Whatever Lincoln was, he was very at ease expressing love, intimacy, and affection for other men. The last thing he was was sexually prudish. His early doggerel poem about the progeny that results from anal sex with another man--he has the two men married no less!--would be regarded by today's conservatives as worthy of protest to the FCC."