The History Channel has been pushing a special about Abraham Lincoln for over a month now. The early commercials just had a narration about how he'd been abused as a child and suffered bouts of depression, but overcome it to become President. The newer commercials showed a class of students amazing their teacher about what they knew about Lincoln from this special. ("He had...issues," one goofy-looking girl with a feather intones.) I was intrigued enough to watch.

Did anyone else see this and was I the only one who was, disappointingly, bored? (I think the kids of that commercial certainly wouldn't have stuck with it.) The narration was uniformly dull, a series of talking heads, interspersed with brief recreations. Also, the narration kept flashing back from his last day alive to his past. They spent a long time chatting about a theory that Lincoln could have possibly been gay because he had been known to travel and share beds with other men. Well, I suppose anything is possible; who knows if he didn't suffer bouts of depression because of such conflicted feelings in a day when gays were considered wicked? But just because he shared beds with other men while traveling and, at least once, the bed of a friend who had nowhere else for him to sleep? This used to be a very common thing on the American frontier: single men used to travel alone and often at inns there was only one bed and two or more men might share them. By that logic, any man who did so was gay and it's just not so.

(Actually, people sleeping two or more to a bed was pretty common up to and all through the Depression, with no sexual connotation involved. In an era where homes didn't have central heat, sharing a bed with a brother or sister or cousin kept everyone warm. I notice where old books talk about siblings and friends sharing beds, new filmed versions of those books always put them in separate beds. For instance, in the television version of What Katy Did, Katy and Clover have separate beds at boarding school, while in the book they—and all the other girls—shared a bed. Same thing with Rebecca and Emma Jane in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. I always used to get a kick out of the kids' bedrooms in The Waltons because each of them had their own little bed. In Earl Hamner's original Spencer's Mountain and the sequel The Homecoming, the boys shared beds and the three girls slept in one bed.)

I finally switched channels to American Experience's portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt. A similar discussion was raised about Eleanor because of her close friendship with Lorena Hickok. Unlike Lincoln, there is evidence that Eleanor wrote "Hick" effusive, gushy "love" letters...but then Eleanor was the product of a time where you did write effusive, gushy "love" letters to not only your sweetheart, but to your good friends and children. If you have ever read any biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, you might have seen examples of affectionate letters his father sent to his daughters (Teddy's sisters) that could be construed today as hinting at pedophilia, but which were perfectly natural letters back then that doting daddies wrote to their children. Times change. Eleanor also wrote effusive letters to her bodyguard, Earl Miller, and her assistant, Joe Lash. Only Eleanor knew, and she took that to her grave with her. It seems an invasion of privacy to poke around like this after all these years.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:59:00 AM

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