In 1829, Abraham Lincoln wrote a poem about gay marriage. Yes, you heard correctly! A decade ago, The Washington Blade published a piece in which Mark Segal told why he thought the dismissal by most historians that Lincoln might have been gay was unconvincing to him. Segal is the founder and publisher of Philadelphia Gay News, the country’s oldest LGBTQ+ newsweekly. He mentioned a poem from 1829, written about a boy marrying a boy. The creator of this poem was a 20-year-old man in rural Indiana. And his name was Abraham Lincoln. This poem is thought to be the first reference to gay marriage in U.S. history. Most historians agree Lincoln wrote the poem as a joke or rebuttal to the lack of an invitation to a friend’s wedding, but how a backwoodsman conceived a boy-marries-boy poem in 1829 remains a question.
The poem was included in the first major biography of Lincoln, written by his law partner, William Herndon. Revisionists omitted it in subsequent editions. It didn’t reappear in Herndon’s edition until the 1940s. The poem starts like this - “I will tell you a Joke about Jewel and Mary. It is neither a Joke nor a Story. For Rubin and Charles has married two girls. But Billy has married a boy…” #Queer Up The USA View