by Larry Kramer
Speed will write to Herndon, “One thing is plainly discernable—if I had not been married & happy—far more happy than I ever expected to be—He would not have married.”
He will write in his Reminiscences: “This thought occurred to me while gazing upon Abe in his coffin. This lie of mine.”
THE PENIS OF JOHN WILKES BOOTH
Among Speed’s papers is a drawing identified as “the penis of John Wilkes Booth.” The penis is markedly bent, so that it must have been awkward, even painful, for Booth to use it in normal positions of insertion. This abnormality of Booth’s was also noted on the autopsy after his hanging (bodies in rigor mortis often have erections), validating the drawing among Speed’s papers and his descriptive notes underneath remarking on this physical deviance. One can only assume it was drawn by Speed, both because the handwriting is his and because of the scrawled words of greeting, “For Abe: How about this for a twisted fellow? Your ever alert Audubon, JS.” Was there another copy that he sent to Abe?
Papers and interviews with family members turned over to the government by one of Booth’s brothers indicate that Booth spoke of his torment from his malformed penis. “I hide myself when I am with another, lest they laugh or run away. Some become so frightened when they see it that they call me ‘Devil!’ and I am forced to bind them to a post to keep them near to me so I can love them.” He writes this to his older brother, the great actor Edwin Booth, who, on several occasions, was called upon to extricate his brother from the results of his brutal behavior.
That he does more than bind them is also confided to Edwin. “Like many others I almost killed him not so much because he laughed at me, or because I performed on him acts he were not accustomed to, but because my cock with its wretched hook did him internal injury, so that blood came spurting out his rectum. I was worried he would soon be dead from this cause and thought I best try to end his agony more quickly. But he pulled himself up and ran away. How am I, with this, like this, ever to love, ever to hope to love, ever to have a person of my own?”
In Speed’s own handwriting: “He caused me much lost blood. It was vanity on my part to believe, as he claimed, his extreme fondness for older men.”
Such abnormal curvature of the penis will become known as Peyronie’s disease. It is caused by the buildup in the soft tissue of hardened fibrous lesions that develop under the skin of the penis. The cause of this fibrous tissue is unknown, but was thought to be caused by trauma or injury to the penis through sexual activity. It is now considered to be an autoimmune disease, meaning that the body is attacking itself. The Underlying Condition is an autoimmune disease too. Peyronie’s only gets worse and makes intercourse difficult, painful, or impossible, much less erections. The stronger the erection, the more acute the pain.
Abe, of course, knows none of this.
Lincoln’s third and final visit to a gathering place for hushmarkeds is to a room in the Willard Hotel, just around the corner from the White House. A special suite is arranged for a Mr. Brown. Abe by now has been unhappily married for twenty-three years, a marriage he knew before he entered it that he shouldn’t make, a marriage that is a hideous parody of that word and institution and that ruins every minute of his life he spends with Mary Todd Lincoln.
He is fifty-one years old, our president, when on the eve of his second inauguration he agrees to meet Joshua Speed, who arranged for the room.
WILKES AND THE FATAL MEETING
John Wilkes Booth was born in 1838, a year after Joshua and Abe began their own relationship.
He was not tall, not as tall as everyone then and forever after thinks he is, or really should have been (after all, he murdered such an important person; surely a shrimp couldn’t have done all that leaping onto the stage); but no, he is not tall at all. He is only five feet eight inches, at the most. Mind, he wears lifts in his shoes. Even the tall ones do, like his brother and father, each more famous than he, each, he knows, a better actor than he; but with his lifts and his ambitious determination to remove the president of the United States, he can become, to his own mind certainly, a much taller person indeed.
He has many ideas about how to do it. They are not so well thought out as they should be, but he doesn’t know that, although he is twenty-seven years old. Is he dumb, perhaps, not to have figured his plan out to a degree that might give it half a chance of succeeding and him a chance of surviving? But he always was a spoiled kid who did just what he wanted. Doing what he wants to do will certainly change history, which is what he wants to do. But that’s just it. He doesn’t know how he wants it changed beyond getting rid of all the niggers. He doesn’t realize that’s not enough. So in this sense, the sense that he has this one bold notion, to eliminate the president, like everything else in his life he will have enough but not enough.
He is of course crazy. Historians haven’t known what to do with him, because he left so little beyond his actions to speak for him, for his heart, for his dreams, for his reasons for doing what he did, so as usual, and as we’ve seen again and again, and as we’ll continue to see, our historymongers refrain from naming the obvious truth. There are holes miles wide in every history written of his terrible deed, so many questions unanswered. Killing Abe does what? Getting rid of all the niggers accomplishes what? How do you get rid of them? What do you do with them? Send them all off somewhere? Then what? Does he really think the world will be a better place for him then? Who will do all the work? Who will look after well-enough-born people like him, even with their crooked cocks?
And what has been so lacking in his world, anyway? He is handsome and talented and as rich as he wants to be if he works regularly, performing for the worshipful crowds of women around the country who are his greatest fans. A doctor in Philadelphia told him he’d seen other cocks like his and it was possible to live with them, depending on what you did or didn’t do with it. “Gentleness is all, I would suggest to you, my dear man, in sex as in love as in life.”
In the future such a deed as he is planning, executed successfully or not, would immediately bring the charge that “ulterior forces” are involved. Foreign enemies, perhaps. Someone(s) dreadfully and terribly rich who hunger ravenously for power. At the very least, associates in the crime who are not so ragtag as the ones caught and punished after Lincoln is murdered. What a motley crew of misfits!
“Niggers out!”
That’s all it seems to be about. Get rid of the niggers.
When does the prank turn from cogitation to all systems go? What pulls the trigger in the mind of this Wilkes, who doesn’t even go by his first name?
As it all stands now, still stands now, after an enormous number of books about it, it doesn’t seem enough, doesn’t add up. What aren’t we seeing? What’s missing? Motive? Enough of a motive actually to murder the president? Is it enough just to call this Wilkes crazy? Deranged? A crazy young actor playing a mad Richard or an obsessed Macbeth or Othello off the stage as well as on? What about all of the others?
Who is this Davey Herold who hangs around Wilkes like a lapdog, an idolizer, a fraternity pledge, a thing, a very slave himself, who never leaves his side even when he knows that if he remains he won’t get out alive? What’s he about, this Davey Herold?
Who is this Lewis Powell who is so magnificent in his handsomeness, to equal Wilkes in this regard, indeed to surpass him? He is a young Marlon Brando, broodingly posing all over the place, even in prison as he awaits the gallows. Without question he’d be a movie star today the minute a casting director caught any sight of him. What’s he about, this Lewis Powell?
What he is about is that he is the beloved of John Wilkes Booth. Why has no one ever fathomed this fact? These two handsome, strapping, indeed gorgeous men, the only attractive couple in this ragtag lot, are bound to each other in a tortured way that neither understands nor can speak about. The brooding referred to as Powell’s dominant mien belongs to a man trapped by forces that can only silence him. He has fucked up his assignment to render the vice
president, Andrew Johnson, unto death; he has never been much successful at anything except being pretty. As he faces death, he welcomes it. That brooding stare says as much as “You will never know and I will never have to tell you.” It is said that he and Booth have known each other for a number of years, ever since Powell, as a handsome Confederate soldier, saw a photo in a newspaper of Booth, a handsome actor appearing that very night, and went to see the production. He was so taken with Wilkes that he went backstage and introduced himself, thus commencing this “friendship.”
These six main conspirators, Herold, Powell, Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlin, Edman Spangler, George Atzerodt, how are they all connected? To this day no one seems to know. Was it really so helter-skelter as it has been made to sound? They all look much of a muchness. A certain look. Acceptable-looking. Except for Powell and Booth, nondescript. To this day we don’t know how they all met and/or were connected to Wilkes. A couple were perhaps friends from school days. None of them appeared to have strong political beliefs about anything. Did he seek them out? Was he paying them? Why did they join him? If they did join him. How did they all wind up dying for his misguided deed? Once again: it just doesn’t add up. Why is so little known, from then and until this day, about this group as a group? Everything written about them is unconvincing.
It is at this last meeting between Joshua Speed and Abraham Lincoln in this Washington hotel that Lincoln meets John Wilkes Booth. Amazingly, hideously, Speed has brought Booth along as “an inauguration present” for the newly reelected president. If Abe still longed for a return to Joshua’s arms—for indeed he had never stopped thinking about him over all these years—then this night must have been a nightmare. Speed’s notes accompanying his penis sketch allow us to fill in some blanks. “I told Abe that we were two old men, and here was a youthful ass to fuck, enjoy it! I was astounded by his tears. It was as if he were that child again who came into my arms that day in Springfield when we both were young. He was so needy for my love then, and apparently still. I envy any man who can love so deep and long. Abe whispered to me now, ‘Oh, Joshua, what you have not learned about the human heart! You who left me for Fanny, whom you never loved and lied to me about it, you who in my very sight gave yourself to another man, and now this—do you not understand how such acts warp and destroy the love I’ve managed to hold in my heart for you?’”
Speed scrawls his defense in handwriting that is blotched by tears: “I believe he said these things to wound. It was his own growing ambition that rent us apart! I wrote to him once, ‘You want a lifetime of importance and I do not. You want a place in the sun and I do not. You want others to hear your voice and I want mine to be a quiet one. I could not say nay to your desires in these regards.’ All these were lies.”
And then Speed writes in bolder script, “I only brought Booth to be looked at, for he was most unusually endowed. Abe had told me he admired his acting. I brought him to be a treat to look at! Yes, I had thoughts of the three of us naked together. Yes, as old as we both were I wished to see Abe naked again. My life had been a sham of everything and he was the best I ever had. But Abe dismissed him, demanded that he remove himself immediately from the room. Booth did not take kindly to such treatment. This act, of his, of mine, of ours, is what sealed Abe’s fate.”
* * *
Lincoln is murdered on the night of April 14, 1865. That he, “the leading actor in the greatest and stormiest drama known to real history’s stage,” as Walt wrote, “should sit there and be so completely interested and absorbed in those human jackstraws, moving about with their silly little gestures, foreign spirit, and flatulent text,” with the audience watching “the scenes of a piece that make not the slightest call on either the moral, emotional, aesthetic, or spiritual nature,” while “the actual murder transpired with the quiet and simplicity of any commonest occurrence—the bursting of a bud or pod in the growth of vegetation, for instance” is not the complete story. There is a different story, known to Lincoln, Speed, and Whitman. But the times, ah yes, the times, always the times, never allow the whole truth to be revealed.
Walt Whitman knows John Wilkes Booth, the murderer, “his face of statuesque beauty.” He knows that Booth, an actor, hounded the boys and young men in the acting companies he performed with, hounded and seduced them. Seduced is too kind a word. There are dead bodies along the routes of Booth’s theatrical tours, missing kids who aren’t found because Wilkes disposes of them. He burns them up. One or two he only butchers into pieces. Several are older men. By the time he murders Lincoln, he doesn’t care if he gets caught. His dash for freedom is haphazard, twisted ankle or not. “Sic semper tyrannis!” he shouts at Ford’s Theater, but the end of tyranny does not mean Lincoln, the obvious interpretation. Like the serial killer grateful for the electric chair as the end to his miserable contortions, John Wilkes Booth, as he performs his greatest role on the stage of history, is finally able to play a part for which his talent rewards him fully and completely, with the self-immolation that his misery longs for.
Yes, Walt knew of Booth’s activities. Walt certainly knew of the world of young boys, having been sent packing by angry parents of a Long Island school or two for being too attentive to their offspring. Walt had even been interviewed (and rejected) by the Milton Academy, north of Baltimore, one of the boarding schools to which the young Wilkes was shipped off. “Oh, wretched transpoiler of the air I breathe, oh you of poison’d thought and deed” is an early barb of complaint aimed but not sent to the principal of a school in the Menemsha Marbledale Pequod district of Nassau, Long Island. Yes, Walt knew this world of young boys and their educators and their despoilers. And their protectors of which he considered himself to be one.
THE FINAL LOVE, THE FINAL WORDS
Abe had written: “I wish a certain knowledge to be known that there was no duplicity, a word itself that pains me, for I meant no double motives to my actions, but that the man himself, your brother and my dearest precious friend, had and held all of which my friendship was capable. I believe he does know this and that he too felt the same and that he too kept his secret from the world all these years.”
These are the great man’s words. They were written to Joshua’s sister Susan some years after the two men parted and she, who had been half in love with Abe herself, demanded to know why.
Abe’s final lover had been Captain David V. Derickson, of Company K, 150th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteers, Second Regiment, Bucktail Brigade, who was chosen by Abe to be his bodyguard. Captain Derickson was a twice-married man (his first wife died) who had fathered nine children by the time he began his relationship with Lincoln. He was five feet nine inches tall, with a husky build, and at forty-four was nine years younger than the president, with whom he slept in the White House when Mary was not in residence, and whom he accompanied everywhere else. These facts are not unknown and indeed were commented upon in local gossip columns of the day. The affair lasted about eight months, ending amicably, the captain requesting a transfer, which Lincoln granted along with a promotion.
The duration of their love affair, during 1862–1863, coincided with some of the worst battles and casualties of the Civil War.
“Such was the War,” Walt writes. “It was not a quadrille in a ball-room.” No, the real war will never get in the books.
Nothing became Lincoln more than his removal from life. Nothing ensured his belovedness more than his murder. It took John Wilkes Booth, a hustler, to make Abe into a god.
In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln said, “Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.”
THE CIVIL WAR
The Civil War is the single most hideous event that ever happens to The American People.
The Civil War is one of the bloodiest, meanest wars in human history.
Six hundred and thirty thousand Americans die at the hands of other Americans.
“And this is surely an undercount,” writes James M. McPherson, “for the figure of 258,000 Confederate war dead is arrived at from incomplete data and does not include the unknown (and unknowable) number of Southern civilian deaths indirectly caused by the ravages of disease, exposure, malnutrition, and inevitable disruption of a war that was fought mostly in the South and destroyed much of the Southern infrastructure.” Fifty-one thousand are killed at the Battle of Gettysburg alone, which John Rhodehamel describes as “the deadliest encounter in American history and the biggest military encounter fought in the Western Hemisphere. It is our Waterloo, our Stalingrad.”
The Civil War is the supreme manifestation of everything that was, is, and will continue to be appalling about America and The American People. That so many volumes by so many “intelligent” writers should claim this internecine bloodbath as some sort of noble enterprise is unbearable. Yes, it ended slavery, but did it really?
America from the Civil War on becomes the America we know now. By the end of the Civil War, The American People commence becoming greedier, more idealistic, more ambitious, smarter, ceaselessly more, more innovators and accumulators of bank accounts and progenitors of children and everything else under the sun. There is much obsession for land. There is little visible desire by anyone to consciously do the right thing, after all, and at last.
What is it about this war that unleashes such energies, pent up or newly formed? Is guilt the subtext, from brothers murdering so many brothers? As if by ambition and enterprise alone a past could be buried, the foundation, true, of a better future, but a cursed foundation nevertheless?
