On tenth avenue, there are a whole bunch of galleries, and last week I happened to walk into a really cool gallery called the C24 Gallery. This isn’t just any normal exhibition that I saw. There was a whole built in house in that gallery, and inside, the stairs lead to the bedroom of Abraham Lincoln. There were newspapers dating back to the 1800s, and old candles, and hay in the bedroom. Skylar Fein put this bedroom together with the help from his research when he went down to Kentucky. Historians have confirmed that Abraham Lincoln shared his bed with Joshua Speed in the 1830s. Joshua Speed had his hardware store downstairs, and the bedroom was upstairs. Therefore, many speculators, like Skylar Fein, have questioned Lincoln’s sexuality. Was he actually gay? No way! I don’t believe that. Historians argue that Springfield, Illinois was a frontier town, so the two men didn’t have much choice. But when I came to know that Joshua Speed was the son of a wealthy plantation owner, so he actually didn’t have a shortage of beds, and that Lincoln rejected the offer of having his own bedroom in the house of a wealthy lawyer but still chose to have a shared bed with Speed, it scares me.

I felt really uncomfortable as I walked into the bedroom. People came and saw the bed, and walked out to see other things in the gallery. I spent some amount of time looking at the primary resources in the bedroom. I didn’t even care if I was allowed to touch things, because not only did I touch things in that room; I started smelling things, like the candles and blankets. Because these things that were displayed were 200 years old. I’m living in this time, 2013, yet I still have access to things from the 19th century. Its depressing and awesome at the same time. I was happy to be there, although the room was creeping me out, and then I just became really sad to think that people would actually think a respectable man like Abraham Lincoln could be gay. What an experience!