Sometimes these stories are built around a grain of truth. Frequently, though, they’re severely distorted if not completely fabricated. They get spread not because of the quality of the research, but in spite of it. They get spread for the most basic of reasons: because lots of people — including credentialed academics, media figures and a chunk of the public — want to believe them.

If you want to see a classic example, take the new book The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln. In it the late C.A. Tripp (a prominent sex researcher, and himself homosexual) claims that Lincoln was also gay — indeed, that the married father of four was really “predominantly homosexual” throughout his life.

As it happens, Tripp’s not the first to make this claim. A few academic types have toyed with it, and gay activists have been pushing it for quite a while now. (Playwright Larry Kramer, whose antics I’ve covered before, even claims he’s discovered secret gay sex diaries from Lincoln’s lover.) But Tripp’s supposed to be different; he’s supposed to have done his homework and thoroughly documented his case. And his book runs nearly 400 pages, so Tripp must have a serious argument to make, right?

Wrong, actually — according to none other than his former longtime collaborator on the book, who says he quit the project because Tripp was bent on perpetrating “a hoax and a fraud.”

Historian Philip Nobile worked with Tripp from 1995 to 2000, researching Lincoln’s personal life to see whether there might be any substance behind the homosexuality theory. Nobile tells his story at length in an article for The Weekly Standard. It makes for fascinating reading, vividly illustrating how someone like Tripp — for all his vaunted academic credentials — can still warp his vision to see only what he wants to see.

When you’ve got some time, it’s worth reading Nobile’s article to see just how thoroughly Tripp succumbed to that temptation. (Heads up: As you might expect with a topic of this nature, parts of it may make you feel just a bit — to use a technical term — grossed out.) But if you’ve only got a few minutes right now, let me present a few examples.

Tripp builds a big chunk of his argument on the notion that the tall, raw-boned Lincoln hit puberty early. Why does this matter? Because according to Tripp’s mentor, the famed and twisted sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, early puberty is often linked to early sex and to homosexuality. “Tripp felt his date-of-puberty argument was the most-important ‘smoking gun’ in the whole gay Lincoln arsenal,” Nobile wrote. “Not only did it lend a quasi-scientific luster to a largely speculative quest, it was his sole original contribution to the discussion of Lincoln's sexuality.”

Then there’s Tripp’s fixation on a brief (eight lines), humorous poem Lincoln wrote at age 20 about a man who marries another man. It’s mainly about the absurdity of same-sex coupling, doomed to (among other things) eternal barrenness. To Tripp, however, this somehow translated to slam-dunk proof: “Viewed through the prism of sex research,” he wrote in an early draft of his book, “the poem is an open and shut case, a virtual certification of Lincoln's own engagement in homosexuality.” Lines like that say a lot more about Tripp’s mind than Lincoln’s.

At times, Tripp resorts to outright fabrication. He quotes an observer claiming that young Abe and a friend “had an awful hankerin’, one for t’other” — without mentioning that the source is an unfootnoted book about Lincoln’s schoolmaster (written in 1944) whose authors admitted that their dialogue was fictional. That was good enough for Tripp, though. “This usage was designed more to deceive than enlighten the reader, who hardly expects to see a concocted quotation passing for real in a nonfiction book,” Nobile commented.

Mostly, though, the person Tripp deceived may have been himself. He was “consistently bending the evidence in the lavender direction” Nobile wrote — so much so that in his book (and, one suspects, his mind) “scenes innocent on their face are always soft-focused into seductions.” So when he hears that Lincoln accepted friend Joshua Speed’s invitation to share a bed (“a common occurrence on the rude frontier,” Nobile notes, where nights got cold), Tripp describes it as “a sexual conquest.” Ditto when Lincoln as president expressed friendship for his rather homely security guard David Derickson, with whom Lincoln also shared a bed when his wife was away.

As Tripp’s argument twists evidence to suit his thesis, it also ignores or derides the abundant evidence to the contrary. At the top of the list is, of course, all the evidence of Lincoln’s heterosexuality. Not only was he married with four children (born over the span of a decade), he had several courtships before he wed Mary Todd, including one with the woman his law partner Herndon thought was the true love of his life, Ann Rutledge.

True, his marriage to Mary was troubled. Yet even that testifies probably not to homosexuality but to its opposite. As columnist Joseph Sobran points out, “If Lincoln could also endure a long marriage to the plump, ill-tempered Mary Todd, we may also suspect that he had a normal male appetite for the opposite sex.” After all,

She was, for lack of a more vehement word, impossible. … She was insanely jealous, and could make utterly mortifying scenes when Lincoln showed even formal courtesy to another woman. But she never made such scenes over men. I think we may assume that Mary was the best authority on the nature of her husband’s desires.

Then there are the common-sense questions that cry out for an answer. For instance, as Donald Herbert Davidson (who is among Lincoln’s leading biographers) has pointed out, Lincoln himself forthrightly admitted sharing bunks with men (writing, for example, “I slept with Speed”). Would he have been so forthright and matter-of-fact about it if something more had been going on? Would practically anyone in that era, much less a man with political ambitions? It takes an ideologue to dismiss such obvious points. And that, alas, is what Tripp was — in Nobile’s words, “more advocate than historian.”

None of this is to suggest that, when dealing with a revered historical figure, we should blind ourselves to evidence that might paint a darker (or just sadder) portrait than we’d like to see. There’s no doubt that Lincoln wrestled with demons in his personal life, including depression, and for all the biblical language of his speeches, he may not have been a Christian. (Historian Allen C. Guelzo examines the question at length in his book Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President.) Neither should his public policies be exempt from debate: He has thoughtful critics (Sobran among them) to this day. Indeed, we shouldn’t place anyone on a pedestal in any way. Hero worship is at best a short step away from idolatry — for it means (to quote a a previous column of mine) “taking at least some measure of the glory meant for God alone and transferring it to sinful human beings, the very best of whom is, at the core of his being, thoroughly rebellious toward God and righteous only in that God declares Him righteous through Christ.”

All of that said, Tripp’s case for Lincoln’s homosexuality barely rises even to the standard of gossip — and that’s no standard for historians to follow. At best he’s constructed a shoddy, ramshackle structure, which Nobile effectively devastates. Nobile’s work can’t be tarred as a smear motivated by bigotry: It’s too strong on its own merits, and besides, why would someone with a bias against gays have spent years researching a book that could have brought them a public-relations coup?

Not that gay activists wouldn’t try, though. According to Nobile, they’ve already threatened to do just that:

“If you don’t stop making a stink about Tripp’s book, I’m going to expose you as an enormous homophobe,” Larry Kramer telephoned me to say last October. “For the sake of humanity, please, gays need a role model.”

That last part may be the most telling of all. For out of Kramer’s mouth comes the bottom line: Issues of truth must take a back seat to a political — and cultural — agenda.

There’s nothing left to say except: The prosecution rests.