nevertheless, katz does indicate that such sleeping arrangements "did provide an important site (probably the major site) of erotic opportunity" if they could keep others from noticing. katz notes that referring to present day concepts of "homo, hetero, and bi distorts our present understanding of lincoln and speed's experiences." he notes that, rather than there being "an unchanging essence of homosexuality and heterosexuality," people throughout history "continually reconfigure their affectionate and erotic feelings and acts". he suggests that the lincoln-speed relationship fell within the 19th-century category of intense, even romantic man-to-man friendships with erotic overtones that may have been "a world apart in that era's consciousness from the sensual universe of mutual masturbation and the legal universe of 'sodomy,' 'buggery,' and 'the crime against nature'".