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Was Abraham Lincoln gay? Scholars make the case in 'Lover of Men' documentary
In this new film, Lincoln scholars examine the intimate life of one of America’s most notable presidents.Abraham Lincoln.Corbis via Getty Images
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By Elaina Patton
In the new documentary “Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln,” director Shaun Peterson tackles decades’ worth of speculation about the sexual orientation of the towering 16th U.S. president.
At the center of the documentary, which will be released in theaters Friday, are Lincoln’s relationships with four men who at one point shared his bed. But just as important as those intimate connections is the film’s exploration of flourishing homosocial relationships in the 19th century — and the idea that only recently has love between men become so problematic.
“We are in a very, very conservative time — this blip on the map of human history where we have names and binaries and now laws that could potentially make loving someone illegal,” Peterson told NBC News, describing the desire to label, categorize and even demonize sexuality as being “very weird” in a larger historical context.
This still image is from a reenactment in the documentary "Lover of Men," which explores Abraham Lincoln's alleged same-sex romantic relationships.Courtesy Special Occasion Studios
“We’re not trying to make the case that Lincoln was an outlier. We’re not even making the case that Lincoln was gay,” he said, alluding to the film’s focus on emotional intimacy over sex. “We’re making the case that Lincoln participated in behavior that was extraordinarily common at the time.”
Peterson, who has closely followed the evolution of Lincoln scholarship over the past 15 years, first became interested in the controversy around the president’s sexuality when he read Gore Vidal’s 2005 Vanity Fair essay titled “Was Lincoln Bisexual?” Then, the documentarian said, his interest in exploring Lincoln’s relationships with the men — Billy Greene, Elmer Ellsworth, David Derickson and, most importantly, Joshua Speed — grew during the pandemic, when he was repeatedly met with skepticism while discussing the potential project. As a result, he wanted to make a film that could bring attention to the small but growing body of work on Lincoln’s alleged queerness and spark a national conversation.
“I thought, what better way to introduce this to the world than through a film with emotion?” Peterson said. “Because, at its core, it’s a love story.”
Beginning with Lincoln’s impoverished childhood in southern Indiana, “Lover of Men” traces his transformation from a lanky young lawyer into the contemplative president who crafted the Emancipation Proclamation and steered the country through the Civil War. And, along the way, it introduces audiences to Greene, Lincoln’s co-worker at a general store in New Salem, Illinois; Ellsworth, a dashing regimental soldier who became devoted to the Union cause; Derickson, his body guard during the war; and Speed, the man who’s repeatedly referred to in the film as the love of his life.
The film features a prestigious group of scholars representing various specialties from across the country. Alongside Peterson’s moody re-creations of the men in bed together, the scholars offer various interpretations on how Lincoln’s defining same-sex relationships played a part in shaping him into the president who “most cared about the country as a whole,” as one expert puts it. They also examine a large body of letters written by and about the president that provide firsthand accounts of those relationships.
Some, like a letter written by Greene, in which he describes Lincoln’s thighs “as perfect as a human being could be,” contain more explicit allusions to carnal relations. Others point to a general feeling among Lincoln’s acquaintances that he didn’t particularly enjoy the company of women. And a few, like the ones between Lincoln and Speed after their four years of living together came to an end, have the unmistakable quality of love letters.
There are also, as Thomas Balcerski — an early American history professor at Eastern Connecticut State University and one of Peterson’s experts — points out, the letters that are missing from the archive. According to Balcerski, some of the missives between Lincoln and Speed hint at letters that didn’t survive, perhaps because the men were known to sometimes burn their correspondence after reading it.
“The surviving evidence — the number of letters between Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed, for example — can also be read by the absence of evidence,” Balcerski said. “Being able to also see absences in the archive, to read those silences, that’s a relatively recent idea within scholarship.”
More recently, historians have started using gaps in evidence to inform the historical record and have begun exploring how contemporary mores may have been inappropriately applied to events from the past. And yet, when it comes to understanding the legacy of Lincoln, these approaches have sparked outrage.
John Stauffer — a Harvard literary historian who received backlash for alluding to a sexual relationship between Lincoln and Speed in his 2008 book, “Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln” — argues that a “long tradition of understanding homosexuality as a kind of disease” is what fuels that reaction.
“Very few scholars, especially Lincoln scholars, accept Lincoln as gay, today. Why is that?” Stauffer, who is heavily featured in the documentary, said.
“Almost all Lincoln scholars see Lincoln as the nation’s greatest president — the nation’s greatest figure. If he was gay, it would explode their understanding of him, because he could not have then been the statesman that he was,” he said. “Essentially, it reflects a prejudice against homosocial/homosexual relations, this unequal status: If you’re gay, then you must be in some ways inferior.”
Balcerski echoed Stauffer, adding that his primarily Gen Z students, members of the queerest generation, generally think it’s silly that historians in the past have interpreted two men sharing a bed for four years as being just friends.
“We have to remember that historians are people, too. They might be respected figures at universities that we all have heard of, but they also are human beings who are products of their time,” said Balcerski, who talks in the film about the “insanely high standard” for evidence that supports a historical figure possibly being queer.
“Lincoln has been a figure of endless fascination, but only with generational shift, only with new ways of thinking about the past can something like this finally emerge,” he said.
Was Abraham Lincoln gay? Scholars make the case in 'Lover of Men' documentary
In this new film, Lincoln scholars examine the intimate life of one of America’s most notable presidents.
www.nbcnews.com
