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topicnews · September 6, 2024

Was Abraham Lincoln gay? Scientists prove this in the documentary “Lover of Men”

Was Abraham Lincoln gay? Scientists prove this in the documentary “Lover of Men”

In the new documentary “Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln,” director Shaun Peterson explores decades of speculation about the sexual orientation of the towering 16th U.S. President.

The documentary, which opens in theaters Friday, focuses on Lincoln’s relationships with four men who once shared his bed. But just as important as those intimate connections is its exploration of the flourishing of homosocial relationships in the 19th century – and the idea that love between men has only recently become so problematic.

“We live in a very, very conservative time – this little blip on the map of human history where there are names and opposites and now laws that could potentially make it illegal to love someone,” Peterson told NBC News, describing the desire to label, categorize and even demonize sexuality as “very strange” in a larger historical context.

This still comes from a re-enactment of the documentary “Lover of Men,” which is about Abraham Lincoln’s alleged same-sex relationships.Courtesy of Special Occasion Studios

“We’re not trying to say that Lincoln was an outsider. We’re not even saying that Lincoln was gay,” he said, alluding to the film’s focus on emotional intimacy rather than sex. “We’re saying that Lincoln engaged 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 surrounding the president’s sexuality when he read Gore Vidal’s 2005 Vanity Fair essay titled “Was Lincoln Bisexual?” Then, the documentarian says, his interest in exploring Lincoln’s relationships with the men – Billy Greene, Elmer Ellsworth, David Derickson and, most notably, Joshua Speed ​​- grew during the pandemic, when he repeatedly encountered skepticism when discussing the potential project. For that reason, he wanted to make a film that could draw 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 an emotional film?” Peterson said. “Because at its core, it’s a love story.”

Lover of Men begins with Lincoln’s childhood of poverty in southern Indiana and traces his development from a lanky young lawyer to the thoughtful president who wrote the Emancipation Proclamation and steered the country through the Civil War. And along the way, the film introduces audiences to Greene, Lincoln’s colleague at a general store in New Salem, Illinois; Ellsworth, a dashing regimental soldier dedicated to the Union cause; Derickson, his bodyguard during the war; and Speed, the man repeatedly referred to in the film as the love of his life.

The film features a panel of distinguished scholars from across the country with diverse disciplines. In addition to Peterson’s evocative recreations of the men in bed, the scholars offer various interpretations of how Lincoln’s formative same-sex relationships helped make him the president who “most cared about the country as a whole,” as one expert puts it. They also examine a large number of letters written by and about the president that provide firsthand accounts of those relationships.

Some, like a letter from Greene describing Lincoln’s thighs as “as perfect as a human being can be,” contain more explicit allusions to carnal relationships. Others indicate a general feeling among Lincoln’s circles that he did not particularly enjoy the company of women. And some, like the one between Lincoln and Speed ​​after their four-year relationship ended, have the unmistakable character of love letters.

As Thomas Balcerski – professor of early American history at Eastern Connecticut State University and one of Peterson’s experts – points out, the archives also lack the letters. According to Balcerski, some of the correspondence between Lincoln and Speed ​​​​suggests that it has not been preserved, 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. “The ability to see absences in the archive, to read those silences, is a relatively new idea in scholarship.”

More recently, historians have begun to exploit gaps in evidence to bolster historical records and have begun to examine how contemporary mores may have been inappropriately applied to events from the past. And yet, when it comes to understanding Lincoln’s legacy, these approaches have sparked outrage.

John Stauffer, a Harvard literary historian who faced harsh criticism 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 this reaction stems from a “long tradition of understanding homosexuality as a kind of disease.”

“Today, very few scholars, especially Lincoln scholars, accept that Lincoln was gay. Why is that?” said Stauffer, who plays a major role in the documentary.

“Almost all Lincoln scholars see Lincoln as the nation’s greatest president – the nation’s greatest personality. If he had been gay, that would be beyond their understanding of him, because then he could not have been the statesman that he was,” he said. “Essentially, it reflects a prejudice against homosocial/homosexual relationships, this unequal status: If you’re gay, then you must be inferior in some way.”

Balcerski echoed Stauffer’s sentiments, adding that his students, who are predominantly Gen Z, the queerest generation, generally find it silly that historians in the past have interpreted the situation of two men sharing a bed for four years as mere friendship.

“We have to remember that historians are people too. They may be respected figures at universities that we’ve all heard of, but they’re also people who are products of their time,” says Balcerski, who talks in the film about the “insanely high standard” of evidence that proves a historical figure may have been queer.

“Lincoln has always been a fascinating figure, but only with a generational change, only with a new way of thinking about the past, can something like this finally emerge,” he said.

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