A must-see documentary film is about to hit the screens. “Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln,”   directed by Shaun Peterson, makes a compelling case that the United States of America’s most highly regarded president was queer.

The question of Lincoln’s sexuality has been explored, researched, and written about for years. Carl Sandburg notes in his 1926 biography that Lincoln had “…a streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets.” Larry Kramer’s research led him to a similar conclusion in 1999, echoed by gay writer C.A. Tripp in his 2005 book “The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln.” Enough horses were startled that the standard response was to accuse these scholars of +not understanding the social mores of 19th century America. But these filmmakers have done their homework and can document all their bold assertions about Honest Abe.

Peterson’s technique is powerful and effective. He uses photographs, documents, letters, and other artifacts, and actors who reenact Lincoln’s interactions with central figures in his life, usually on location at the historic sites where they occurred. Bracketing these scenes are excerpts from interviews with experts in American history as well as queer cultural history. Several were known to this reviewer, among them Jonathon Ned Katz, Jack Halberstam, Hugh Ryan, and Michael Bronski, while others were new to me. All were eloquent and very open in elucidating their findings. They did an excellent job of refuting the charges of misunderstanding the social history of the period made by other scholars in the past. In fact, they dealt extensively with the changes wrought by the Freudian and Kinseyan eras in the 20th century, when sexual behavior became sexual identity. And yes…same sex people often shared a bed in the nineteenth century, when a bed might be the most expensive item in a home.

Men traveling might share a bed, but generally for a night or a few nights. Lincoln shared his bed with a variety of other men, and sometimes for as long as four years, and at a time when he was earning enough to buy as many beds as he wanted, and the rooms to house them as well.

Abraham Lincoln was indeed born in a log cabin (in Kentucky), moving to Indiana when he was 7. Of his mother, Nancy, he wrote: “God bless my Angel mother. All that I am or hope to be I owe to my mother.” Tragically, she died suddenly when he was 9, leaving him in the care of his father Thomas, a brutal man who hired him out “As if he were a slave,” and beat him when he was caught reading instead of performing the heavy labor he despised.  He would receive only a year of formal education but was a voracious reader.

At age 21, Lincoln moved to New Salem Illinois, where he got a job and was able to start figuring things out. He came to see that he needed more formal education, and during this era, many witnesses noticed and commented on his total lack of interest in women. A young co-worker, Billy Greene, with whom he shared a small cot for about a year and a half, would later write of him: “Well and firmly built, his thighs were as perfect as a human being could be.” The film’s experts do a polite but explicit job of decoding this message.

In 1837, Lincoln had passed the bar and moved to Springfield, where he met the beautiful man who would be the love of his life, Joshua Fry Speed. The film makes a case for this being a fully “in love” relationship of four years and documents the grief he would feel at its ending. Speed would marry and Lincoln would marry, but other male loves are equally well documented until his assassination. To learn more about them all, see the entertaining and compelling “Lover of Men.”

Lover Of Men (in theaters this Friday) has partnered with HRC; those who purchase tickets to see the film in 
theaters this weekend via this custom link will directly benefit HRC

 

Review: Janet Prolman

Janet Prolman was born in Boston, Massachusetts,  where her mother nicknamed her “my little queer.” She has also lived in North Carolina and New York. A lover of short stories, theater, music, and performance, she knows the lyrics to almost every song or advertising jingle she’s ever heard. Now on Cape Cod, she enjoys kayaking and frequenting Provincetown.