Was Abraham Lincoln Gay? Scientists Explain Case in ‘Lover of Men’

In the new documentary Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln, director Shaun Peterson addresses decades of speculation about the sexual orientation of the 16th U.S. president.

At the heart of the documentary, which hits theaters Friday, are Lincoln’s relationships with four men who at one point shared his bed. But just as important as those intimate relationships is the film’s exploration of the burgeoning homosocial relationships of the 19th century — and the idea that it was only recently that love between men became so problematic.

“We live in very, very conservative times — a blot on the map of human history where we have names and divisions into two categories and now laws that 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 the larger context of history.

“We’re not trying to prove that Lincoln was an exception. We’re not even saying that Lincoln was gay,” he said, referring to the film’s emphasis on emotional intimacy over sex. “We’re proving that Lincoln participated in behavior that was extremely common at the time.”

Peterson, who has closely followed the evolution of Lincoln studies for the past 15 years, first became interested in the controversy surrounding the president’s sexuality after reading Gore Vidal’s 2005 essay in Vanity Fair titled “Was Lincoln Bisexual?” Then, the documentarian said, his interest in exploring Lincoln’s relationships with men — Billy Greene, Elmer Ellsworth, David Derickson and, most notably, Joshua Speed ​​— intensified during the pandemic, when he repeatedly faced skepticism when discussing the potential project. Ultimately, 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 bring this to the world than through an emotional film?” 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 a contemplative president who crafted the Emancipation Proclamation and led the country through the Civil War. Along the way, it introduces viewers to Greene, Lincoln’s co-worker at a general store in New Salem, Illinois; Ellsworth, a handsome regimental soldier who devoted himself to the Union cause; Derickson, his wartime bodyguard; and Speed, a man who is repeatedly referred to in the film as the love of his life.

The film features a prestigious group of scholars from across the country, and alongside Peterson’s atmospheric reconstructions of men in bed, the scholars offer a variety of interpretations of how Lincoln’s definition of same-sex relationships played a role in shaping him into a president who “cared most about the country as a whole,” as one expert put it. They also examine a large number of letters written by and about the president that provide first-hand accounts of those relationships.

Some, like the letter written by Greene in which he describes Lincoln’s thighs as “as perfect as a human being can be,” contain more explicit allusions to sexual intercourse. Others indicate a general feeling among Lincoln’s acquaintances that he did not particularly enjoy the company of women. And a few, like those between Lincoln and Speed ​​after the end of their four-year life together, have the unmistakable quality of love letters.

There are also, as Thomas Balcerski, a professor of early American history at Eastern Connecticut State University and one of Peterson’s experts, points out, letters that are missing from the archive. According to Balcerski, some of the letters between Lincoln and Speed ​​refer to letters that have not survived, perhaps because the men were known to sometimes burn their correspondence after reading it.

“The surviving evidence—for example, the number of letters between Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed—can also be read from 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.”

Recently, historians have begun to exploit gaps in the evidence to inform the historical record and have begun to examine how contemporary mores may have been inappropriately applied to past events. Yet, when it comes to understanding Lincoln’s legacy, these approaches have sparked outrage.

John Stauffer — a Harvard literary historian who faced 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 “a long tradition of understanding homosexuality as a kind of disease” is what fuels the backlash.

“Very few scholars, especially Lincoln scholars, today accept Lincoln as gay. Why?” said Stauffer, who is featured prominently in the documentary.

“Almost all Lincoln scholars see Lincoln as the greatest president in the country—the greatest figure in the country. If he were gay, their understanding of him would explode, because he couldn’t have been the statesman that he was,” he said. “It basically reflects this prejudice against homosocial/homosexual relationships, this unequal status: If you’re gay, you must be somehow inferior.”

Balcerski echoed Stauffer, adding that his students, mostly from Generation Z, the most queer generation, generally find it absurd that historians have historically interpreted two men sharing a bed for four years as simply friends.

“We have to remember that historians are people, too. They may be respected figures in universities that we’ve all heard of, but they are also people, products of their times,” said Balcerski, who in the film speaks of the “incredibly high standard” of evidence that a historical figure may be queer.

“Lincoln was a figure of enduring fascination, but only a generational change, only new ways of thinking about the past, could finally lead to something like this,” he said.

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