I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find the image — at least the mental one — intriguing: Young Abraham Lincoln, our future esteemed 16th president, sharing a bed with his close confidante Joshua Speed, their bodies pressed together as Speed dreams about Lincoln’s perfect thighs.
The new documentary Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln tries to make a case for the probability of this scenario, through the use of historical data, old letters, reenactments and speculating experts. Did Lincoln, who had an infamously strained marriage to First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, spend decades secretly romancing men like Speed? Stranger things have happened, and the documentary does make some solid points, though some of it feels like a trip to a psychic who, in an attempt to win us over, lays out our entire life by reciting strategically worded generalities.
History can be what you make it, as anyone could tell you if they grew up in the ’70s and ’80s reading social history textbooks (the ones that suggested the Civil War was a bloody four-year battle over states’ rights) only to be confronted by reality in adulthood.
It’s fun to privately speculate about the sexual orientation of famous people, both living and dead, but do we really need an entire documentary devoted to whether Lincoln was secretly bedding men? This is not a rhetorical question, but it’s one I suspect a lot of people on a certain side of the aisle will be asking when The Lover of Men hits cinemas on September 6. Others — most of them likely on the other side of the aisle — will be thankful for a deep dive into a theory that’s gained traction in recent years.
I’m not sure the documentary proves its thesis. After watching it recently, I remained undecided. I also am not sure that it even matters at this point.
For many of us, Lincoln is more a symbol — a profile on a penny, the man who freed the slaves, though the latter is a gross simplification of his legacy and the history of enslaved Americans — than someone who was a living, breathing human being. Though we’ve all seen renderings of him in portraits and primitive photographs, nobody alive knows how he walked and talked.
Related: A Conversation With Thomas Jefferson, White Supremacist
It’s different when assessing more recent iconic figures who were confirmed as gay, may or may not have been gay, or were probably bisexual, like Rock Hudson, Cary Grant, and Marlon Brando, respectively. They’re all dead, but we can still see them in action in their classic films. They remain alive and real in a way dead presidents from the 19th century never will be. (On that note, I’m surprised John F. Kennedy’s lifelong best friendship with Lem Billings, a gay man, hasn’t received closer inspection, despite the 35th president’s well-documented penchant for flagrant womanizing.)
When we read about Cary Grant’s alleged dalliance with Randolph Scott, his onetime roommate and fellow matinee idol, we might be tempted to revisit his movies and reevaluate his chemistry with his female costars and perhaps even look for small or large gestures and clues. Was conveying romantic chemistry with the likes of Katherine Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, and Audrey Hepburn a lot harder for him than it looked?
But the further back we go, the more abstract our historical icons become, whether it’s Abraham Lincoln or Alexander the Great. Even if someone were to stumble across incontrovertible proof that Lincoln was gay, would it change the way we see photographs of him?
I understand what the documentary is trying to do. It’s not just about titillation, though there are moments in Lover of Men that veer close to that territory. It’s about setting the historical record straight and, in part, setting an example for today’s LGBTQ community, confirming that we were indeed a crucial part of history and our history goes well beyond Oscar Wilde and Stonewall. It’s similar to what we are doing for people of color when we talk about the true ethnicity of legends like Cleopatra, Nefertiti, Queen Charlotte, and Jesus Christ. World History is not solely the history of white people.
But taking aside our need for historical LGBTQ role models, does it really matter if Lincoln was indeed a lover of men? We live in a contradictory time when many of us refuse to be defined by labels even as we keep coming up with more of them. That makes the question “Was he gay?” a complicated one.
Outing people is no longer considered to be politically correct, and in response to those with an anti-gay agenda, we often cite an inalienable right to privacy — it doesn’t matter what goes on behind other people’s closed bedroom doors. So, does that apply to dead people as well? Should it?
The answer to that is between you and your curiosity, but I think unpacking Lincoln’s sexual orientation would be a more defensibly urgent pursuit and worthy of deep analytical investigation if his sexuality somehow affected the course of history. Oh, Mary!, a farcical Broadway play written by and starring Cole Escola that I saw a few days after screening Lover of Men, makes the case that maybe it did.
I’m pretty sure history has been fairly accurate about the assassination of Lincoln, but Oh, Mary! presents a “What if” scenario that gets you thinking and wondering while you’re laughing. It’s ostensibly a play about the cabaret aspirations of Mary Todd Lincoln (played by Escola), but it’s actually just as much about the untold history of Abraham Lincoln (played by How to Get Away with Murder and Fire Island actor Conrad Ricamora) and how John Wilkes Booth (played by You’s James Scully) fit into it.
The U.S. education system has done a thorough job of rewriting our country’s past to whitewash historical racism and erase the contributions of Black Americans. Has a similar type of erasure been committed against gay Americans?
My guess is yes, so perhaps a closer and more serious look at Abraham Lincoln’s relationships with men is warranted, if for no other reason than to underscore that we’ve been here and we’ve been queer for centuries, doing remarkable things.
That said, evaluating the sexual proclivities of someone who lived two centuries ago, using today’s cultural standards, can be tricky. “Gay” as we now think of it didn’t exist as a concept in the mid-19th century. Masculinity has evolved, too. There we no gym bodies back then, nor were there “bromances” where male friends who can’t stay away from each other used carefully studied gestures and words (“Hey, man”) to assert their heterosexuality. Two male roommates sharing a cot back then wouldn’t necessarily have had the same implication to them or to anyone privy to that information as it would today.
Also, the florid prose of both the spoken and the written word in the old days reflected a time when language was used differently. Examining old letters and trying to match the language within to modern-day feelings is tantamount to watching a melodrama from the 1940s to determine what women want or how they behave. Film acting was different back then. Meryl Streep wouldn’t be caught dead batting Bette Davis eyes, but in Davis’s time, Davis was considered as accurate a conveyor of human emotions as Streep is today. We may live to see the day when Streep expressing sorrow or rage in the ’70s or ’80s will seem dated and false. For some, maybe it already does.
Cultural norms change over time and place. In India, it’s perfectly normal for male friends to walk down the street holding hands. If you see two men doing the same in New York City, you might safely assume they’re a couple. Similarly, comparing behavior in one century to the same behavior in another can lead to false, overarching equivalencies.
Consider Lincoln’s evolving views on race, even at the end of his life. They wouldn’t hold up to close scrutiny by 21st century anti-racists applying contemporary liberal criteria, but they still would have been seen as enlightened and relatively progressive, if not quite radical, for the times he lived in (though Frederick Douglass might have disagreed).
While we’ll never know for sure if the 16th U.S. president was indeed a lover of (many) men, when it comes to the untold history of Abraham Lincoln, both the new documentary and Oh, Mary! are worthwhile viewing. The latter doesn’t pretend to be based on facts, but its clever revisionist history and completely unexpected climax gave me so much more to think about after the curtain call.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Jeremy Heligar's work on Medium.
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