Abraham Lincoln targeted for theatrical character assassination; filmmaker suggests he was a philandering homosexual
Activists' so-called "Pride Month" is over, but their campaign to queer America is clearly a perennial undertaking. While American youth are a popular target, long-dead American greats are apparently also fair game.
Shaun Peterson, a self-described "director/preditor" from California who has previously worked on multiple Disney projects, is set to debut a so-called documentary film in September that accuses Abraham Lincoln of having extramarital affairs with men.
"As told by preeminent Lincoln scholars, historical recreations and never before seen photographs and letters, the film details Lincoln's romantic relationships with men," says the website for the film. "Lover of Men widens its lens into the history of human sexual fluidity and focuses on the profound differences between sexual mores of the nineteenth century and those we hold today."
The filmmakers made sure there was no mistaking the agitprop nature of the film, stating, "Lover of Men is not only an exploration of gender roles and sexual identity, but also serves as an examination of American intolerance."
According to the trailer for the film, sexuality "through the mid-19th century was far more fluid, but for someone who wanted a political career, it was mandatory that you have a wife."
"If you can accept a queer Lincoln, you can accept queer people overall," says the trailer. "He should inspire us to achieve a true democracy for everyone."
Whereas the new Broadway show "Oh, Mary!" similarly accuses Lincoln of being gay, the LGBT publication Queerty indicated its transvestic playwright Cole Escola readily admits that his play is utterly baseless. The trailer for Peterson's film, on the other hand, adopts a pretense of seriousness about its projection of faddish contemporary notions about sex onto a revered 19th-century statesman.
'I've seen those letters, and they have no homoerotic overtones.'
Lincoln married Mary Anne Todd, a Kentucky woman, on Nov. 4, 1842. Together, they had four children, only one of whom — Robert Todd Lincoln — lived past the age of 18.
While there have been various efforts over the years to paint the American father and husband who issued the Emancipation Proclamation as gay or a "bisexual" — especially by the late gay activist Larry Kramer, who made no secret of his political aim to the New York Times — these appear to have consisted largely of projections, inventions, speculations, and misinterpretations.
One reason people have concluded Lincoln was gay was that he shared a bed with a man on more than one occasion. It's clear from the trailer for Peterson's film that it similarly will lean into the suggestion embraced by other revisionists that Lincoln had a romantic relationship with Joshua Speed, a man whose marriage to Fanny Henning lasted 40 years.
Michael Burlingame, the Naomi B. Lynn distinguished chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield, told the Hartford Courant in 2021 that the supposedly controversial aspects of Lincoln's relationship with Speed seized upon by the likes of Larry Kramer would "be a footnote" in his multi-volume biography of the Republican president.
"The evidence I've seen seems insignificant to justify its inclusion," said the Lincoln expert. "I've seen those letters, and they have no homoerotic overtones."
Burlingame suggested, instead, that he had found evidence that Lincoln was infatuated with women besides Todd prior to their marriage.
Charles Strozier, a psychoanalyst and history professor who addressed the false narrative in his 2016 book "Your Friends Forever, A. Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed," told the Daily Beast that it was very common for men to share a bed in Lincoln's time.
"Inns at the time were really just homes where they finished the loft. They weren't hotels like we have now. They were just hostels, where you have the men over here and the women over there," said Strozier.
According to the Daily Mail, Lincoln originally shared a bed with Speed because when he moved to Springfield, Illinois, in 1837, he didn't have enough money to acquire his own bed and bedding.
The Mail noted further that Lincoln would also sleep in the same bed as other lawyers — a common practice for the traveling "circuits" of his time, where up to 20 would share one room.
Doris Kearns Goodwin was another award-winning historian who reportedly poked holes in the gay Lincoln narrative in her biography on the Republican, noting, "Their intimacy is more an index to an era when close male friendships, accompanied by open expressions of affection and passion, were familiar and socially acceptable."
"Nor can sharing a bed be considered evidence of an erotic involvement. It was common practice in an era when private quarters were a rare luxury," continued Goodwin. "The attorneys of the Eighth Circuit in Illinois where Lincoln would travel regularly shared beds."
The late Harvard professor David Herbert Donald, long regarded to be the definitive biographer of Lincoln, also disputed the suggestion — by C.A. Tripp, a gay researcher for Alfred C. Kinsey — that the 16th president was gay. The New York Times indicated that no one at the time had ever suggested Lincoln and Speed were sexual partners — not even his enemies in the yellow press. Donald, like Strozier, emphasized that in frontier times, space was tight and men shared beds. It was not out preference but necessity.
In response to a similar effort — again by Kramer — to paint Alexander Hamilton as non-straight, Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow warned against "ransacking history in service of a political agenda."
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Remember Lincoln for his courage and his political perseverance in saving the Union, but also remember the source of his courage.
Lincoln sought to communicate the moral philosophy defining the American founding in ways all people could understand.
We raise a glass of remembrance to Washington and Lincoln: good fathers of a great country.
Diana Schaub's book, 'His Greatest Speeches: How Lincoln Moved the Nation,' provides valuable insight on how Lincoln's words illuminate our current political debates.
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