Historians have long argued over whether Abraham Lincoln, revered as one of the greatest American presidents, had romantic, sexual relationships with men. A new documentary, Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln, comes squarely to the conclusion that he did.
“Our greatest president, our greatest military genius, the man who saved the Union, also was in love deeply, sexually, emotionally with other men,” Thomas Balcerski, a professor at Occidental College and Eastern Connecticut State University, says in the documentary. “These relationships aren’t ‘So what?,’ they’re defining, because this is an individual who struggled his entire life to make sense of this duality within him.”
Lover of Men, using interviews with historians, documents, and reenactments, goes into Lincoln’s relationships with four men: Billy Greene, Joshua Speed, Elmer Ellsworth, and David Derickson. Lincoln moved to in New Salem, Ill., in 1831, after growing up in Kentucky and Indiana, and he became fast friends with Greene, a cousin of the local schoolmaster. The two shared a small cot above the store where they worked. The historians in the film believe both men gained pleasure from the arrangement.
Bed-sharing was also the case with Joshua Speed, who ran a store in Springfield, where Lincoln moved a few years later. Given that Lincoln lacked money for the materials for a bed, Speed invited him to share a bed above his shop, and Lincoln quickly took him up on the offer. “This was lust at first sight,” Michael Chesson of the University of Massachusetts at Boston says in the documentary.
The arrangement with Speed lasted four years, during which Lincoln, as a lawyer and state legislator, saw his income rise to the point that he could have lived and slept elsewhere, but he didn’t. That rebuts the argument that his bed-sharing was a matter of convenience, even though it was for some men in the era, according to the historians in the film.
The relationship with Speed helped shape Lincoln’s political views, the scholars say. Speed was from a wealthy, slave-owning family in Kentucky, and after he moved back to Kentucky to run the family plantation, Lincoln visited him and saw firsthand the oppression and suffering of enslaved people — while their masters lived in luxury.
Speed and Lincoln both eventually married women, but marriage was expected in the mid-19th century, especially of men who sought to rise in politics or business, and that doesn’t mean Lincoln lost his same-sex attractions. Indeed, according to several of the historians, sexual fluidity was better accepted then than it has been in the 20th and 21st centuries, which saw the rise of established categories of heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual identity — and religion and science helped pathologize any identity that wasn’t heterosexual. In the 19th century, they say, it was recognized that a person could be married but still act on other attractions. And laws against sodomy were enforced mainly when the act was nonconsensual.
The film also goes into Lincoln’s later affections for men. Col. Elmer Ellsworth became famed as the first casualty of the Civil War in 1861, when he was fatally shot after taking down a Confederate flag from a hotel in Alexandria, Va., just across from Washington, D.C. Lincoln was inconsolable and even spent a night beside Ellsworth’s body.
In 1862, pondering what to do about slavery, Lincoln often took refuge in a cottage that was at his disposal in Washington, where he worked on the Emancipation Proclamation. There, Capt. David Derickson became his bodyguard — and his bed partner when Mary Todd Lincoln wasn’t with him. A letter from the era, read in the accompanying clip, comments on Derickson and Lincoln’s relationship, and historian Jean Baker says it makes her happy that Lincoln was physically affectionate with Derickson.
Why do some object to the idea that Lincoln had romantic, sexual relationships with men? The answer, the historians conclude, is simply homophobia. “We can all agree, Abraham Lincoln is one of the greatest, if not the greatest president in American history,” Balcerski says. “But what if I told you that Abraham Lincoln is what we would today call queer? Would he still hold a place in your heart?”
Lover of Men is directed by Shaun Peterson, who wrote the film with Joshua Koffman, Grace Leeson, and Robert Rosenheck, and is in theaters September 6. Go to LoverOfMen.com to find a theater near you and order tickets.
