Was Abraham Lincoln gay? Scientists prove this in the documentary “Lover of Men”

In the new documentary “Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln,” director Shaun Peterson explores decades of speculation about the sexual orientation of the towering 16th U.S. President.

The documentary, which opens in theaters Friday, focuses on Lincoln's relationships with four men who once shared his bed. But just as important as those intimate connections is its exploration of the flourishing of homosocial relationships in the 19th century – and the idea that love between men has only recently become so problematic.

“We live in a very, very conservative time – this little blip on the map of human history where there are names and opposites and now laws that could 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 a larger historical context.

“We're not trying to say that Lincoln was an outsider. We're not even saying that Lincoln was gay,” he said, alluding to the film's focus on emotional intimacy rather than sex. “We're saying that Lincoln engaged in behavior that was extraordinarily common at the time.”

Peterson, who has closely followed the evolution of Lincoln scholarship over the past 15 years, first became interested in the controversy surrounding the president's sexuality when he read Gore Vidal's 2005 Vanity Fair essay titled “Was Lincoln Bisexual?” Then, the documentarian says, his interest in exploring Lincoln's relationships with the men – Billy Greene, Elmer Ellsworth, David Derickson and, most notably, Joshua Speed ​​- grew during the pandemic, when he repeatedly encountered skepticism when discussing the potential project. For that reason, 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 introduce this to the world than through an emotional film?” Peterson said. “Because at its core, it's a love story.”

Lover of Men begins with Lincoln's childhood of poverty in southern Indiana and traces his development from a lanky young lawyer to the thoughtful president who wrote the Emancipation Proclamation and steered the country through the Civil War. And along the way, the film introduces audiences to Greene, Lincoln's colleague at a general store in New Salem, Illinois; Ellsworth, a dashing regimental soldier dedicated to the Union cause; Derickson, his bodyguard during the war; and Speed, the man repeatedly referred to in the film as the love of his life.

The film features a panel of distinguished scholars from around the country with diverse fields of expertise. In addition to Peterson's evocative recreations of the men in bed, the scholars offer various interpretations of how Lincoln's formative same-sex relationships helped make him the president who “most cared about the country as a whole,” as one expert puts it. They also examine a large number of letters written by and about the president that provide firsthand accounts of those relationships.

Some, like a letter from Greene describing Lincoln's thighs as “as perfect as a human being can be,” contain more explicit allusions to carnal relationships. Others indicate a general feeling among Lincoln's circles that he did not particularly enjoy the company of women. And some, like the one between Lincoln and Speed ​​after their four-year relationship ended, have the unmistakable character of love letters.

As Thomas Balcerski – professor of early American history at Eastern Connecticut State University and one of Peterson's experts – points out, the archives also lack the letters. According to Balcerski, some of the correspondence between Lincoln and Speed ​​​​suggests that letters have not survived, perhaps because the men were known to sometimes burn their correspondence after reading it.

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