According to a wild new documentary from documentary producer Shaun Peterson, President Abraham Lincoln was a member of the LGBTQ+ community who had a series of relationships with men throughout his life. Peterson’s shocking claims on the subject fill the documentary, which is called Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln, which focuses on the president’s alleged love life.
The trailer for Lover of Men was released over this summer and sparked a large amount of online outrage, as the trailer and the documentary it advertised, which is now playing in theaters across the United States, claim that President Lincoln was gay, or sexually fluid. Conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro and big X accounts like X owner Elon Musk sounded off on the trailer when it came out.
In any case, Lover of Men includes interviews with some of the top Lincoln scholars and is filled with never-before-accessed photographs and letters involving the Civil War president. That material is used to present the claim that the president, revered by many for holding the United States together, had numerous romantic, sexual relationships with men. The documentary mainly revolves around four close associates of President Lincoln, amongst them his close friend Jonathan Speed.
Peterson’s documentary was sparked by a book called The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln. The description of that book provides, “For four years in the 1830s, in Springfield, Illinois, a young state legislator shared a bed with his best friend, Joshua Speed. The legislator was Abraham Lincoln. When Speed moved home to Kentucky in 1841 and Lincoln’s engagement to Mary Todd was broken off, Lincoln suffered an emotional crisis. An underground campaign has been accumulating about Abahram Lincoln for years, focusing on his intimate relationships. He was famously awkward around single women. Before Mary Todd, he was engaged to another woman, but his fiancée called off the marriage on the grounds that he was “lacking smaller attentions.” His marriage to Mary was troubled. Meanwhile, throughout his adult life, he enjoyed close relationships with a number of men disclosed here for the first time, including an affair with an army captain when Mrs. Lincoln was away. This extensive study by renowned psychologist, therapist, and sex researcher C.A. Tripp, examines not only Lincoln’s sexuality, but aims to make sense of the whole man. It includes an introduction by Jean Baker, biographer of Mary Todd Lincoln and an afterword containing reactions by two Lincoln scholars and one clinical psychologist. This timely book finally allows the true Lincoln to be fully understood.”
Speaking to The Daily Beast about the controversial documentary, Peterson highlighted the scholarship he says was integral to the film, saying, “[N]owadays, where it’s even harder in this fake news world, where people on the right have mobilized against LGBTQ rights in a way that is unprecedented, I knew the heat was going to come.”
He continued, “We wanted to introduce this topic in a way so that it could create some debate, but then also contextualize the whole thing, get into the deeper history of human sexuality. And then, of course, try to get as many Ivy League scholars involved so it just doesn’t seem like a conspiracy theory film. It’s really rooted in scholarship. No matter what you do, you’re going to get people hating on the film, but we wanted to at least bring as many big name scholars into it as possible.”
Peterson added, also in his interview with The Daily Beast, that he hopes the Lincoln aspect of the documentary will get more people to watch it than otherwise would, saying, “I’m hoping that the Lincoln component of the film is a little bit of a Trojan horse. It’s about Lincoln, but once you get inside, then you can learn more about human history, and what went wrong. You know, for most of human history, things were pretty fluid, and then what went wrong, you know, by creating the binaries, and it may end up becoming a diagnosis.”
Further, Peterson described criticism of the film as homophobic, telling the Daily Beast, “A lot of people say, ‘Well, why are we dredging up his personal life? He can’t defend himself from the grave.’ The subtext of all those questions are, to me, very homophobic, because we’ve certainly dug into his life before. There are thousands of writings about his marriage to Mary Todd, how tumultuous it was. There’s a play on Broadway, Oh, Mary!, about their tumultuous relationship.”
Watch the trailer for Lover of Men here:
Featured image credit: screengr
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