For years, scholars have revealed — and partisans have covered up — facts and feelings around Lincoln’s sexual and emotional orientation.
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Opening today, the new documentary Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln is the latest assessment to address the 16th president’s “love life”.
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An A-list collection of queer scholars and writers addresses the question, including gender studies scholar Jack Halberstam, When Brooklyn Was Queer author Hugh Ryan, artist Alok Vaid-Menon and even Montana state legislator Zooey Zephyr (D).
Their answer to “how gay” is “very.” But the truth depends on the angle that you’re coming from.
In the 20th century, sex, sexuality and gender roles became more rigidly defined as scholars like Sigmund Freud delved into the subconscious. This rigidity result erased notions of fluidity in feelings among the sexes.
The idea that a man like Abraham Lincoln — president, folk hero and Savior of the Union — could have enjoyed the company of other men in any way but a platonic relationship vanished from any discourse.
But love between men wasn’t always so fraught.
For time in memoriam through the 19th century, it was an accepted fact across cultures that men and women’s closest relationships could be with the same sex. Sexuality was far more fluid; that truth lived side-by-side with marriage between men and women.
Lincoln’s relationship with Joshua Speed was a living and “out” example of that common phenomena.
Lincoln met Speed, the co-owner of a general store, when he arrived in Springfield, Illinois in 1837 to practice law. He moved in with the strapping store owner the very same day, and the two shared a bed for the next four years.
Lincoln was unedited in his feelings.
“Dear Speed, I shall be very lonesome without you,” his bedmate wrote during an extended absence. “Yours forever, Lincoln.”
After Speed moved home, Lincoln was distraught. “I am now the most miserable man living,” he wrote. “If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.”
The film makes the case that Lincoln had a type — “dashing and daring” — that he would be continually drawn to in this way throughout his life and career.
One other such dashing and daring man was Captain David Derickson, who was attached to the president in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief.
“There is a soldier here that is devoted to the president,” a staff member shared in a letter, “and when Mrs L. is not here sleeps with him. What stuff!”
Derickson was once seen wearing the president’s nightshirt.
Other “evidence” includes letters that reveal Lincoln “did not much go with the girls,” he “cared little for them” and “didn’t love the company” of the other sex.
According to one scholar, a suspected lover of Lincoln wrote a paean to his thighs, an indication the future president may have been down for intercrural sex, frottage or — in modern-day parlance — “side” activities.
The film illustrates the fact that while sex, sexuality and gender are indeed fluid, the bigger point is that they always have been. Just because someone came up with the term “side” in 2013, doesn’t mean it’s some newly liberating position. We just finally put a name to something people had been doing for ages.
Lincoln’s heartfelt words about his companions do the same — they speak for themselves as loudly now as they did when they were first written.
