One of America’s favorite presidents may have had a not-so-secret life as a queer man, a new documentary has suggested.
Lovers of Men is a new documentary that “‘examines the intimate life of America’s most consequential president,” including the theory that Lincoln may have had gay sexual relationships throughout his life.
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The documentary is not the first to claim this. Scholars and academics have long pointed to letters Lincoln wrote to close male friends as evidence he may have experienced same-sex attraction.
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One male friend in particular comes up often in the discussion of Lincoln’s sexuality. Joshua Fry Speed was one of Lincoln’s closest friends from childhood, and their friendship remained strong until Lincoln was assassinated on April 15, 1865.
The documentary’s trailer depicts a letter from Lincoln that reads, “Dear Speed, I shall be very lonesome without you…. Love, Lincoln.” The trailer also shows Lincoln with a variety of other men in bed, cuddling and holding hands.
Lincoln, unable to afford a bed in his early days as a lawyer when he moved to Springfield, Illinois, in 1837, slept in the same bed as Speed. Lincoln would sleep in the same bedding areas with up to 20 men. Sleeping in the same bed was common at the time if money was tight.
But even after Lincoln became a successful lawyer and member of the Illinois House of Representatives, he and Speed continued to share a bed. The sleeping arrangement continued for four years afterward.
In his 1926 biography of Lincoln, Carl Sandburg wrote that Lincoln and Speed had a “streak of Lavender,” a suggestion of effeminate homosexuality.
In her 2005 book The Team of Rivals, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin argued against labelling Lincoln as queer.
“[Lincoln and Speed’s] 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,” she wrote.
Goodwin also pushed back against the idea that “sharing a bed be considered evidence of an erotic involvement. It was common practice in an era when private quarters were a rare luxury. The attorneys of the Eighth Circuit in Illinois where Lincoln would travel regularly shared beds.”
Historian Jonathan Katz, in his 2003 book Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality, disagreed. He wrote that sharing a bed “did provide an important site (probably the major site) of erotic opportunity’ if they could prevent anyone else nearby from noticing.”
He also noted that the friendship between Speed and Lincoln may well have been intense and had romantic, even erotic, elements considered to be “a world apart in that era’s consciousness from the sensual universe of mutual masturbation and the legal universe of ‘sodomy,’ ‘buggery,’ and ‘the crime against nature.'”
David Derickson, an army captain and Lincoln’s bodyguard, is also thought to have been a possible romantic or sexual partner for Lincoln.
Elizabeth Woodbury Fox, the wife of Lincoln’s naval aide, wrote in her diary for November 16, 1862, about Derickson and Lincoln sleeping in the same bed, “‘Tish says, ‘Oh, there is a Bucktail soldier here devoted to the president, drives with him, and when Mrs L is not home, sleeps with him.’ What stuff!'” she wrote, using “stuff” as a then-contemporary slang term for baseless gossip or “nonsense.”
Still, “When you put together all of the evidence,” an expert interviewed in the documentary’s trailer says, “it’s really startling!”
Ultimately, Lincoln married Mary Todd. Together they had four children, Robert, Eddie, Willie, and Tad. But the implication of a queer Lincoln still matters.
The trailer ends with a Lincoln expert saying that “If you can accept a queer Lincoln, you can accept queer people overall.”
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