All these years later, people are still buzzing about Abraham Lincoln’s love life. That’s due in large part to Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln, a new documentary from director Shaun Peterson that sheds light on relationships with men the film’s scholars say Lincoln had throughout his life.
When the trailer for the film was released earlier this summer, it sparked outrage over the idea that Lincoln might have been gay, or sexually fluid. Elon Musk and Ben Shapiro posted against it, while comment sections in posts about the movie burned with vitriol.
In a recent interview ahead of the film’s Sept. 6 theatrical release, Peterson told the Daily Beast’s Obsessed that he isn’t surprised by the charged discourse. In fact, the controversial nature of the film’s content is why he was so passionate about making it.
He first became aware of the theory that Lincoln had male lovers from Clarence Arthur Tripp’s 2005 book The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln. He’s since spent years researching the topic, conducting interviews with scholars including Harvard professor John Stauffer, Occidental College’s Tom Balcerski, and University of Utah’s Lisa Diamond, who all appear in the film.
In this exclusive clip, they discuss when Lincoln first arrived in Springfield, Illinois, as a young, penniless lawyer. For four years, he didn’t just live with a man named Joshua Fry Speed, they shared a bed. It was “lust at first sight,” one historian says in the clip. “But it grows into something much more than lust. There is love, I’m convinced, between those two men.”
With Lover of Men now in theaters—and the discourse surrounding it whipping up in volume—we spoke to Peterson about what is with this discussion over Lincoln’s sexuality that has gotten so many people so fired up.
Were you expecting the movie to be so polarizing?
Oh yeah. I don’t know if you saw, but Elon Musk, Alex Jones, and Ben Shapiro have already tweeted against it, and then all the comment sections have been pretty harsh. But I definitely knew, because if you go all the way back to where it started for me, which was in 2005, I read this article by Gore Vidal that was in Vanity Fair about Clarence Tripp’s book. And then after Tripp’s book, I read multiple things that Andrew Sullivan had written, and then Dr. John Stauffer, who’s in our film, his book Giants. I knew that he had gotten beat up quite a bit by the press. Clarence Tripp certainly did. A bunch of scholars came out against Tripp’s book at the time.
This type of reaction must have seemed inevitable then.
I knew that was coming. And nowadays, 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. 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.
How does that make you feel that you like you’ve made this project that has so many scholars involved endorsing its argument, and yet it still is, just on face value, being just counted by people?
Well part of it is just the way the world is right now. You could show somebody a piece of evidence right in front of their face… One of our producers, Grace Leeson, worked a lot with Jordan Klepper, going into Trump rallies. They would present evidence, and those people would just say, “Regardless of what Trump does, I’ll still support him.” I don’t read a lot of the comments because they are disparaging—not about the film, per se, but just about the state of America overall.
There are people who refuse to even hear what is being said in the film.
I think the goal of the film is to try to connect with people who might be in the middle. The soccer moms, the same people that both parties are going after. Or really, for me, knowing a lot of families with trans kids and queer kids, for a young kid to say, “Hey, mom and dad, watch this movie.” Or, “Let’s watch this together, and let’s have a discussion about it.” The goal is to provide some context to the history of this. And it’s not just a trend that's happening right now.
It sucks that this is the state we’re in, but 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.
Why do you think this is the thing, alleging that Lincoln had male lovers, that is deemed so sacrilegious for people, that it’s getting them fired up?
That’s a good question. 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.
Have you seen it? It’s hilarious.
I haven’t seen it. I’m dying to. But the heteronormative elements of his private life are open for historians. People make their careers on it. But this idea that you can’t talk about the men he loved, that he can’t defend himself against such an accusation, is purely homophobic. A lot of our historians talk about this idea. Dr. John Stauffer, in the film, brings up the phrase, “If I lose my faith in Lincoln, I lose my faith in the United States.” There are scholars who have said that to him, and what they mean is, if I lose my faith in Lincoln as a heteronormative, heterosexual, manly man, then I lose my faith in the nation itself. Because the nation is founded on heteronormativity, and I would not be able to believe in this country if he was gay.
Film still from Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln
Special Occasion StudioIt’s a pretty extreme stance.
That’s unfortunate for our country. But what I’m hoping the film does is open up a conversation. What I have faith in too, is Gen Z rejecting these labels, saying don’t put me in a box. There are all these new terms and ideas and ways of being that are very fluid. I think the Gen Z kids are identifying with the way most of human history has been, with people just responding to their sexual impulses. So I’m just hoping it opens up a conversation. It’s been eye opening for me as I’ve made this film. Just the idea of gender identity and sexual identity as being these black and white binaries, it all broke down for me making this film.
Have you found that there are people who you’ve shown the film to who have been open to its ideas and have come around to its ideas?
Yeah. Literally, some of our scholars, who are storied scholars, said, “Wow, I learned a lot from the film.” We’ve had a lot of LGBTQ leaders in West Hollywood who watched the film. They’re like, “Wow, I learned so much.” It was eye opening for even people that knew quite a bit about this. And then, certainly, there are lots of people that don’t know this part of Lincoln’s life, and certainly don’t know a lot about the 19th century and sexuality. A lot of people said, “Oh, I thought homosexuality was illegal and you could just be murdered for it.”
Yeah I think that’s a fairly common assumption.
And the truth is, in the 19th century that there were some of those laws on the books, but they were never prosecuted. No one ever got in trouble for it. And that was eye opening for me too. I think that’s what’s so fascinating. There’s been a microcosm of time where this has been a problem. In 1870, homosexual and heterosexual, those words were made up and invented, and then the psychological community made it a diagnosis. And then the modern church was like, “Oh, we like that.” And they grabbed onto it, and they started passing laws against it, really, from 1870 to a couple years ago. It was this brutal time, and my hope is Gen Z is going to change that. There are hundreds of laws on the ballots and in legislatures right now that are just brutal, and I just don’t think that this next generation is going to tolerate that, which I hope the film speaks to.
