A new documentary released Friday on Abraham Lincoln sets to examine years of hypothesizing about the president’s sexuality. Director Shaun Peterson hopes that the documentary can also serve as a commentary for our contemporary times by reflecting how sexuality was defined in the past and is defined today.
Abraham Lincoln And Joshua Speed
One of the relationships examined in the documentary is the closeness between Abraham Lincoln and store owner Joshua Speed. According to them.com, an LGBTQ+ news site, Lincoln met Speed, the co-owner of a general store, upon arriving in Springfield, Illinois in 1837 to practice law. Not only did Abraham Lincoln move in with Speed that same day, the two went on to share the same bed for four years.
According to Shaun Peterson, practices like sharing a bed with another man were commonplace in Lincoln’s time, and physical intimacy was almost an expected part of male friendships. “You would be intimate with each other…and that was part of the culture,” said Peterson. Abraham Lincoln and Speed were different, however. Described in the documentary as “lust at first sight,” their relationship lasted their entire lives and they exchanged many affectionate letters over the years.
That’s where the unbelievable love triangle starts: Speed was responsible for introducing Abraham Lincoln to Mary Todd. Lincoln romanced Todd because of his political aspirations and her family connections, but before their wedding, he briefly broke off the engagement because the relationship had caused him to become estranged from Speed, as the film characterizes it, according to them. com.
Allegedly, after Speed moved home to Kentucky to take over his father’s plantation, Lincoln was so distraught that he was put on suicide watch, with his friends taking his shaving kit away. “I am now the most miserable man living,” Lincoln wrote of the loss. “If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.”
What This Means Contemporarily
Director Shaun Peterson stated something that he hoped to explore in his documentary. Just as important as Abraham Lincoln’s intimate connections is the examination of flourishing homosocial relationships in the 19th century, including the idea that only in recent years has love between men become so problematic.
“We are in a very, very conservative time — this blip on the map of human history where we have names and binaries and now laws that could potentially make loving someone illegal,” Peterson told NBC News, describing the desire to label, categorize and even demonize sexuality as being “very weird” in a larger historical context.
“We’re not trying to make the case that Abraham Lincoln was an outlier. We’re not even making the case that Lincoln was gay,” he said, alluding to the film’s focus on emotional intimacy over sex. “We’re making the case that Lincoln participated in behavior that was extraordinarily common at the time.”
Conclusion
Shaun Peterson said he first became interested in the hypothesis surrounding the president’s sexuality when he read Gore Vidal’s 2005 Vanity Fair essay titled “Was Lincoln Bisexual?” Then, he explored Abraham Lincoln’s relationships with men more deeply, studying mostly Billy Greene, Elmer Ellsworth, David Derickson, and Joshua Speed.
Though he was repeatedly met with skepticism while discussing the potential project, he wanted to make a film that could bring 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 a film with emotion?” Peterson said. “Because, at its core, it’s a love story.”
Disclaimer: The comments and opinions in this article do not reflect the opinions or policies of Total Apex or its owners. The content matter is the subjective opinion of the author and the creators of the documentary.
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