The Case That Abraham Lincoln Was a ‘Lover of Men’ (2024)

On New Year’s Day of 1841, Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois state legislator, read a notice in the newspaper saying that his roommate of several years, Joshua Speed, was selling his Springfield general store and returning to his family home. Lincoln had not been previously informed of this. He would later refer to this day as “the fatal first of January,” one that sent him spiraling into a depression so profound he was put on a form of suicide watch. “I am now the most miserable man living,” he wrote in a letter. “If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.”

The previous month, Lincoln had broken off his engagement to Mary Todd (whom he did eventually marry). This wasn’t his first documented expression of severe depression either. While the events surrounding “the fatal first” have long been contested, in the new documentary Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln (in select theaters September 6), experts argue that—despite these other factors—the source of Lincoln’s turmoil can be traced to his impending separation from Speed. Why? As historian Dr. Jean H. Baker (Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography) puts it, “His great love…was moving back to Kentucky.”

Over the last two decades, Abraham Lincoln’s sexuality has been feverishly debated in academic circles. Widely considered the greatest president in American history, Lincoln left behind a trove of detailed letters written to Speed that have met varying interpretations. His law partner and eventual biographer, William H. Herndon, collected letters about Lincoln, written by various acquaintances, that have also been reexamined as Lincoln’s potential queerness has come into focus.

Lover of Men, directed by Shaun Peterson (Living in Missouri) and produced by entrepreneur Robert Rosenheck, synthesizes these developments while making some contributions of its own, grouping more than a dozen prestigious scholars and historians to outline the case that Lincoln had sexual relationships with multiple men. “We are not trying to damage or besmirch or do anything harmful to Lincoln’s reputation—quite the opposite,” says historian Dr. Thomas Balcerski (author of Oxford University Press’s Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King). “We are broadening. We’re being more inclusive, and we’re taking a scholarly interpretation that has been bubbling up for generations—and that, finally in 2024, has found its moment to be expressed.”

Peterson became fascinated by the topic years ago, when he came across a provocative Gore Vidal essay in Vanity Fair titled, “Was Lincoln Bisexual?” Vidal assessed a groundbreaking book grappling with that theory: sex psychologist C.A. Tripp’s The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (2005). He also contemplated Lincoln’s bond with Speed as sexual—thereby setting off what Peterson calls a “domino effect” in the academic world. One particular line in Carl Sandburg’s seminal 1926 Lincoln biography, The Prairie Years, seemed to take on an especially bold new meaning: The author described Speed and Lincoln’s friendship as containing a “streak of lavender, and spots soft as May violets.”

Harvard professor John Stauffer, a doctor of literary history, wrote the best-selling 2008 book, Giants, about the parallels between Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. “It suggested that Speed and Lincoln had carnal relations,” Dr. Stauffer tells me of his research.

Following the book’s publication, Stauffer was sharply criticized by many of his peers for his argument. “Virtually everyone sees Lincoln as an American icon, a great American figure—so if someone who is deeply prejudiced against gay or bisexual [people] sees someone writing a book saying that Lincoln is gay, that really ruffles their feathers,” he says. “Melville and Whitman had long been accepted as gay—and they’re major figures as well. But they’re not Lincoln.”