Abraham Lincoln… Lover of Many Men?
A new documentary and a new Broadway play present overlapping portraits of an American icon as a flesh and blood man.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find the image — at least the mental one — intriguing: Young Abraham Lincoln, our future esteemed 16th president, sharing a bed with his close confidante Joshua Speed, their bodies pressed together as Speed dreams about Lincoln’s perfect thighs.
The new documentary Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln tries to make a case for the probability of this scenario, through the use of historical data, old letters, reenactments and speculating experts. Did Lincoln, who had an infamously strained marriage to First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, spend decades secretly romancing men like Speed? Stranger things have happened, and the documentary does make some solid points, though some of it feels like a trip to a psychic who, in an attempt to win us over, lays out our entire life by reciting strategically worded generalities.
