Was Lincoln gay? New doc conscripts American icon to LGBT cause

Abraham Lincoln holds a mythic position in the American consciousness. He’s respected across the political spectrum. He redrew America’s social contract and self-image. And because he led the country through the Civil War and abolition, he’s now accorded a status befitting a Greek god, cast in bronze and marble.

Lincoln is essential to the American social contract, which makes him essential to any political cause seeking to reframe the national project. He’s criticized by “woke” leftists and alt-righters as a symbol of the neo-liberal consensus and used as a symbol of equality and unity by those in power.

One of the saddest things about the modern world is that the concept of close male friendship has functionally been destroyed.

It’s no surprise, then, that the LGBT movement would come to claim him as well. While no American presidents have ever been openly "gay" as such, a handful have attracted questions concerning their sexual proclivities. Lincoln’s predecessor James Buchanan, for example, was America’s only bachelor president, a pink flag for certain historians looking to "out" him.

Lincoln's outsized stature naturally makes him a far more tempting catch. As transgender and gay issues increasingly dominate the discourse, there have been more than a few attempts to use speculation about Lincoln’s private life and vague comments in his letters to canonize our 16th president as an official "queer" icon.

A deliberate provocation

A recent documentary boldly announces its intention in its blunt title: "Lover of Men: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln."

The film was released this fall to general praise from the press and backlash from conservative media. The filmmakers mostly laughed off said backlash, telling the Hollywood Reporter that they were “thrilled” that Ben Shapiro, Alex Jones, and Elon Musk were furious about it. “The reason that they notice the film is because it is compelling. This story is provocative,” said director Shaun Peterson.

The case "Lover of Men" makes goes roughly like this: Lincoln had very close relationships with multiple men throughout his adult life, relationships that were arguably more intimate than traditional friendships. He shared beds with men for months or years at a time, revealed details of his sex life to them in letters, and openly expressed his deep emotional connection to them.

The film essentially argues that Lincoln was LGBT avant la lettre, living an identity that would today be recognized as "queer," "fluid," or "non-conforming." Whether Lincoln actually had sex with any of these men is largely immaterial.

Strange bedfellows

"Lover of Men" dismisses most of the immediate rebuttals with a shrug; the first among them being that beds in the 19th century were expensive and scarce, and it wasn’t uncommon for inns to assign multiple men to a bed or for male friends to share beds.

Peterson's argument relies upon the common modern assumption that intimacy and sexuality are deeply entwined things. The possibility that two men would share deep affection without any hint of the erotic is mostly overlooked because the alternative soundbite — Lincoln was gay! — proves irresistible.

Ironically, Peterson's eagerness to reach this conclusion tells us more about the America of today than it does about Lincoln's era. One of the saddest things about the modern world is that the concept of close male friendship has functionally been destroyed. Even progressive feminists will admit that one of the privileges women enjoy is the ability to form intimate, non-sexual relationships without any hint of Eros.

Men consequently tend to be lonelier than women and have more trouble intimately bonding.

Part of this can be attributed to a decline in fraternal organizations, with most male-only organizations now admitting women. Part of it is also the growing masculine insecurity with being perceived as unmasculine.

The erosion of male friendship

Still, the pernicious influence of the LGBT lobby's tendency to cast public male intimacy as gay should not be underestimated. One needs only recall the particularly fanciful attempts to affirm the secret, sexual passion between "Lord of the Rings" protagonists Frodo and Sam, despite all evidence to the contrary, not least of which is author J.R.R. Tolkien's devout Catholicism.

The result is a negative feedback loop. Men have fewer and fewer opportunities to express themselves. They are criticized for not being emotional; at the same time, any emotional expression is seized upon as evidence of homosexuality.

Tolkien's close friend C.S. Lewis, himself a target of LGBT revisionists, diagnosed the problem more than 60 years ago in his book "The Four Loves": “Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love affair.”

Was Lincoln "closeted"? It's certainly possible — but it seems likely that the claim is beyond proving. "Lover of Men" takes this as reason enough to indulge its speculation. As one interviewee argues, “If the naysayers had their way, there wouldn’t be a gay history because you couldn’t prove it.”

And yet "Lover of Men" is not content to settle for the past. Appropriating Lincoln’s life as a story of repressed homosexuality is a means to entrenching the LGBT movement's power in the present; one commentator goes so far as to say the 14th Amendment should be extended to Americans identifying as transgender.

Whatever one's personal opinions on the matter, using Lincoln as a vehicle for modern-day activism in this way is bad history. We don’t know the secrets of Lincoln’s cloistered heart, and neither do the historians Peterson has assembled. We should be happy to admit our ignorance; some things are meant to remain a mystery.