"Lincoln and Bowie share a lot of the same behaviors": Filmmaker on the 16th president's bisexuality

"Lincoln and Bowie share a lot of the same behaviors": Filmmaker on the 16th president's bisexuality
Director on showing how sexual fluidity was accepted in Lincoln's time: "You know a love letter when you see it"

By Melanie McFarland
Senior Critic
Published September 6, 2024 1:30PM (EDT)


(Salon) Shaun Peterson hadn’t thought much about Abraham Lincoln’s love life until around 15 years ago. That changed when he read Gore Vidal’s 2005 Vanity Fair article about “The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln,” C.A. Tripp’s controversial biography that dared to make connections other historians had long set aside concerning his friendships with other men.

The title of Vidal’s piece places the question front and center: “Was Lincoln Bisexual?” Nearly 20 years later, Peterson’s documentary “Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln” revisits that question with ample visual evidence. But the first image drawing our attention is the poster’s illustration, featuring Lincoln’s face dashed with David Bowie’s signature red lightning bolt from his album “Aladdin Sane.”

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The accepted history of Lincoln’s love life is that he was awkward with women, but eventually courted and married Mary Todd Lincoln, and had four sons, three of whom died young. But Tripp and others scrutinized the whispers in the margins that cast Lincoln’s relationships with men in a different light.

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But no relationship was more central to Lincoln’s life than his bond with Joshua Speed, a handsome store owner in Springfield, Ill., with whom the man who went on to be the 16th president of the United States shared a bed for four years. Vidal, repeating other historians’ assertions, pointed out this was “not necessarily, in those frontier days, the sign of a smoking gun — only messy male housekeeping.” ..............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/09/06/abraham-lincoln-lover-of-men-bisexual/