Was Abraham Lincoln gay?

Transcript Transcribed by Laura M.

Courtney: Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is Courtney. I am here with my spouse, Royce, and together we are The Ace Couple. And who, out there, is ready for a little bit of ranting? Mayhap a touch of snark? For I just got back from the theater and I am furious. I have so many thoughts and I’m going to try my best to get them all out before I forget them.

Royce: So care to explain what you just saw at the movie theater, and why? Why you saw.

Courtney: So I went to the theater to watch the documentary Lover of Men: the Untold History of Abraham Lincoln. I read an article this morning about this documentary coming out. Limited release, select theaters, short time only. And I was like, that sounds like something that I want to see. But I was already cautious going into it. Part of that was the theater itself. I am still not just freely going out doing public things very often, and when I looked up movie times in our area, there were three showings this weekend.

Courtney: Two different theaters had one showing each on Saturday and then one theater had one showing on Sunday. So I was like, “Well, surely this is going to be all sold out, right?” Well, one theater was almost all sold out. The other one had sold only one ticket, and it was the very back row in the very corner. And I was like, “That is my kind of person.” So I, like, masked up, I bought a ticket to that showing, and by the time I got there, a third person had also bought a ticket. And so it was just three people alone in this theater and we were, like, as spread out as we possibly could have been. It was magnificent. And I’ve never been to see a documentary in a theater before, but I love a good documentary. I really do.

Royce: Was this a good documentary?

Courtney: No! [laughs] No, it was not! But there was even a nice little link that was like, “If you buy your ticket through Fandango, you can– a portion of your ticket sales is going to benefit the human rights campaign.” And I was like, “Well, that’s nice, I guess I’ll buy my ticket through Fandango for that reason.” It was pretty trash. [sighs] I’m sorry! I have so many feelings about this and I’m going to lay them out and I want all of you to bear with me. So there is this sort of modern trend of viewing historical figures with a queer lens, and nine times out of ten, that actually means homosexual lens. And I’ll get into some of this more, no doubt.

Courtney: But some of these scholars who view a historical figure as being very, like, gay coded, get very passionate about: “This person in history was gay”, and then make grand sweeping statements of: “Anyone who doesn’t believe me or doesn’t get on board with this is just homophobic.” And [sighs] I mean it’s led to some jokes. I mean this is, in the mainstream, like, our just silly internet talking back and forth version of this is like, “And they were roommates.” Like I am aware of what can happen where all the evidence in the world does say that someone was gay or some flavor of queer, and there are some people who are just like, “I will refuse to see any evidence. I will absolutely refuse it.”

Royce: Yeah, didn’t you know that every non-heteronormative orientation was invented on Tumblr?

Courtney: I have heard that. I have heard that. [sighs] But the thing is– Well, you know, homosexuality and bisexuality, that existed. I mean, Freud invented those, right? [chuckle] So, this documentary did make the assertion, more or less, that Freud invented the terms homosexuality and bisexuality and heterosexuality. And I was like, “Uh? That’s a reductive take.” So there was a lot, there was so much here. And yet missing so much, so much. Historical context and a broader understanding of queer identity. I’m very upset, and so the thing is this might end up being a series of episodes, because I have for a long time wanted to talk about an A-spec take on situations like this. And I’ve got a couple other historical figures in mind. I mean, we have alluded to Marilyn Monroe, we have alluded to Edward Gorey. Like Abraham Lincoln is not the first deceased person in the world for people to, after they’re dead, just be like, “That person was gay.”

Royce: Is the name of this episode going to be: “But they were actually roommates.”

Courtney: [emphatically] “But they were actually roommates!” No, no, no, no. See, my– My main takeaway from this is: could Abraham Lincoln have been queer? Sure. I believe anyone in all of history could have been queer. Like, imagine all the possibilities if everyone could have been queer.

Courtney: But I don’t like, for a lot of reasons, when someone takes a deceased person, especially from a completely different era, and does look at them with not only such a modern context– Because I do think there is value, a lot of the time, to looking at historical instances with a modern understanding of things because thought patterns do develop over time. But it is also very much influenced by culture, right? So we’re always going to get a few things wrong when we’re looking at history with our modern context.

Courtney: But it’s not only that. Every time I encounter “this historical figure was gay” argument, I find that not only are you too hyper focused on your modern context, but it’s a very limited modern context. And that’s what bothers me so much. Because so much of this– I am not ever going to sit here and be like, “Abraham Lincoln was asexual, Marilyn Monroe was asexual.” But I am always going to say there could be an ace reading to that and you being so vehemently, “This is a homosexual situation, everything–”

Courtney: Like so, here’s another Tumblr line, right? “There’s no platonic explanation for this.” That’s a thing that I, like– that people like to say and throw around. And baby, you wouldn’t believe the platonic explanations I can come up with for anything. [laughs] But I don’t think it’s as much of a reach as everyone thinks it is.

Courtney: Like when someone will look at me being like, “There could be an ace reading to this.” They’ll be like, “No, you’re wrong. You’re reaching. How dare you? You’re also homophobic.” Meanwhile, I hear their evidence and I, with my understanding, am like, “This actually sounds like you’re reaching just as much, if not more, than me.” So this documentary, first of all, just by a documentary standpoint – not even the argument that they’re making, just citing sources, having a coherent storyline, tying it all in together – like narratively, maybe one of the worst documentaries I’ve seen in a long time.

Royce: Really? I feel like we’ve put some pretty trash documentaries on the background lately.

Courtney: I’m not counting those because I’ve fallen asleep while we were watching them and I haven’t gotten to the end. So every documentary I’ve watched to the end lately. [chuckles]

Royce: So, to be fair, bonus points for Lover of Men. Courtney did not fall asleep.

Courtney: [laughs] I will give it that. First of all, I was waiting for, like the title, Lover of Men– The trailer promised me [emphatically] “Never before seen letters written by Abraham Lincoln that is going to prove that he was a lover of men.” So I was, like, waiting for a quote by either Lincoln or someone close to him… No, I guess they just decided that’s the title. And yet in the article I read today, the filmmaker was like, “I’m not making any arguments, I don’t have an agenda, I’m just presenting the facts.” Well, you named the thing lover of men, and I, as much as I am not saying Abraham Lincoln was asexual, I’m also not saying he was homosexual, I’m also not saying he was straight.

Courtney: I don’t like making assertions about anybody that I don’t know personally. And I can’t know him personally because he died in the mid 1800s, famously. So since this is all through a modern lens anyway, and I’m going to make the argument that it’s a very limited modern lens, I’m going to make an argument almost that it was, like, a 20 year ago queer theory lens. Or like at least 10 years ago queer theory lens. It honestly seemed a little dated to me, even on the queer theory front. So I was also like, who’s the audience for this? Because, before I get into the details of everything that’s leading us up to this point, they started the documentary by talking about how Abraham Lincoln is a god to Americans. Kid you not.

Courtney: They’re showing like the Lincoln Monument. They’re like, “He’s on our currency. He is the closest thing America has to a God. He’s worshiped by both Democrats and Republicans. He freed the slaves.” Which– I don’t think they ever once mentioned Juneteenth or anything that happened after the Emancipation Proclamation, so like– They tried to add a few anecdotes about slavery and the abolition of slavery, but it was very limited because so much of the focus was like, “But look at all the gay lovers he had! So many gay lovers he had.” And so they’re like, “He is a god. He is a god to us.” I’d say he was an American god, but I don’t want to talk about Neil Gaiman again. [chuckles] And from: “He is a god, he’s a martyr, he’s the most important president in all of our history. He freed the slaves.” Then it became, “He is so, so very queer.” And the thesis was: if we as a country can accept that Abraham Lincoln was queer, then you can accept that anyone is queer, that your neighbors are queer, that your kids are queer, that other legislators are queer. Everyone will accept queer people if we can just prove that Abraham Lincoln is gay. And also that all of Gen Z is exactly like Abraham Lincoln, because Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and Gen Z is very queer, and so they’re gonna liberate queer people just like Abraham Lincoln. [laughs]

Courtney: It sounds so silly, but I feel like I’m only lightly paraphrasing. So first of all, even having just seen it, one thing I am not going to be able to do is get out every single thought I had during this. I wish I could have, like, taken my laptop to take notes real time. And that– that wouldn’t be wildly rude to do in a theater, because I had– There were so many individual lines that were said that just had me going like, [closed mouth scream] I have so much to say about just that single sentence alone. But I’m definitely not going to be able to cite exactly who said what, which biographer or which queer studies professor said what. Because, especially in the first half of the documentary, I feel like they front loaded it with so many tiny short clips of interviews with so many different people that I was already like, “Why are there so many people in this documentary?” And as it went on, it focused a little more on sort of a main two or three people that got more talking time than the others. But especially early on, and it– even though it was very much giving the vibe of Lincoln was queer, there were many times where the documentary completely contradicted itself.

Courtney: Because of how many fragmented one-off lines there were from different people, someone would say something near the beginning that would then be completely contradicted by a much longer interview later in the documentary. And so that was just like, “Please get your narrative straight, please.” So I found it not only very uneven in its analysis of this historical figure, but I also found it very disjointed in its overall historical analysis.

Courtney: And I will remind our listeners who maybe aren’t as familiar with my background, but I’m not like an Abraham Lincoln historian, but the art form and the culture surrounding the art form that I studied – being hair work – was most common in the Victorian era, especially around the Civil War era. This was a wildly popular art form. So I have done a lot of research in this era. And I have seen exactly three locks of Abraham Lincoln’s hair. Fun fact. Houston, Texas. Chicago, Illinois. And Independence, Missouri.

Courtney: And especially when it comes to things like love and sentiment and endearment, that is something that is very relevant to my area of study. And if we’re talking about a modern queer lens, obviously, I am coming at it from an a-spec perspective. Asexual, aromantic, a far more expansive view of sexuality than… Freud. I can’t believe they threw in Freud. I was waiting for that because I’ve also seen people throw in Freud when analyzing Edward Gorey and Marilyn Monroe. So they’re really ticking all the boxes for this pattern that I’ve seen. So a couple of quick notes.

Courtney: I am first and foremost regaling my own spouse with what I saw to be a deeply reductive documentary, and in talking casually about my opinions and inviting your listeners into that conversation, there are probably going to be times where I use words a little interchangeably, like gay and queer as one example. And I ask you to please not read into and nitpick that too much, because I want to emphasize that we’re already starting in very murky waters. When we have historians literally posing the question: was Lincoln gay? When that word would not have been used, or that identity conceptualized in the same way we use it today. And some of the interviewees did literally say the word gay, while others may have heavily hinted at it. Some others may have been leaning more toward a modern notion of bisexuality, while many simply use the word queer. And yet the word queer, even in our modern understanding, was never adequately defined for the viewers of this documentary, which I see as a fatal flaw in the argument right from the jump. But, above all, please know that my criticisms are not to prove that Lincoln was or was not anything in particular.

Courtney: My main concern is that this documentary claims it seeks to set out to normalize queerness by showing that even Lincoln can be queer. But I question, and I encourage you listeners to question, if the provocative nature of the advertising and the salacious framing of the narrative could ever truly achieve the normalization it claims it wants. Because, after all, if queerness were unilaterally accepted as an equally valid and normal state of being, would we conceptualize it as queer at all? And, furthermore, would this documentary be scandalous or even notable enough to warrant creating at all? So let’s get on to it, cause, uh… Some of it was very, very silly too.

Courtney: So why did they come to the conclusion that Abraham Lincoln is queer? Well, he shared his bed with men. They focused on four different men that people they were interviewing, to varying degrees, viewed as love interests of his of some kind. And the very first one he worked at a shop, and another guy who worked at the shop with him, they slept in the shop on a cot – there was only one cot – but they were very quick to remind us that sleeping on the floor was an option and yet neither man slept on the floor.

Royce: Sleeping on the floor also sucks [Courtney laughs] particularly. You said this was a shop floor. Was it just like wood?

Courtney: In the 1800s? Yes. So– But the thing is, what really really got me was that not only did they have these historians or biographers or queer study professors commenting on these things, they were narrating it as if they were there. And they front loaded it with like all the– all these letters that were promised, these never before seen letters.

Royce: Did they do cheesy reenactment videos that some documentaries do?

Courtney: Oh, God! It was so bad. [laughs]

Royce: They’re always bad.

Courtney: It– Oh my gosh, it was so bad. So they front loaded it with a few different quotes. I don’t even know who all made these quotes. And I will also say too, because I don’t think I said this at the top, like this documentary is not the first time I have ever heard anyone make the argument that Abraham Lincoln is gay or otherwise queer of some kind. So this concept is not new to me. This isn’t the first time I’ve ever hearing it.

Courtney: But all these letters that weren’t– We didn’t get dates for all of them, we didn’t get who said them all. They just, like, show a screenshot with all of it blurred out, except a single sentence. And that was the thing they did, over and over again. And they started with like, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam bam. All these quotes about something to the effect of like, when Abraham Lincoln was young, he didn’t seem to have much interest in girls. And like, that was how it started. So it’s like all right, putting it out there, he doesn’t like women. But then he slept on a cot when he worked at this store with another man. And that’s when– That’s when the bad historical reenactment came, because I have this tiny cot that they’re showing two actors, one dressed as a young Abraham Lincoln, one dressed as allegedly Abraham Lincoln’s first lover, interspliced with these people trying to explain to us how there is no platonic explanation for this. [chuckle] Unironically. Because they’d be like, “Well, true, beds were very expensive back then. And true, it was really normal for a bunch of people to sleep together in the same bed. And yeah, it was really normal for men at varying stages of their life to sleep together.”

Royce: And also it was a shop with one cot.

Courtney: But they’re like, “But this cot was so small, and Abraham Lincoln was so tall, that the only way that Jack could have fit on the Titanic door was if Rose–” [laughs] It was bonkers! Because they had this guy trying to explain how the only way two men could fit on the cot, especially one of these men being a very big dude, is if they both slept on their side.

Royce: That was my immediate inclination as soon as you proposed two people on a cot.

Courtney: But if these two men are sleeping on their side and they’re sleeping touching each other.

Royce: Back to back.

Courtney: Nope, they were spooning. They said the word spooning. They said the word spooning! These two men were spooning. [laughs] But then, with this reenactment happening, so– we see a young Lincoln spooning this man in this cot on the shop floor. This guy says, “Well, I can see how that makes sense in the winter months when you want to share body heat. But then how do you explain–?” And then it cuts back to the reenactment, as he says, “But how do you explain the summer, when you have these two hot, sweaty men–” And this time they’re shirtless. [breathy laugh] I kid you not. And the thing is, this commenter in particular, like the way he’d be like, [emphatically] “Two hot, sweaty men.” I was like– I was picturing the reenactment being like his headcanon, like his historical fanfiction for this. And the way he was talking also, while we’re seeing this reenactment like, “Ooh, this time cut to them and they’re shirtless, and they’re spooning on the cot. There’s no platonic explanation for this.” I was like, my God, you’re Blanche Devereaux reincarnated.

Royce: Don’t tell him when Lincoln was younger, he was the county wrestling champion.

Courtney: Oh no! They didn’t even tell me that! Well, now– Now, now that you tell me that– So the thing is this commenter, I was genuinely prepared for him to be like, “Abraham Lincoln slept with men. Many, many men.” And I was like, “This is very, very Blanche Devereaux.” It was– It was– So the thing is this– this fellow who Lincoln shared a bed with apparently wrote a letter about how fine of a specimen Abraham Lincoln was, commenting on how his legs are in really good shape.

Courtney: And this commenter, the way he phrased it also. So the quote from the letter that they were referencing was how his thighs were the best thighs I’ve ever seen on a man. And this commenter is like, “Normally, when men of that era talk about each other or write about each other, they’re commenting on their strong arms, their buff biceps, their handsome face. But why was he commenting on Abraham Lincoln’s legs?” But luckily, this commenter filled in the gaps for us. The only reason why this man who shared a cot with Abraham Lincoln would be commenting on his thighs is if they were having intercurial [sic] sex.

Royce: Okay.

Courtney: That wasn’t the word they used. I want to say they literally just called it femoral. I think. And they– I don’t think this one was Freud, they might have quoted Kinsey as, like, this is our source for the fact that femoral sex is a thing. I was like, pretty sure that existed before Kinsey. And it was at this point that they started planting the seeds, which they said multiple times– Multiple times they kind of mentioned that, well, back then sexuality was much more fluid and people didn’t have this modern concept of heterosexual and homosexual. And– and it was– it was really common for men to, you know, say their sexual urges with one another, and it just wasn’t seen as a big deal.

Royce: Isn’t this time period usually argued the opposite? Like, of course, this person who never was openly in a relationship, a same sex relationship, was gay because back then they couldn’t be openly gay.

Courtney: Yeah…

Royce: Like we’re talking about the 1800s, not ancient Greece, right now, right?

Courtney: Oh, but they absolutely– Like they– [sighs] They did a really haphazard job of basically being like, “People have always been gay.” And they’d show like the Greek pottery and they’d show, you know, Egyptian paintings. And they’d be like, “All over history, people have always been gay.” And they’re like, “Even the early Roman Catholic Church.” And I was like, weird to leave it there. And– But it wasn’t well cited, it wasn’t a main focus at all. There were all these throwaway lines that were these broad, sweeping generalizations that kind of made it seem like homophobia is brand new. Like, it was totally okay to have homosexual relations back in the day.

Courtney: Which was wild to me, because someone made the assertion that it was so normal for people to have homosexual relations with one another during this time that, even though there are technically sodomy laws, nobody has ever been prosecuted on sodomy laws and nobody cared about sodomy laws until like the 1960s. Uh? Um… Oscar Wilde? Even– even if you’re talking about America– If you’re like, “In America we are very fluid sexually,” which they kind of were doing. Because they– In talking in such vague, general, sweeping things, without making a point in the moment, without citing sources, they kind of made it seem like America winning the Revolutionary War and becoming independent from Britain kind of like made us all very queer. And that was part of the appeal. Like if we get away from Britain, we can like– I am over-exaggerating now, but only barely.

Courtney: They were like, “Cowboys in the Wild West,” and I was like, yeah, well, cowboys are frequently secretly fond of one another. [laughs] But they genuinely made it seem like, since America has been a country, nobody cared about sodomy or being gay. And they even made the assertion that, like, as long as you eventually got straight married and had kids, people didn’t care what you were doing off on the side, on your own time. Someone literally said, “You do you!” That was a line someone said as like this is how the Victorians felt about not only infidelity but homosexuality.

Royce: As famously portrayed in everyone’s favorite high school English book, the Scarlet Letter, everyone was just free to do whatever they wanted in their relationships.

Courtney: Thomas Jefferson was like, “Yeah, so right now we’re executing people for sodomy and maybe that’s a little much. Maybe we should just castrate them.” Thomas Jefferson also suggested that women who have sex with women should have holes drilled through the cartilage of their nose. Like, I don’t think that ever actually happened or became law. But like Thomas Jefferson is also on our money. Also super side note, but did I say intercurial earlier? When I meant to say intercrural? My brain was just like, “You’re talking too fast. I think you messed up a word like 20 minutes ago.”

Royce: That’s one of those words I don’t hear pronounced often enough to be confident about the pronunciation of, my brain scrambles too many letters in the middle of words.

Courtney: Yeah well, you’re dyslexic, you’ve got an excuse. I just get overexcited and my tongue gets away from me. So but then, [sighs] not only were they like, “Yeah, being gay was super not a big deal,” they had a couple of people – who would only give a couple of soundbites and then didn’t end up being major figures – who would kind of just say like, it was a lot more common for men to have like deep interpersonal relationships with other men back then as they do now. And likewise women. Like women, had very close women friends. Men had very close men friends. And I was like, yeah, that was– social situations were often a lot more heavily gendered back then. So, yeah, there are reasons for that. But then they’d have people come in and be like, “Oh yeah, I mean, all this was happening and it was no big deal, a lot of people knew about it, and it was just fine. No– nobody cared.”

Courtney: And it’s like– Then they showed a montage of photos, Victorian era photos of like two men who were either, like, holding hands, or they had their arms around each other’s shoulders, or one was sitting on another’s lap. And they showed so many of these. But they’d show the entire photo for a second and then they’d, like, zoom in on the fact that they were holding hands. And then they’d show another photo and then they’d zoom in on the fact that they were touching shoulders, or they’d zoom out and then they’d zoom in on the fact that, you know, one of them was kissing the other’s cheek or something. And they went through so many of those. And I was like, “Who are you people?”

Courtney: Because in the context of what they were saying, it was very much like, “Here is evidence that people were just having these homosexual relationships, and it was just fine and nobody cared. Look at these photos of two men holding hands.” But then in one of the photos– And I wanted them to show it for longer, but they really only showed a quick flash before, like zooming in on something or moving on to the next one. But I’m pretty sure in this montage that one of the men was wearing a hair worked watch chain and it was of the era for such things. I wanted, like, an extra second because there were some watch chains that were just like threads or silks that might have had a similar sort of braiding pattern. But the moment I saw it I was like, “Oh, hair!” And then it was gone. But the thing is, the other man in the picture, who they seemed to be implying there’s something, there’s no platonic explanation for this, did not have hair long enough to make that watch chain. So that’s a fun context clue that I am the only one in the world who’s going to pick up on.

Courtney: But the thing is, then I got to thinking I was like these weren’t always romantic gestures, these bits of hair jewelry. I have seen, let’s say, a ring woven with hair that is exchanged between lovers. It is a very romantic gesture. I have seen exactly the same ring with exactly the same pattern that was something a man wore that was woven out of his sister’s hair. So, like, the thing that I’ve always loved about hair work is that it is all kinds of love. It is romantic love, it is familial love, it is friendship. People would keep entire journals with locks of the hair of all of their friends. So it was very much commemorating all types of affections that way. And that’s something that I find– Or even love coming from a place of grief like a deceased loved one.

Courtney: So I’ve always loved it for its flexibility in sentimental meaning. Because the way people from this era would talk about one another, write about one another, there was this essence of romance about it that I don’t mean literally like romantic love, but in like the flourishes, the poetry, the– the pomp and circumstance of it all. But then you also have a couple people saying, “Men did have really deep, meaningful friendships with one another. And it was totally socially normal for men to share beds together.” And then you’d have people being like, “But Abraham Lincoln was really close to this guy and they shared a bed together, so there was definitely sex happening.” And so it’s like, which is it? They definitely heavily favored the ‘there was definitely sex happening’ narrative, because they brought it up more often and more consistently and put more emphasis on it. But I was also like, if you’re going to spin me a narrative, at least keep it a little consistent, or make it more balanced or something.

Courtney: But then they made the assertion that – and this was near the end, when they were trying to tie this into modern, modern human rights– rights and the queer rights movement – Abraham Lincoln did have male privilege, but the fact that his queerness has been suppressed for so long and the fact that he was a member of a minority community, that’s probably why he had the empathy he needed to free the slaves. Are you kidding me?! Oh my gosh, I was so aggravated because– They brought up Frederick Douglass, like a couple of times, they mentioned him a couple times offhanded, and a couple people were slipping in there to say like, “Yeah, Abraham Lincoln wasn’t like, from the jump, like yes, let’s emancipation proclamation. This is bad, this is wrong. We gotta fix this situation.” There were a couple people that were like, “Oh, no, no, he needed to be convinced.” So like, at least they mentioned that.

Courtney: But it was so, so reductive for every bit of just like historical context that, as much as I hate the focus on he was gay, I was like can we keep it on this narrative please? Because you’re not doing any of these side tangents any justice by just offhandedly mentioning the entire history of the queer world. Or mentioning the civil war and slavery and abolition. Like you’re not doing these big concepts its own justice. It was very tonally off for me for that reason. But basically, Abraham Lincoln, after this first, uh, sleeping on a cot, goes to a new place, tries to buy a bed, doesn’t have money to buy his own bed. But the guy who runs a shop, who moved here from a very wealthy family – he grew up on a plantation and then he moved to Illinois – was like, “Oh, you don’t have a bed? Well, I’ve got a pretty big bed.” And he did have a pretty big bed. In fact it looked like a normal size bed, not but a cot.

Courtney: And the way they said the narrative– And again, they aren’t really giving us dates, they aren’t giving us any more letters for context. People are just telling us a story and asking us to take their word for it. And some of it got to a point where I was like, how much of this is just pure speculation on your part? Because then you have someone sitting here like, “Oh yeah, the day Abraham Lincoln met this guy, he walked into a shop looking for a bed, and this guy looks at him and is immediately attracted to him. And so he says, ‘Well, you can share my bed.’ And then Abraham Lincoln goes upstairs and looks at the bed, and leaves all of his stuff there and comes back downstairs and doesn’t even bring his things with and he’s like, ‘Great, I moved in.’ Because, basically it was love at first sight.” And I was like, “Source? Please?” [laughs] I beg you for a crumb of source.

Courtney: And thus became the primary focus, which was Joshua Speed, who they’ve made the assertion like this was the love of Abraham Lincoln’s life. And even the people who were like, “There’s no platonic explanation for this,” said like, “I can see how at the start, maybe it wasn’t a gay thing, maybe it really was that Abraham Lincoln couldn’t afford a bed and this other guy happened to have a really big bed that easily fit two people.” Maybe at the beginning that’s what it was, but then they roomed together for four years. And they’re like, [emphatically] “Four years…? Why would you sleep in the same bed with someone for four years if you aren’t fucking?” [breathy laugh] Someone said that Speed was actually the woman behind Abraham Lincoln. It wasn’t Mary Todd Lincoln. Mary Todd Lincoln just got all the credit for it. Which I think was weird, because most scholars actually tend to really hate Mary Todd Lincoln.

Courtney: But they– Again, they had this reenactment. So it shows them in bed together and it shows them, like, resting their heads on each other’s chests and stroking each other’s hair. And as soon as you do those dramatic reenactments, I just can’t handle it. And someone said offhandedly – and it might have even been in the trailer – where he was like, “Abraham Lincoln literally said he was jealous of Joseph Speed’s wife.” But, as they’re saying, they’re super close friends, they’re really intimate with one another and they sleep in the same bed. Eventually, Speed introduces Lincoln to Mary Todd and in this reenactment it shows him, like, yeah, they’re at a party. He’s like, “Hey, Lincoln, come over here.” You know, Abe, Mary Todd. Mary Todd, Abe, whatever. But then they’re like, “But I think Speed got jealous after that.” And it shows, like, Mary Todd and Abraham sitting in a room just talking to each other. And then it shows, like, Speed, like, looking in the door from across the room and then, like, scoffing and be like, oh– [gasps] looking so devastated and leaving. And again I’m like, what is the source for that, please? Where are these never before seen letters I was promised? Did he– Did Speed say that he was jealous of Mary Todd? Did like– So then like, Speed moves away and gets engaged to a woman, and Abraham Lincoln gets engaged to Mary Todd.

Courtney: And then they’re also saying– And here’s where I also really, really want the context. Like, I didn’t get the full quotes for these, but they were saying that both of these men– Oh, also someone said, like, we have every reason to believe that he was still a virgin at age 32. As if that’s impossible, unless he was gay! Like any straight man would have had sex with a woman before then. Which– I know so many virgins in their 30s because they’re asexual and they just don’t actually want to have sex. Like that’s– And how alienated those people feel because everyone in the world thinks that that is such a grievous injustice that, like, your life must be so sad and so empty without sex. Like– But then I was like, just– just a few minutes ago you were saying that Lincoln and the first guy he shared a cot with were having intercrural sex. So, was– was he a virgin or not? Or are you trying to say that, like PIV sex is the only thing that actually counts for virginity? Because I don’t think you’re allowed to say that when you’re looking at things with a modern queer lens, either. [chuckles] So one way or another, you’re doing it wrong. Both ways, actually. We are– we are doing all the ways wrong.

Courtney: I was so frustrated throughout this entire thing because of little things like that. Like, not only are you contradicting yourself, but I don’t like either of the assertions you made. But the real thing that I, like, desperately wanted the full context for was that they said, “Well, both men, Lincoln and Speed, were terrified of consummating their marriages.” They were afraid to have sex with women. And, of course, these guys were like, “What straight man in his 30s is afraid to have sex with a woman? I’ll tell you what straight man, none of them. Because they were gay.” [laughs]

Courtney: And again, when people are like: doesn’t want to have sex with a woman, therefore must be gay. I’m like, um… Could be asexual. I’m not going to sit here and say Abraham Lincoln was asexual. I’m not. But it drives me nuts when people say this is the only possible explanation. While then also being like this queerness has been suppressed. This queerness has been suppressed for over 100 years. What a grave injustice that people have not allowed it to be known how homosexual President Lincoln was.

Courtney: And it’s like, in your analysis, not only are you suppressing so many other possibilities, so many gray areas, so many types of queerness that aren’t the specific type that you keep coming back to. Because there were a couple people who were, like, very careful not to say gay or homosexual for what they thought Lincoln was. Because they’re like, “Well, he did have kids with Mary Todd Lincoln.” So I’m like, uh… yeah, but like sexuality was super fluid back then, so [breathy laugh]. That is why it sort of felt to me like not only are you applying modern ideals and a modern context and a modern queer theory to someone who died well over 100 years ago, but this is why it kind of felt like this was like a 20 years ago queer theory of like, “Did you know this person was gay, actually?” When, A, we will never know definitively; B, there are so many more expansive possibilities that, for some reason, none of the experts are actually pointing out.

Courtney: One got really close. One queer educator did say that in a modern context we have made these boxes so rigid in a way that they weren’t always so rigid. And she did kind of say, like, the thought is, if you do this certain type of act, then that’s the kind of person you are. And in the context it was like if you have gay sex, then therefore you are gay. And she kind of said like it’s not as simple as that. And I was like, yeah, I want you to talk more about that. But then it got cut and I’m sure she did talk more about that in her own prospective interview, but it didn’t make it into the final edit.

Courtney: They then went on to talk about how horribly depressed Abraham Lincoln got when Speed moved away. And how, in the midst of this depression, he called off his engagement with Mary Todd. And how he was suicidal to the point where other people in his life were like taking away his shaving equipment.

Courtney: And not giving any more context for anything else that could have possibly been happening in his life right now, which – not being a Lincoln historian, I don’t have them all 100% off the top of my head – but I’m pretty sure like not only was his best friend, maybe lover – could have been, I’m not saying it couldn’t have been – moved away, but there were also like he had already started a political career. He didn’t just become president out of nowhere, which this documentary kind of made it seem like he became president out of nowhere. They did not talk about his career, for those four years or immediately after. We’re like, yeah, he did have hurdles in legislation before becoming president. He did, like, step away from his law firm. And like there were so many other things and stressors going on.

Courtney: And also like just what many people conceptualize is like, yeah, he probably had what we would now call clinical depression. Like he– He very much seemed to be suicidal. People were worried about his safety, worried about his health. Some going so far as to saying he was, you know, being self destructive. This documentary basically only said all of this came as a result of him learning that Speed was moving away. And it showed him sobbing on his side in bed while Speed caressed him from behind and comforted him and petted his hair.

Courtney: But then they were like, “Why would you be so upset about this guy moving if he wasn’t the love of your life?” I was like, I don’t know, have you ever had a best friend move across the country? It actually does kind of suck. Like, the way they were talking, so consistently devalued what a friendship could be. In a way that it could be very alienating for a lot of ace and aro people.

Courtney: Because not only do we in our communities very often highly value friendship, because we don’t inherently believe that a romantic relationship is the pinnacle of human experience, it’s the best relationship that you need to aspire to, it’s going to be grander than all the rest. We don’t inherently believe that. And for some of us friendship is the end all be all. That is the aspiration, having a deep, meaningful friendship. So devaluing that so consistently in their analysis?

Courtney: To me, doesn’t matter what sexuality Abraham Lincoln had. What matters to me is why is your queer analysis of history so limited? Why are you so laser focused on this that you are ignoring all of the other expansive possibilities of human experience out there?

Courtney: And that’s not even to bring in queerplatonic relationships. That can mean so many different things to so many different people. And is, of course, not something that ever gets mentioned in analysis like this. Ever. And I would say it could even go so far as to say like this was a deep, meaningful friendship. There are themes and elements of queerness about it. It could have well been a queerplatonic relationship. It could have been a sexual and romantic relationship. But there are personal details about someone’s life from this era that we are just never going to know definitively which is which. And I think that could already open up the conversation in ways that they’re purporting that they want to do. They’re saying we want people to see Lincoln as queer, because if you can accept Lincoln as queer, then queer liberation for all! We solved homophobia. [chuckles]

Courtney: But the fact that every single analysis time and time again is like, “You wouldn’t care this much for a friend. If you weren’t having sex, why was he such a wreck when he moved? There is no reason why a man in his 30s wouldn’t want to have sex with his wife, unless he’s gay.” Like, all of these things time and time again, there are going to be a-spec people out there – with a myriad of their own individual experiences – who are watching this, going like, “Um, excuse me?”

Courtney: And then they get to the letters back and forth when they’re– they’re separated, they’re– they’re engaged to their you know respective fiances. Apparently, Speed sent a letter to Lincoln that was like, “Had sex with the wife for the first time. It actually wasn’t so bad.” [laughs] And I wanted all of the lead up that they allegedly had. Because they were like, [emphatically] “Both men were wary of having sex with women. They were afraid to have sex with their wives.” But I didn’t get quotes for that. I got a single sentence of like, I guess, alluding to consummating the marriage, and it wasn’t that bad. But apparently Lincoln was very anxious about hearing this.

Royce: Were the sources for the letters mentioned at all?

Courtney: No really. Some of the times it was like, “This was a letter Lincoln wrote. And here’s a single sentence from the letter.” Or it would be, “This is a letter Speed wrote. Here’s a single sentence from it.” So no, I– There– There weren’t like, “Here was the date, here was–” Nothing like that.

Royce: I was just curious because I was doing a little bit of reading here and there as you were going through it, and there’s a whole alleged hoax diary between the two of them that has been debunked.

Courtney: I– I’ve heard of that as well, just offhandedly, I’ve heard of that. But I don’t know all the details around that diary or why people think it is a hoax. I don’t have any reason to believe that these letters were from that. So–

Royce: Yeah, that would be a bit egregious. I assume it was not. More documentaries need to put shortened links or QR codes or something–

Courtney: QR codes?!

Royce: Something that you could embed in the film and actually, like, look up the resource. Or, I guess, just post something with timestamps. That’s harder to look up when you’re watching and not get spoiled, but something like that. QR codes might not encode very well.

Courtney: I mean even just, like, have a supplementary website. Like, for more information go to our website and here’s– here’s a link to all of our sources. Here’s– here’s where we found these things. Here’s– here’s the museum this is in here, like. The website has none of that. You know what the website has? A picture of Abraham Lincoln with, like, a David Bowie lightning bolt painted on his face. [laughs] I’m not kidding! And so, apparently, Abraham Lincoln was really concerned about having sex. Honestly? Relatable. Honestly, relatable. That’s what we’re going to call him now. We’re going to call him Honestly Relatable Abe. [laughs]

Courtney: But, um, I was waiting for the line to come where Abraham Lincoln was apparently like, “I’m jealous of your wife.” Cause I’m like, yeah, that could be– That could be a pretty strong argument. Uh, if he was like, “Oh, you’re married and you’re having sex with your wife. Well, I’m so jealous of her.” Like that, that would be– That’d be pretty obvious, right? The actual quote was more along the lines of, “I am jealous of the two of you because now you have each other to care for. And I’m going to slowly be forgotten. And I’ll be alone. And I wish the two of you would have stayed in Illinois and built your life here together to be closer to me. But that’s– I know that that’s too big of an ask.”

Courtney: And I was like– And everyone’s like, “See? Super gay, why would he say that if they weren’t– if they weren’t lovers?” And I was like that, right there, is such an ace fear.

Courtney: Such– such an a-spec concern where– in situations where we aspire to these deep, intimate levels of friendship but the friends around us are all allo, and are pairing off and beginning to devalue their friendships or not spending as much time together. That is such a profound loss that so many ace and aro people experience in our lives, is sort of the slow death of a friendship, because that other person has found a romantic, often also sexual, interest and just no longer has the time, no longer has the same level of intimacy with you that they once had. And so I felt kind of baited and switched! I felt baited and switched when it’s like, “Oh, he was jealous of Speed’s wife,” and yet his statement was like, “I’m jealous of the two of you because you have each other now and I’m gonna be forgotten and alone over here.” Like, this very third wheel kind of energy. So I was like that wasn’t the quote you think it is.

Courtney: But then Speed gets married to his wife, Abe gets married to his wife, and ta-da, he’s president. Amazing how that happened when he was, like, just working at a shop sleeping on a cot four years ago. Don’t know what could have happened in that four years. Like the lack of additional context around his life just also baffled me. So not only is he president, but now civil war is happening. And he’s got this new friend who just like comes out of the woodwork, I guess. And Abraham Lincoln allegedly once wrote, “He’s the finest little man I’ve ever known.” And I thought that was kind of a silly line. But Abraham Lincoln wrote a letter to promote him up the ranks within the military when civil war is happening and whatnot.

Courtney: The weird aside they gave was: so this guy actually started at a higher rank than Ulysses S Grant because Abraham Lincoln liked him so much and they were probably lovers, so he just promoted him. So nobody said this guy slept his way to the top, but if he was a woman, they’d have. [chuckles] And so, he dies. He gets shot in the Confederacy, and Abraham Lincoln is super sad about this. [emphatically] But why would he be so sad about this if they weren’t lovers? Someone actually said the word erotic, I think, for this third guy too. He was like, “The reason why we know that Lincoln felt so intimately and so erotically toward this man is because of the context of his past relationships.” So he also basically just admitted that there’s almost no evidence that they can find that this was a sexual relationship, except for the fact that this guy kind of looks like Joshua Speed.

Courtney: And they put two, like, hand painted portraits of these two guys next to each other and I didn’t see it. They were both white men, one had blue eyes and the other had brown eyes. And they had different noses. But they were like Abraham Lincoln has a type, and because we know he had sex with Speed, clearly this guy too, because he cried when he found out that he died. And I was like, I don’t know, maybe people just cry when their friends die? And also he’s the president overseeing this war and the one who wrote the letter who put him in the position that put him literally in that position where he died? Was there maybe an ounce of guilt there? Like, Wha–? I can come up with so many reasons why Abraham Lincoln would cry that this guy died that are indeed platonic, [laughs] or at least could be, could be platonic. And so they brushed over that guy real quick because they really didn’t have much there.

Courtney: But the fourth guy, also a military guy, because Lincoln has a type. And his type, they say? Daring, dashing manly. [laughs] It was comments like that where I couldn’t get Blanche Devereaux out of my head. Because they’re saying these things like, [emphatically] “His type was daring, dashing, manly.” And then you see these very homoerotic, like, reenactments of things that they are just either outright making up or, the most generous read is they’re filling in the gaps with their modern idea. Modern and limited idea of what sexuality is. And so, fourth guy became Lincoln’s bodyguard. And when Mary Todd Lincoln was away, like shopping in New York for example, his bodyguard slept in the same bed as him. Mhm. And that bodyguard, even, sometimes wore some of his nightshirts. And they pulled one quote from someone who says, “Oh, they say his bodyguard sleeps in the same bed with him when she’s gone.” What stuff? And then people were really focusing on that, “What stuff,” as like it’s unthinkable two men to sleep together. And this woman is, like, scandalized, like, “Oh! How, how absurd that they’re sleeping together. Can you believe such a thing?”

Courtney: But I could be wrong about this. But I don’t think that’s the only reading of ‘what stuff’ from– from that era. I would have– Had I read that on my own, without the context they were giving me, I would have read that more as, like, a modern, like, “What a load of baloney.” Like this is a rumor going around, that isn’t true. But that was, like, the only, like, confirmed, hard and fast, “Here’s the quote we have.” One sentence from a letter.

Courtney: But then they were– Even though that was the one sentence from one letter they gave, they were like, “It was the talk of Washington DC. And everyone knew about this. And everyone was cool with it.” And I just– I really find that hard to believe. Because there were a lot of people that, for various reasons, were political enemies of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

Courtney: And I am not aware of anybody trying to use that to attack him. Like if it was this big, open secret that everybody knows Abraham Lincoln has a sexual relationship with his bodyguard, and everyone knows this, everyone’s cool about this. Like they claimed that they didn’t ever prosecute any sodomy laws and nobody cared about it at that time, but sodomy laws were absolutely on the books. And there were no political opponents…? I just– I find that so hard to believe. And if there were any political opponents who were out here being like, “Our president is sleeping with other men, are we going to let this happen?” Then why didn’t the documentary say that? Would that be important context? I would think it would be.

Royce: Yeah, if that was an open secret in Washington, you’d at least see some, like, old political cartoons from the day. Because there are plenty of those drawn of Lincoln by his detractors for a variety of reasons.

Courtney: That’s what I was thinking. And I was like, if this did happen and I have just never come across it on my own, then I would want this documentary to put it in front of my face as additional evidence. But meanwhile we have this one sentence from the letter and then a bunch of guys telling us like, “Yeah, everyone knew about this. And it was fine. Because, I mean, he was married and had kids, so that’s all anyone cared about. So if he was sleeping with men on the side? You do you!”

Courtney: Although there was a biographer of Mary Todd Lincoln – and I have not read this biography – I will say they kind of like asked her what she thought of it and she was like, “Well, I think it’s great that he was so comfortable in his own sexuality that he was just openly having sex with his bodyguard while she was gone.” And then she just, like, starts laughing. And then she, like, backs it up and she’s like, “Or at least holding hands with him.” And I was like– [sharp inhale] And then it’s showing like the flashbacks, like it shows the two of them in bed when she’s like sleeping with him, and she’s like, “Oh, or at least holding hands.” And then it shows the two of them holding hands. And I was like, [whispering] “What?.” And that– that was like the closest anyone came to, “Maybe they weren’t literally having sex,” maybe they were just holding hands.

Courtney: But then it started getting tonally even weirder for me, because even though I am craving more sources and I’m craving more nuance within the queer theory they’re trying to apply, and even though I kind of just in general have a problem with saying that person who can’t speak for themselves is this thing, it got so much weirder from there. Because then they’re like, “Well, he freed the slaves.” And I wanted to scream every time they said Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Because again, like, nuance, there’s more to it. We’ll be here all night if I go into it.

Courtney: But they start talking about things that, again, way too general. They did not go into enough detail. I have quite a bit of background knowledge in the themes they were talking about, probably definitely more than the average viewer of this. They start talking about like, “Well, now that the slaves are free, then eugenics was invented.” Which– They also made it seem like eugenics came out of nowhere, or came as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation, which it did not. That’s one of those things that just– it keeps coming back. It keeps coming back like a bad rash, which we’ve talked about in various contexts before.

Royce: Yeah, fun fact, some of the thought leaders of the Confederacy praised the French book that came up with the theory of the Aryan race. That’s one of those timelines that I never hear compared appropriately, but that was in the 1850s.

Courtney: [sarcastically] But the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. Haven’t you ever talked to someone from Florida? Oh my god, my sincerest apologies to our progressive listeners who live in Florida. I know you exist, I do. I see you, but the next time I hear someone call it the War of Northern Aggression, I’m going to go feral. So, Emancipation Proclamation. Yay Lincoln, he’s our God. All praise Lincoln, our gay icon. Now eugenics, uh, oh. And as they’re talking super vaguely about basically scientific racism, they’re like, “Now people are obsessed about breeding superior humans.” They’re like showing images of, like, phrenology skulls, like the science of the shape of your head meaning different things, which was all the rage of the time. And like showing these diagrams. And they’re like, “Yeah, eugenics happened. And then doctors came along, science came along.” They were almost talking about science coming along as like a bad thing. I was like, “Are you about to get anti-vax?” It was very weird.

Courtney: Because they were like, “Science is the new religion.” And I was like, oh, oh, no, not the new religion science. But then they were talking about junk science, fad science, racist science, things that are not actually science, but they tried to make science, where they were like– They didn’t ever say the word phrenology but they showed so many phrenology like models and documents. And so all of these bits of context I’m needing to fill in on my own and be like, yes, I have a frame of reference for that. I know what this was talking about.

Courtney: But they turned that into: now that scientists are coming along… And they’re trying to– They didn’t make a good tie-in to how medical racism became medical homophobia. They did not make that link even though they could have. And that’s what also bothered me as a missed opportunity, because they’re like, “Eugenics is bad, but then Freud also very bad.” And I was like, well, that we can agree on. But they didn’t make a very clear tie.

Courtney: And this is the point where they’re like, “Freud said there’s homosexuality and heterosexuality and bisexuality, but also that there’s a hierarchy between these three identities.” And they were like, “Freud was terrible for that and influenced all this theory that became bad.”

Courtney: And then, you know, homosexuality became something scientific and– At this point, I was expecting them to talk about how, like psychiatry and mental illness and how homosexuality was in, you know, the DSM as a mental disorder. But they didn’t even go that far. They never mentioned the DSM. They never– They never took it that far. But because I know of all these themes very well, I’m waiting for them to go down that path, and they just didn’t.

Courtney: Where they left it at was basically Freud made boxes, he made these three boxes, and so now if you do this certain act, then you are that thing. And– But apparently, that doesn’t count for absence. Absence of sex doesn’t equal asexuality.

Courtney: It all goes right back. It’s either– either you act straight and you are straight, or you act gay and you are gay. But if you don’t act like either, then you’re probably gay. [sharp exhale]

Courtney: But their whole thing was like, “Now that Freud said the word homosexuality, and now that we have a concept of homosexuality, and now that this is a medical thing that doctors are talking about, now everybody is afraid to be seen as gay. Everyone had their no homo era.” They’re like, “Now you can’t dress in drag without being accused of being a homosexual. You can’t be a man who shares a bed with another man anymore because you’ll be accused of being a homosexual.” And so they’re like that was the worst thing about Freud, is that now everyone’s afraid of being accused of being a homosexual. Which was very interesting, because– Also in my mind they– They kind of– The framing of it and where they put it in the context of this narrative they were making, kind of made it seem like Freud’s concept of homosexuality and everyone all of a sudden being afraid to be seen as gay is the reason why Lincoln’s gayness has been suppressed for so long.

Courtney: And I was like– [sighs] And they also alluded to– this was a little earlier because this got brought up a couple of times. But Carl Sandburg was a biographer of Lincoln, an early biographer, who said that Joshua Speed and Abraham Lincoln had a streak of lavender. And everyone was like, “Well, that’s proof, because streak of lavender was slang for being gay.” But the biographer himself, like this was the early– like this was the early 1900s that he wrote that. The biographer wasn’t even born until like 10 years after Lincoln died. I don’t have his exact birthday in front of me, but he– he was not alive while Lincoln was alive. This wasn’t like someone who knew him very well who wrote about him during the period of time. So they kept using that as, like, evidence. They brought it up multiple times that this biographer said he had a streak of lavender. It’s like that biographer said he had a streak of lavender. It’s like that biographer didn’t know him personally. So why are you using that as evidence? So I didn’t much like that because it’s like I was begging for sources but then they gave me a source and I was like, “A better one please.” [laughs]

Courtney: So the two bits of context that I did wish they had put in a little more of, there absolutely – if they did the research and actually wanted to draw a distinct parallel between racism, eugenics and homophobia – there is evidence out there, but they didn’t pull any of the examples. There were instances of people trying to explain that the reason why lesbians are lesbians is because their genitals are more like the genitals of Black women. Like awful things, unscientific things, racist things, homophobic things all in one. There are examples of that in medical literature from the kind of people they’re trying to gently allude to without getting very specific about it. Save for name dropping Freud. But none of this was about the history of race or racism. And very little of it, do I think, was actually doing due diligence to the actual history of queerness, queer lives in different eras.

Courtney: Because when they randomly alluded to like, “Oh, you can’t dress in drag anymore without being concerned that someone’s going to call you a homosexual,” they showed a photo of like a 1920s era flapper who – without telling me who it was, when it was photographed – I was like, are you trying to tell me this is a drag queen? Are you trying to tell me this is a trans woman? If I just saw that photo with no context at all, I would have just been like, it’s– it’s a flapper girl. I wasn’t seeing any, like, obvious, like, “This is a man in a dress.” Which was very weird, because the line they had over it was like, “You can’t dress in drag anymore.” And I was like, “Is this even drag or is this just a flapper woman?” I don’t know, because you aren’t telling me who it is or giving me any context for why you’re using this photo.

Courtney: And it was at that time where I was like, you haven’t said anything about drag, you haven’t said anything about cross dressing, you haven’t said anything about trans people from this era, or even really gender fluidity from this era. You haven’t talked about that at all. So now, all of a sudden, that line doesn’t have any context around what we’ve been having a conversation about. And I was trying so desperately to remember where I read this, but in reading like late 1800, early 1900, like, etiquette books, I have seen a bit of like etiquette advice from, I think, the Victorian era, possibly Edwardian, where when I read it I was like that’s shockingly progressive. But they didn’t give any context like this as like here’s a shockingly progressive thing that in culture we can point to. But the bit of etiquette was like: if someone is dressed as a lady, you treat them like a lady. Like that– That was– That was basically the etiquette advice, because it would be far more rude, you know, to not treat a lady like a lady, than–

Courtney: Yeah, like, especially with all the anti trans laws we have being passed and stuff, like when I came across that I was like, that– that shockingly progressive. But not everything was shockingly progressive, even though they really made it seem like everything here was shockingly progressive. Until Freud. But then– So Freud’s the only reason why anyone has an issue with homosexuality, I guess? And I am– I am no lover of Freud. I have a button made by an ace that has a picture of Freud with, like– What’s that symbol called? When you, like, circle it and cross it out. Is there a name for that?

Royce: That is the general prohibition sign, also known as the No symbol.

Courtney: The No symbol. So I have the No Freud, the Freud prohibition button. But they almost, back to back, jump from these two thoughts, one being people were super cool with homosexual behaviors before Freud and then Freud messed it up for everyone. But then they talk about the weaponization of Christianity. And then they give a super basic 101 understanding of the things that you and I talk about a lot on this podcast. And that being– And I was surprised to even see them say things in these words, because I don’t always hear people talk about it in this way, that we have seen and discussed it, that being Christianity often ties sex to marriage and that sex, in their eyes, must be procreative. They got that far and I was like, “Whoa! Hold on a second, you’re absolutely right, I didn’t expect this.”

Courtney: But then they started talking about how they’ve used that to be so hateful to people over time, and they’re even showing old, old paintings of like Christian colonizers and Christians at war, and using the Bible to say like, “We are the superior ones, so we’re allowed to take your land and do terrible things.” And they were like, “So, yeah, those Christians were like gotta have procreative sex and gotta be married to do it.” And talking Christianity’s long history of doing this. And it’s like, so, which is it? Was everybody super cool about everyone just having gay sex on the side when their wives are out of town, or was christianity used to suppress uh, people for a very long history? There was– And they weren’t even presenting it as, like, an argument. It didn’t tonally feel like, “Here’s one side of the story saying people are really cool. Here’s another side being like whoa, whoa, whoa. Actually Christians have been mean to gay people for a long time.” It seemed like they were trying to share exactly the same narrative, but it’s like you’re contradicting yourself! You’re contradicting yourself. Please, don’t.

Courtney: But then that ended up segueing into showing pictures of, like, the Westboro Baptist Church and it’s like that– that was seeing– That was very much like they’re right down the road from us, like they’re based in Topeka, Kansas. So the Westboro Baptist Church is often in Kansas City. I have seen them so often outside of political rallies, outside of concerts. Literally see them in person often. And that’s when they start transitioning into again a very brief, not very deep, like, “Lots of States have passed anti LGBT legislation in the last few years.” And then they show like a few TikToks from trans activists or trans legislators. And then they’re like, “Isn’t it great that the internet now is doing the same thing that America did when we… when we became independent from Britain? We all got so much socially queerer, and now the internet is doing exactly the same thing it used to do. Is like, isn’t that great?” [laughs]

Courtney: And I was like, uh… Of all the parallels I feel like you could draw throughout history, this is not the one that is making sense to my brain and you haven’t provided me enough evidence to sway me in your direction. And that’s when they start talking about, like, “Yeah, gen Z, super queer, queerest– queerest generation yet.” Which, like yeah, by– by self ID yes, that is accurate. But then– then the comments that are like, “Yeah, if we can accept a gay Lincoln, we can accept all people are gay.” So I’m like is this documentary for the conservative Christians who are deeply queerphobic? Are you trying to convince them that Lincoln was gay? Because you think that would be socially better for everyone if they could get to believe that?

Courtney: Like, I don’t know who the audience actually was for this. Except for– The only audience I can see this being for are people who don’t have a deep knowledge of all of the things they briefly brushed over – like Abraham Lincoln’s life, social roles and relationships of the 1800s, eugenics, early sexuality studies, modern anti queer legislation – but do like lean progressive, lean left, do lean toward allyship or are themselves queer, but just don’t have a lot of exposure to queer theory or a deep understanding of it. It’s like it felt like– I feel like the audience kind of had to be preaching to the choir, but only if the choir is not going to ask too many questions. So it missed a lot of marks for me, it really really did.

Courtney: And I’m left with all this with the same question I always have anytime you take a historical figure, where… Is it actually okay to do these deep, somewhat invasive theories about someone’s personal life? Because if we were talking about a modern day politician and we were speculating so wildly about their sex life, nobody would be okay with that. So many people would be like, “It’s not okay to out other people. People don’t owe you their personal details.” And yet they phrased it– They literally said like, “Yes, Lincoln has male privilege, but he is queer. So he was marginalized actually.” As the president of the United States. And the fact that they’re like, “His queerness has been suppressed for so long.” It’s like the people talking are trying to say, like, we are doing Abraham Lincoln a service by letting everyone know the real him. And I hate that. I hate that so much. Because there are a number of ways you can conceptualize, like, how much harm does this actually do?

Courtney: You can take the– the very empathetic, sometimes spiritual or religious, thing of like, you know, these people are looking down on us, or just even just the human empathy of like what would they think about this if they were still alive? Right? And there are a number of arguments you can make for how this would actually be really bad. What if– What if Lincoln was a homosexual? And everything they’re saying is exactly true. Nothing is embellished, they got everything on the mark. I don’t think that’s true. But devil’s advocate, what if they were?

Courtney: Being of the era and of the– of his stature, of his position in society at that time, is he going to be grateful to us for showing the world the real him, or is he going to be mortified?

Courtney: Were people actually as super cool and chill with queer people back then as they sometimes said they were? Or is he going to be like, “Why are you telling everyone that? Why are you outing me?” Or maybe he just genuinely was not? There are some scholars who genuinely believe that he wasn’t. There are some debates about whether or not Lincoln did have other female relationships before married Todd Lincoln. Some people think he did, some people think he didn’t. I personally don’t care that much either way. What if he really just was a very anxious, depressed straight guy? Would he then also be mortified? Or would he be like, “I am such an enlightened ally that I know it is not actually an insult to be called gay. So I’m not going to get offended by this. ”?

Courtney: That’s not going to happen. Because this is a man from the mid 1800s. As another example, what if he is asexual? Maybe sleeping in a bed is just sleeping in a bed and maybe the reason why he didn’t want to have sex with his wife is because he didn’t want to have sex at all. There are some queer scholars that would say the very questioning of that is homophobic. I have been told before that I am homophobic for saying, like, “This person kind of reads asexual to me.” They’re like, “How dare you not think that this person is homosexual?” I’m not vehemently arguing that he definitely wasn’t, I’m not. This– People like to put you in the same camp as, like, the scholar who’s going to intentionally ignore all evidence of homosexuality because they’re very homophobic themselves and they can’t stomach the idea.

Courtney: If you so much as say, like, maybe there’s another queer option that isn’t just gay, people still are going to say homophobia. Because people are actually quite acephobic. So acephobic that even if– even if I bought everything they were selling, even if they had stronger quotes, even if they had more sources, even if I thought their narrative in this documentary was more coherent, I would still say that many of the things they said throughout their analysis was still acephobia at worst, ace erasure at best. So even if I was on board, “I’m like yes, team gay Abraham Lincoln, definitely.” I’d still be like, there are other ways you can word that. There are different ways you can get your point across without totally dismissing the value of friendship, the existence of queerplatonic relationships, the fact that some people just don’t want to have sex, and that’s fine.

Courtney: But then if you aren’t taking the empathetic route, if you aren’t taking the, like, “What would this person think, if they saw what we were saying about them?” You could say, like, “Well, if a person’s dead, they’re gone.” You could think there is no afterlife. You can think nothing we can say is going to actually hurt that person. Then I still have to wonder, like, if this isn’t like justice for Lincoln, if this isn’t like the world needs to know the true him, then this narrative is for us. This narrative is for us as modern queer people. And they kind of even tried to say this near the end, as they’re wrapping it all together. They were trying to say, like, “It’s important that queer people know that we have always existed, we have always been here.” And as much as I agree with that sentiment in isolation, I often have this just feeling of repulsion when we take a single person and idolize them, and deify them, and queer them.

Courtney: Sort of like, all without their consent. Because I could see it being so bad either way. I’ve told different stories and like this is just me, using my own empathy, and again like a modern lens to a historical figure. Which, they even said in the documentary that, like, “Oh, historians call that anachronism,” and they’re talking like that’s a bad thing, that historians say like, “You can’t use your modern frame of reference to apply it to these past situations.” And they were doing that a lot in the context of, like, sharing beds together. They were like, “To all the historians that say that it was pretty common for men to share beds together–” I think at one point one person even literally said, “If Lincoln was sharing a bed with a woman, we’d all say that they were having sex obviously. So why wouldn’t we say the same thing when two men are in bed together?” And I was like, no… No. Because I also don’t like the assumption that a man and a woman in bed together are inherently having sex 100% of the time, no exceptions.

Courtney: And also again, they’re like– You are ignoring some amount of historical context now. Our job as historians is to determine what sets of context matter. But at the end of the day, there is kind of a story that we are telling. And I have to ask what is the reason why we need to tell this story pertaining to a specific person. Because they did not go over multiple examples through history. They didn’t do a queer history of the world. They alluded to the fact that there is one, but it wasn’t in general terms. They’re taking a very specific person and saying that person’s gay. And the reason why I have an issue with that is because I have personal experience with this. And I know a lot of other aces do too. And I know the pitfalls of taking my modern experience and trying to apply it to a historical figure.

Courtney: But bear with me a moment. Like, I’ve mentioned before that, I was made fun of in middle school for being a lesbian, and at the time in my head I was like, “Well, I don’t think I am a lesbian, but–” Being the ally I was, I was like, “I would rather these bullies make fun of me for being a lesbian than someone who actually is a lesbian, who is in the closet, who hasn’t come out, who hasn’t discovered themselves yet. So I’m just not going to speak up about it and I’m going to let it roll off my back.” Water off a duck’s back, you know? And also, like, “Being gay isn’t an insult, so they’re not even making fun of me. Like, pick a better insult if you want to be mean. Being gay isn’t a bad thing.” Although that was not the full story. I am not a lesbian. But then when I was in a relationship with a man and not having sex, all of a sudden all of the assumptions were, “You are having sex with this person,” derogatory statements, awful rumors being spread.

Courtney: I haven’t even told that whole story yet because it is very traumatizing. Maybe someday I will let some of that information out. But I literally had, like, a teacher at my high school refer to me as a sex kitten because I was in a relationship with a guy, who I wasn’t having sex with. So I have had, like both ways. People thinking that I am performing heterosexual acts, and that was very traumatizing and awful for me, and led to a lot of bad things in my life at that period of time as a direct result of people saying things like that. And then also people making fun of me for being gay, and I was aggressively unbullyable because I was too weird. At that period of time I was like, “Fine, I’ll take it, it doesn’t bother me.” And it was neither. I was a secret third thing. I was asexual.

Courtney: So I know that people are going to assign a sexuality to you, whether it’s correct or not. I’m so viscerally aware of that fact that I reject this narrative of, “We are doing justice to this person by sharing the truth.” Because you’re not. A lot of this is speculation. So if the story is for us, what do we materially gain as a queer community by, like, claiming Lincoln as one of us? By being like, “One of us! He was queer, he slept in beds with four men.” Like, if their theory that they posited is: if you can accept gay Lincoln, you can accept all gay people; then we need to be convincing the people they briefly alluded to: The Christian nationalists, the conservative Republicans, the people who are taking our rights away. They wouldn’t believe this documentary, even if you gave them better sources.

Courtney: And then what do we gain from, then, telling anybody who disagrees with this that you are homophobic? I’m sure some of them are. But, like I said, there have been other historical figures where I’ve been, like, “Very ace coded person.” And they’re like, “How homophobic of you. Because this person was clearly gay.” What– What do we have to argue, as even a queer community, arguing amongst ourselves as to whether or not this person was queer? I don’t actually think convincing the conservatives that Lincoln was gay that that will magically solve all of our political issues right now. And if anything, whether Lincoln was queer or not – gay or bi or ace or straight – listen, I don’t know the guy personally, I don’t know his heart. Probably there is no situation where he would be, you know, theoretically, looking down from heaven, being like, “Thank you for finally telling my story the correct way.”

Courtney: Almost certainly that wasn’t. Almost certainly not. I cannot see a single world where that is the case. So I guess, maybe some of this does just stem from the fact that – like I’ve said in a recent episode and much longer ago even – I’ve never really been one to have heroes. I’ve never really been one to develop parasocial relationships with celebrities or wanting to know about people’s personal lives. So maybe there is an element of that. Maybe there– I can theoretically understand if someone does have a hero and if Abraham Lincoln is their hero, that like, “Wow, he’s just like me.” How that, like theoretically, could be really meaningful to a young queer person. But even if we say, like, that hope for someone who is alive outweighs the theoretical harm it could have done to someone who isn’t even around anymore, so you can’t literally hurt Lincoln, he died a long time ago, I do just worry about the general culture of speculating on sexuality.

Courtney: Because that does happen to real life people in the present day. And even real life celebrities in the present day who are in the public eye, who– People sort of think they’re owed a coming out from famous people, because you have a platform and you should be a voice for us, and we want you to be on our team. Like join us, join– join the queers. And I– I don’t personally think that way. So I don’t know, am I– am I thinking too far into that, or is there actually a concern of like legitimizing this type of grab a historical figure, make the case that they are some type of queer identity, as like posing that as not only scholarship and actual history, but also as some sort of social justice to do. Does that open the door even wider for situations of that being used and weaponized against real life queer people today?

Royce: I think that’s a reasonable assumption, or at least something to be cautious of. I think that, at the very least, that is one of many inconsistencies or contradictions that this movie presented. Where they’re arguing for one thing or one type of behavior, or something in one instance and then doing something else in another instance. I also just think that history in general needs to be carefully protected from a factual versus fictional standpoint. Like, yes, if you want to speculate on something because there are gaps, I think you have room to. In this case, you would need to do more broad speculation. This is like someone going in with confirmation bias instead of looking at the whole picture and all of the possible options.

Courtney: Yeah, it needs to be more interdisciplinary too.

Royce: Yeah, but it still needs to be written as a speculation. I think there needs to be a very clear line between what is clearly citable, what is known or what has been written or documented, and what is essentially historical fanfiction.

Courtney: [sighs] Yes, the historical fanfiction. Because, as I’m seeing these reenactments, like there was one moment where, like Lincoln and Speed are spooning in bed. And one of them, like, grabs the hand of the other one and, like, gently kisses, like, the inside of his wrist. And I was like, “Oh, that’s– that’s such an intimate kiss.” And they kept saying the word intimacy. And it’s like, yes, intimacy can exist within friendships, within queerplatonic relationships, intimacy can be romantic without sex. But– I could go on for a million years. But if– if we are applying, like, the concept of historical fanfiction, like, I guess at least make it silly. Like Hamilton as an example. Like, you can learn some actual things about history by watching that that maybe you didn’t know before, but also it’s missing a lot of context, and clearly the Founding Fathers were not actually rapping. Like we know that this is a fictionalized account.

Royce: I don’t have an issue with the tone that you described. I have an issue with the labeling.

Courtney: Yeah, I mean, it is the– Like, “This is the real, true history.” And the title even alludes to that. It’s the untold history of Abraham Lincoln. So it’s like this is true without a shadow of a doubt. And I guess I just wonder, like, what do we have to gain by picking one speculation and dying on that hill? Because even if you believe it, you can say this is my interpretation of it, because of X Y and Z. Others believe this, or here’s another reading of it. I think there’s so many better ways to present it. But even historians in their analysis of history pushing a narrative. Same thing with journalists. Journalists reporting facts can still be using facts to push a narrative. These are all things we need to be aware of.

Courtney: But yeah, I do wonder, especially the man in the documentary who is saying– who is basically disparaging the concept of anachronism, saying like, “Well, we should look at this with a modern lens. And the historians who say we shouldn’t are just homophobic.” If you are so keen to apply a modern queer theory to a historical figure, why are you doing it at all? You would never– You would never, as a queer sociologist, anyone in queer theory, look at a person alive today and dig this deeply into their lives and try to prove this person is queer and here is why.

Courtney: In fact, people do still do that. I mean, are people still saying that Taylor Swift is queer? I feel like that was a big thing a couple of years ago. Like, people will look at so many famous people and say, like, “They’re queer because: this.” And I’ve always thought that that was wrong.

Courtney: There’ve been so many authors who’ve been forced to come out, who have said, “I didn’t want to come out, I wasn’t ready to come out, but because you all were speculating so heavily, I feel like I’m forced to.” And people, at least in hindsight, go like, “Oh yeah, that was bad, that shouldn’t have happened.” So you’re really not applying modern queer ideals unilaterally, in that sense, you’re sort of picking and choosing what you want to apply to the situation in order to serve your own narrative. And I guess the same could be said for the ace erasure of it all. Either you genuinely don’t know, because you haven’t explored that area of queer theory, or you’re just ignoring it to push your theory. And again, I don’t mean that specifically in Lincoln, I’m talking about in general. So yeah, I think that’s all I have for today, but I do have more thoughts about this phenomenon. And more thoughts about specific historical people. So let us know if you enjoyed this little rant in the styrate, and perhaps we will do more and dig deeper, look at it from a different angle.

Courtney: So, because I mentioned this prohibiting Freud button, I feel like that is who I need to shout out today. So I actually bought these, I think, well before we ever started the MarketplACE, so I don’t actually know if this particular shop has actually made it to the MarketplACE yet, but I want to give them a shout out anyway, because I mentioned it and it’s relevant.

Courtney: This is Bloo Rose Art over on Etsy. As always, I’m going to put all the links in the show notes. This is actually an Ace Pride button pack, so one of them is just Freud’s face with the big No symbol over it, which I think is hilarious. And then you can also get along with that a button that just says Ace Pride with the backdrop of the Asexual pride flag. And then you can get a pronoun pin. The photos on the listing show they/them, he/him, she/her. But there is an option to put Other and enter below, because the shop does make it themselves.

Courtney: But they’ve got a bunch of other things on here. I think years ago, when I first found this shop, I also got a sticker of like the Asexual Pride rainbow and it says Aced It. And, because this is also very relevant to our current state of affairs, there is a button that says, “Yes, I’m American, No, I’m not okay.” But there’s a lot of other fun stuff here. There are bookmarks, some fandom illustrations, a cute little ghost with a knife for stabbing. And then some things about pitbulls and animal adoption. There’s all kinds of stuff in here. So definitely check out Bloo Rose Art. That is B-L-O-O, by the way. I realize it sounds like blue as in the color. No, it’s B-L-O-O Rose Art. And, as always, thank you all so much for being here. We will talk at y’all next time.