“V/H/S/Beyond” Review 
“Joker: Folie à Deux” Review 
“Stopping The Steal” Review 
“Mr. McMahon” Review 
“Uglies” Review 
“Will & Harper” Review 
“Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln” Review 
“His Three Daughters” Review 
Was Abraham Lincoln gay? There’s a lot of evidence in the documentary Lover of Men to suggest so, based on the discovered letters of the former president. To many Americans who have grown up with such an iconic political figure, it might be hard to swallow, perhaps even generating an immediate denial of affirming a fantasy of the queer community. But history is filled with wild discoveries; where in the past few years, we’ve learned of the secret lesbian affair of Emily Dickinson and the scrubbed works of the black French composer Joseph Bologne.
What makes most of this documentary unique is that it places context on this revealed sexuality. The quick defense for Lincoln’s heterosexuality is that he might’ve slept in beds with other men, but that didn’t mean he had sex with them. Aside from the language used in the letters to suggest something more than sleeping, there was a causality to how homosexuality came about during the 19th century. A man having sex with another man would be as thoughtless as the cramped sleeping arrangements. As the many historians interviewed point out, the people of that era didn’t view homosexuality with the same taboo nature as the 20th century. They didn’t even have a category for it.
The film darts between staging Linoln’s sexual encounters and the history of how queerness went from being familiar to taboo. The picture painted of the president feels like a full affair, where Lincoln’s marriage to Mary Todd felt more like a safer relationship to ensure political strength. There’s some tasteful reenactments that play into the details mentioned in letters, where one man becomes obsessed with Lincoln’s thighs. For 2/3rds of the movie, there’s a story to tell about repressed homosexuality from a time where it wasn’t as fully understood.
It’s other third of the film where the picture gets lost in evoking the context of queerness today, where Lincoln takes a back seat for the latter part of the film to discuss the more immediate issues of gay rights and trans rights. These are topics worth considering, but they are reduced to common talking points and all the familiar news footage used on this issue, stretching from news coverage of policy to politicans debating trans rights to right-wing provocateurs spewing their hateful bile. This plays more like a 101 for modern bigotry and, to its credit, it might be a necessary dose of reality for those hoping this would be a historical documentary locked in the past without highlighting historical relevence today. But the film also gets lost in that noise, where all the news footage overlaps into a quilt of talking heads, trying to paint a similar portrait of history, but with the hues seen in so many other docs. It’s as though the filmmakers started with Lincoln’s queerness and then went off on a long tangent about the problems of queerness today that carry the picture to the end, reminding itself by the closing lines that this was supposed to be a documentary about the legendary president.
Lovers of Men is an important documentary on historical queerness, but also one that struggles to connect the dots with its essential but few artifacts. While the evidence presidented certainly suggests a president who slept with men, the material doesn’t seem as suited for a feature-length documentary. The grander topic of history’s hidden homosexuals is one that seems more worth exploring, where Lincoln’s iconography as America’s greatest president rarely seems to make any solid connections with his queerness. There are some attempts at correlation to how Lincoln’s sexuality may have influenced the topic of slavery, but they thankfully don’t veer too far off into Ancient Aliens territory. The association of Abraham Lincoln and homosexuality has probably shattered some minds and Lovers of Men deserves some credit for trying to become more of an earnest historical account than a scandalous expose.
