A new documentary explores the possibility that one of the country’s most influential presidents might have been part of the LGBTQ+ community — and a University of Utah professor is among the experts discussing it.
“Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln,” according to its website, “examines the intimate life of America’s most consequential president, Abraham Lincoln.” The film also, the website claims, “widens its lens into the history of human sexual fluidity and focuses on the profound differences between sexual mores of the nineteenth century and those we hold today.”
The movie is slated to be released nationwide Friday through AMC Theatres, including the West Jordan 12 in Utah. Home video release plans have not yet been announced.
The film features interviews with 19 scholars, historians and activists, who talk about both Lincoln’s story and the history of gender identity and sexual fluidity.
One of the interview subjects is Lisa Diamond, a professor in the University of Utah’s Department of Psychology. Diamond is a developmental psychologist whose area of research is sexual and gender identity development across a lifespan.
Diamond said she hasn’t studied Lincoln specifically, but a lot of what the film discusses is in her area of expertise — particularly “that people’s patterns of sexual desire and behavior fluctuate over [their] lifespan and sometimes in response to specific relationships.”
For example, Diamond said, some of the women she’s studied would have close friendships and “would eventually become sexually involved with that friend.”
“We have this notion of ‘Oh, and then you discovered your identity, and then you went off into the sunset,’ Diamond said. “As an actuality, over the course of a lifespan there’s a lot of sort of unexpected variation that folks kind of go through. In Abraham Lincoln’s time, they didn’t obsess about them to the same degree that we do now.”
“That is definitely one way to sort of think about life: that you can have a generally heterosexual orientation and that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re incapable of instant relationships with the same sex,” Diamond said. “That’s been kind of part of what a lot of my work has been about.”
The film’s director, Shaun Peterson, said he was researching the history of sexual fluidity, and came across Diamond’s book, “Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire.”
“I really leaned on her research and her expertise,” Peterson said in a statement to The Salt Lake Tribune, “but also I loved how beautifully she articulated this complex topic: with wisdom and often a bit of humor. But, what really sealed the deal was seeing Lisa’s TED Talk ‘Born This Way.’ I can’t recommend it enough. …”
Peterson added: “Lisa said it best when she said, ‘I think this film deepens your empathy about Lincoln as a person.’ That he was this unbelievable historical figure… but he was a human being, having human impulses, and human relationships. … To see someone of his caliber in love, and writing with love. The way out of this difficult historical moment we are in right now is empathy. And this film is a gateway to the empathy we are all going to need moving forward.”
(Special Occasion Studios) Actors reenact a scene between Abraham Lincoln, right, and Capt. David Derickson, in the documentary "Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln."
Diamond said her conversation with the filmmakers lasted around two hours. Though “very little” of it ended up in the film, she said it was “delightful” because they spoke about so many different topics, such as “how we think about gender and sexuality and the gaps between what popular understandings are at any particular point in time and what scientific understandings are, and what the political consequences of those understandings are.”
Most of the discussion, Diamond said, revolved around “what we know about the degree to which modern conceptual bases of sexual orientation don’t necessarily reflect what people kind of thought about their sexual lives.”
The discussion also covered, she said, the “category boundary that we had about friendship and love in the past, in other cultures and historical periods, versus the way we think about it now.”
Diamond said she’s not sure how people will react to the film or the suggestions it makes. “In the past five years, the whole issue of queer sexuality has just become more fraught and filled with more anger and vitriol,” she said. “I feel like if this film would have come out 10 years ago, people would’ve been like, ‘Oh wow, sexuality is complicated, let’s all be more accepting.’”
Now, though, she said people are more likely to say something like, “‘How dare you take our hero and turn him into a gay person?’”
Diamond said it’s more complicated than that, and simply stating that Lincoln was gay is “reductionistic.” Diamond said she thinks it’s more accurate to say that “Abraham Lincoln’s sexuality is complex [and] we may never know any more than that.”
“It’s kind of pointless to try to diagnose someone as gay or straight in the past, because our notions of gay and straight simply did not exist in the same way, so those categories don’t really apply,” she said.
“A lot of it goes right back to this question of, ‘How does one culture and historical period understand what was happening in another culture and another historical period?’,” Diamond said. “We can’t help but to use our language, categories, framework, to try and make sense of something that happened in a different period. …
“It gets us a certain ways down the road, [but] at some point, it always fails to get us all the way. We can never fully make that translation.”
Still, Diamond said her hopeful side hopes that people who watch the film will walk away with a “broader appreciation for the fact that sexuality, love and intimacy are a little bit more complicated than the current boxes that we have.”
“Ideally,” Diamond said, “it would make people question the category that they currently have, not just about gay and straight, but about love and desire.”
(Special Occasion Studios) The poster for the documentary "Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln."
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