Originally published at: Documentary highlights the men that Abraham Lincoln slept with - Boing Boing
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I was skeptical at first when I saw this, but the trailer does look it’s got some depth and historical standing… But yeah, the big thing is remembering that we used to live in a much more homosocial world, and same sex sexual activity was far more common than we think…
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One of the social norms that has changed since Lincoln’s time is that it used to be perfectly commonplace for men to express deep and intimate affection for one another whether they had any kind of sexual relationship or not.
Whatever the truth was behind Lincoln’s sex life, it’s a shame that it has become so stigmatized for men to express love (even platonic or brotherly love) for one another. Lots of dudes are so worried about their masculine image that they would sooner freeze to death than share a bed with another man.
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Homosexuality was pretty well documented on both sides of the civil war. So much so I thought a couple of years ago that it would be funny to mess with red states that were trying to make it illegal to take down confederate statues by putting ones up of gay confederate soldiers just to mess with them.
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Was hoping for a title like “Abraham Lincoln: The Man With Two Beards.”
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And it goes back even further than that.
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Lincoln fathered four children with Mary Todd so even if he did have sex with other men in his youth she was definitely more than a “beard.”
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The other thing we need to do is stop creating confusion on this issue by using euphemisms. We know he slept with men. The question is, did he have sex with them.
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Adding to this – I’m always at least a little annoyed by “he slept [had sex with] men, therefore he was gay” as if there aren’t other options! I do like that they touch on this in the clip by mentioning a lack of rigidly defined categories in the time period.
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The obligatory Electric Six song:
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I read a graphic novel about Von Steuben last summer that I reviewed here on BoingBoing! It was fascinating, and really good (particularly in the way it addressed the linguistic/social shifts around the ways that society identifies men who have sex with men).
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On one hand, modern social norms certainly encourage us to perceive queerness in the idea of a man who willingly chooses to share a bed with another when he doesn’t have to, and who describes that man’s thighs in gushingly intimate ways.
On the other hand, I am a legally licensed heterosexual (read: I am a cis man married to a cis woman), and I have also willingly shared beds with other men whose body parts I am intimately familiar with, in such a way that I could (and do) describe their qualities in similarly positive ways. Which means those same modern standards would imply the same things about me!
Of course, I’m also aware that most Ostensibly Heterosexual MenTM don’t have the same kinds of relationships with other Ostensibly Heterosexual MenTM as I do. But I think that’s what makes this sort of a fascinating topic for me.
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This is not meant to be picking apart your statement, but that very much does not mean you’re heterosexual! You could be bi/pan/ace or some other orientation other than heterosexual I’m not listing. For that matter, one of my metamours is a gay cis man married to a pan cis woman (my partner that connects us.) They’re happy to be together emotionally and socially, they’re just otherwise platonic.
I mostly bring this just to describe the difficulties of assigning modern categories to people, especially from 150+ years ago. Even now, a lot of us spend quite a bit of energy breaking down rigid definitions of gender and sexuality. I’m genderqueer, so I’m not quite sure what heterosexuality would even look like for me.
Definitely a fascinating topic!
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It’s also worth pointing out Lincoln was a known horndog who visited prostitutes and almost certainly ended up married to the worst possible woman because he couldn’t stop himself from getting her pregnant. (He was an inveterate gentleman about it, too).
If he engaged in sexual activities with men, it wasn’t because that was his sole preference, but a larger facet of his personality. It’s hard to say because, like you said, social conventions were not what they are. It certainly wouldn’t diminish him if he did.
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What are you going on about?
Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln were married on November 4, 1842. Their first son was born almost exactly nine months later on August 1, 1843. Even if she had been pregnant when they married it’s almost certain she wouldn’t have known it yet.
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The circumstances of their marriage and the way it was done make it almost certain that Lincoln at least believed it was possible he was going to become a father. They married with an hour’s notice to anyone in a tiny ceremony. His friends had been pressuring him to stop seeing her, likely because they expected this exact sort of thing. The woman went on to become a serial adulteress and an outright criminal.
I mean, I might be a little fuzzy on the details, but I listened to the audiobook version of his two part biography last October while I sewed my daughter’s dress. Which is how I know I spent more than a hundred hours on the dress.
Always appreciate the unnecessarily aggressive tone, though. 
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19951022&slug=2148077
Edit to add: I was born two weeks late. My son was born eight days late and only by emergency c section. Nine months to the day does indeed leave room to reasonably suspect a pregnancy.
Edit again: here are the books:
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They had been previously been engaged a year before any possible window of pregnancy, so characterizing Mary Todd as “the worst possible woman” who he only ended up with because she seduced him into impregnating her is not only speculative but insulting to both people.
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Sorry, but I have to object to that characterization of Mary Todd Lincoln… she’s gotten a very rough treatment, because of her social anxiety… which understandable, considering she lost 3 child and a husband over the course of her life… And she later had her other son put her away in an asylum. She lived in an era when that regularly happened to women…
Not all historians agree with Burlingame’s assesment of Mary Todd, keep in mind. just because one historian says something, doesn’t mean it’s the case. Historians who have studied her, including a friend of mine, have come away with much more sympathetic takes on the woman. A woman weighing down a great man is one of the oldest misogynistic tropes when it comes to the history of famous men. We hear it about Yoko Ono, Mary Todd Lincoln, and countless other women. Just because some dudes says it, doesn’t make it the truth. It’s his opinion, which, although well informed by his years of study on President Lincoln, doesn’t make it factual. Maybe check out some other works that focus more on MTL, maybe from a more feminist perspective?
[ETA]
He relies heavily on written accounts by the Lincolns’ contemporaries, most of which were composed after Abraham’s death by individuals unfriendly to Mary
Burlingame aggressively criticizes scholars who have suggested otherwise by interrogating the objectivity of their sources. Whether his own would withstand similar scrutiny is impossible to determine, given that the volume provides no citations
The guiding spirit of this volume is Herndon, the Lincoln memorialist whose hatred of Mary was loud and passionate. He wrote of her, “After she got married she became Soured — got gross — became material — avaricious — insolent — mean — insulting — imperious; and a she-wolf.”
Burlingame might have interrogated Herndon’s objectivity, or expressed skepticism about the hearsay and rumors that underlie many of the accusations in this volume. Instead, he conjectures. An anonymous letter to the president accusing Mary of having an affair with a lobbyist named William S. Wood allows the author to infer that Abraham “might have had a possible adultery scandal in mind” when he reportedly expressed concern to Orville Browning about his wife disgracing him. A paragraph later, Burlingame asserts, on equally questionable grounds, that “Mrs. Lincoln may have been unfaithful with others as well as with Wood,” without having established the truth of the Wood affair.
Primary caregivers will note how frequently Mary and Abraham are held to different standards. Mary is dismissed as a negligent mother when she entrusts a 6-year-old with the care of her baby. But Abraham is “not a good babysitter” when he ignores his screaming children and allows one to fall out of a wagon. Mary’s physical disciplining of her children receives censure, but when Abraham beats one of his sons an approving observer notes that he “corrected his child as a father ought to do.”
Burlingame goes so far as to assign Mary a certain culpability in her husband’s assassination.
Okay… all that seems… highly questionable to me. Seems like had a point of view about MTL and went out of his way to find sources that supported it, and didn’t do the work to interrogate those sources and their possible biases. Seems like pretty bad history there. He seems to have done little to attempt some objective views on the marriage… I have no idea why he seems to intensely hate MTL so much, but… 
Just from these few examples, he comes off as kind of petty and vindictive about her.
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That’s why I used that phrasing! By most definitions and for most useless intents and purposes, I am indeed a practicing heterosexual. But that isn’t something I “identify with,” per se. It feels inaccurate, reductive, and confining to me — even if nearly all of the people I’ve been sexually attracted to or active with have been women.
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