Filmmaker Shaun Peterson is defending his controversial new documentary, "Lover of Men" ... which makes a compelling case for the theory that President Abraham Lincoln was gay.
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00:00Joshua Speed and Abraham Lincoln shared an apartment above a store.
00:07This is early on in Lincoln's career.
00:10They slept in the same bed.
00:12Was there a romantic relationship there or was this just two buddies sharing an apartment?
00:18You have a take on it.
00:19Well, sure.
00:20So a lot of conservative historians, well, that's their talking point, right?
00:22Like men shared beds.
00:23It was common.
00:24And that's true.
00:25A lot of people did for financial reasons.
00:27But in the case of Lincoln and Speed, they shared a bed for four years.
00:31And this is coming directly from Speed's own account of it.
00:34Four years for Lincoln, who is a double income earner.
00:37He was a legislator and a very successful lawyer, easily could have afforded his own
00:41room.
00:42And we also present evidence in the film.
00:43And we have all kinds of letters that we dug out of the Library of Congress, letters that
00:47people had never seen before.
00:48This is a letter from one of Lincoln's mentors who literally says, come stay with me.
00:53I'll give you your own room.
00:54And instead of staying with someone he knew, he ended up staying with a stranger, Joshua
00:59Speed, who offered him a bed in his room where they stayed for four years.
01:03And it's and when you see a picture of Joshua Speed, he was a very handsome guy.
01:08All the scholars will say this is his most intimate friend throughout his entire life.
01:12In the film, you cover several other relationships that Lincoln had with men.
01:18Lincoln is showing a pattern of behavior that starts at his young, in his young career,
01:22all the way up to his presidency.
01:25He also shared a bed when he was first moved to New Salem.
01:28He shared a cot, a little cot with Billy Green.
01:31So this is before he moved to Springfield.
01:33This is before he became a legislator.
01:35He was working in a little country store and him and Billy Green slept in a little cot
01:38for 18 months.
01:40Lincoln from Billy Green's mouth had the most perfect thighs a human being could have.
01:45So he was complimenting Lincoln's thighs.
01:47And we get into the film about through Alfred Kinsey studies that there was a sexual technique
01:52back then that people would call called femoral eroticism, where you push the thighs together
01:57and have intimacy with the thighs.
01:59So, you know, when you compliment a man's thighs, you're saying something.
02:04What was the public view of homosexuality, you know, back in the 1850s, 1860s?
02:10There was no such word as homosexual or heterosexual.
02:13Those words were literally invented in the 1870s.
02:17There was no concept of binaries.
02:19There was no there was no thought about it.
02:21You just acted on your sexual impulses.
02:24Your behaviors did not define who you were.
02:26Now, if you have sex with a man, a man has sex with a man.
02:29You are a thing.
02:30Back then, if you have sex with a man, you just did a thing one time and you aren't you
02:34don't have an identity.
02:36So audiences that went to see Reagan saw this trailer.
02:38And really, that's kind of what sparked all I use the word controversy in the intro.
02:43It's because that's how the audiences took it.
02:46Like, wait, what are they saying about Lincoln?
02:48That's what we're hoping.
02:49It's probably upset some people, but we want to open up a conversation.
02:52We're not trying to attack anyone.
02:54We want to talk about this.
02:56I mean, Lincoln is sort of a Trojan horse to talk about a larger topic in a kind of
03:00a divided country.
03:01But, yeah, you know, Elon Musk tweeted against us, Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro, they've come
03:06after us.
03:07But, you know, I would love to have like a watch party with those guys and sit down with
03:11them and watch the evidence.
03:12You know, in this fake news world, we really put forth as much evidence as we could and
03:18talk with scholars who spent their entire lives studying this.
03:21So we want to we want to talk about it.
03:23Like, let's talk about it.