Author’s note:
Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809. I was born on February 12 as well. Growing up, that coincidence was treated as a kind of moral assignment — read Lincoln, admire Lincoln, be like Lincoln. With Presidents’ Day falling next Monday, it feels like an appropriate moment to reflect on what that instruction actually meant, what was quietly edited out over time, and what Lincoln’s example might still offer us now.
When I was a kid, that coincidence felt like a small moral assignment. Teachers and relatives leaned into it with cheerful sincerity: Be like Honest Abe. Read the books. Admire the speeches. Learn the story. Absorb the lesson.
So I did.
What no one ever explained was what kind of man Lincoln actually was — not the statue, not the mythology, but the human being who carried the Civil War on his back. And certainly no one ever suggested that whatever made Lincoln great might sit uneasily with our modern ideas of masculinity.
That’s why I loved the documentary Lincoln: Lover of Men.
Not because it was provocative.
Not because it was trying to shock.
Because it treated Lincoln as something we rarely allow great men to be anymore: complex.
Masculinity Before Labels
The documentary does something both modest and radical. It refuses to flatten Lincoln into a set of modern labels, but it also refuses to pretend that his intimate relationships with men were incidental or meaningless.
Lincoln’s long, emotionally intense relationship with Joshua Speed is not speculation. The letters exist. The shared bed is historical fact. The depth of attachment is undeniable.
I’m comfortable saying this plainly: Lincoln was most likely gay as we would understand the term today.
That doesn’t mean he lived with a modern sexual identity. It doesn’t mean he understood himself through our categories. Desire doesn’t require vocabulary, and intimacy doesn’t wait for permission from history.
What matters more than labels is this:
Lincoln lived in a world where masculinity was broad enough to absorb intimacy without breaking.
That world is gone.
The Sandburg Decision
It’s worth remembering that Carl Sandburg is largely responsible for the Lincoln most Americans carry in their heads. The prairie mystic. The moral conscience. The melancholy genius. That portrait is Sandburg’s.
In the first printing of his Lincoln biography in the 1920s, Sandburg referenced Lincoln’s relationship with Speed in language that clearly marked its emotional and intimate character. It wasn’t scandalous. It wasn’t accusatory. It was observational.
And then, quietly, that language disappeared in later editions — a shift scholars still debate but rarely ignore.
Not corrected.
Not disproven.
Simply omitted.
That wasn’t about historical accuracy. It was about cultural comfort.
By mid-century, America had decided something important:
its greatest president could not also be queer.
Not openly. Not even suggestively. Not even poetically.
So the complexity was smoothed away. And with it, something larger disappeared.
The Kind of Men I Grew Up Around
I grew up surrounded by men who would never have panicked over this — uncles, neighbors, church deacons, men who spoke rarely but watched everything.
The Greatest Generation fought in World War II. They worked with their hands. They kept their private lives private. They did not explain themselves, and no one expected them to. Masculinity wasn’t something they performed. It was something they inhabited.
They assumed men could have inner lives without those lives becoming public performance.
They assumed intimacy didn’t cancel authority.
They assumed responsibility mattered more than explanation.
No one asked what they did at night. No one cared. They slept in separate bedrooms from their wives. They came and went as they pleased. Affairs were understood, not discussed. Whether those affairs involved men or women was largely beside the point.
What mattered was whether you showed up.
That world had plenty of flaws, and I don’t romanticize it. But it understood something we’ve since lost: masculinity did not need to be defended.
It was sturdy enough to hold contradiction.
What Lincoln Gave Me
Here’s the part I didn’t understand as a kid when people told me to “be like Abe.”
I already was.
was observant, inward, verbal. I watched more than I talked. I felt deeply but learned early that those feelings needed to be managed, not displayed. I knew I was different long before I knew what that difference meant.
And like a lot of boys, I absorbed the lesson that masculinity was something you could lose if you weren’t careful.
Lincoln disrupted that.
Because when you look closely at who he actually was, not the monument, you see a man whose inner life was not incidental to his leadership but central to it. His melancholy sharpened his judgment. His attachments deepened his empathy. His capacity for intimacy made him better able to hold a nation together when it was tearing itself apart.
For someone like me, that mattered.
It meant that the parts of myself I had been quietly managing weren’t weaknesses to be outgrown. They were tools I hadn’t been taught how to use yet.
Strength Without Performance
Lincoln was not a swaggering man. He was melancholic, self-doubting, awkward, and deeply introspective. He loved language. He loved stories. He loved men.
He was also one of the strongest leaders this country has ever produced.
He visited battlefields.
He sat with dying soldiers.
He absorbed criticism from every direction without lashing out.
He held together a fractured cabinet through persuasion rather than domination.
He delayed moral certainty until he believed the country could bear it.
No one questioned his masculinity.
No one doubted his authority.
Masculinity, then, was not performance.
It was capacity.
Capacity for endurance.
Capacity for responsibility.
Capacity for restraint.
Capacity for moral seriousness.
Lincoln had all of that — in abundance.
The Diagnosis Everyone Is Getting Wrong
We hear a lot right now about a “crisis of boys.”
Falling academic performance.
Isolation.
Anger.
Disengagement.
A sense that young men don’t know what they’re for anymore.
The people most eager to talk about this tend to land on the same explanations: schools are too soft, culture is too hostile to masculinity, boys need tougher discipline, clearer rules, stronger role models.
Some of that isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete.
Because it mistakes symptoms for causes.
The real problem isn’t that boys are being told too much about feelings.
It’s that they’re being told the wrong story about what feelings mean.
They’re taught that inner life is either a liability to suppress or a product to monetize. That masculinity must be constantly defended. That intimacy weakens authority. That ambiguity disqualifies leadership.
When boys sense that they are complex before anyone gives them permission to be, they assume something is wrong with them.
That’s the fracture.
What Lincoln Would Have Made Possible
Lincoln lived before we demanded that men explain themselves in slogans.
He did not have to announce who he was.
He did not have to defend the seriousness of his inner life.
He did not have to simplify himself to be legible.
That gave him something boys today rarely receive: permission to mature slowly.
Lincoln didn’t resolve his contradictions early. He carried them. He lived with them. He let experience shape judgment over time. His leadership came not from certainty, but from an unusual tolerance for tension.
When we stripped masculinity of interior life, we didn’t make men stronger. We made them brittle.
Be Like Abe
Growing up, “be like Abe” meant honesty, perseverance, humility. All good things. But it left out the most important lesson.
Be like Abe means you don’t amputate parts of yourself to be taken seriously.
You don’t perform toughness to earn authority.
You don’t confuse certainty with courage.
You carry what you feel.
You do the work anyway.
You don’t ask to be applauded for it.
Sandburg didn’t remove that language because it was wrong.
He removed it because America decided it couldn’t hold both greatness and queerness at the same time.
Lincoln could.
It took me decades to understand that the instruction to “be like Abe” was never about perfection. It was about wholeness.
He didn’t need to defend his masculinity.
He didn’t need to clarify his desires.
He didn’t need to simplify himself to lead.
He was strong enough to be complicated.
And that, it turns out, is exactly the kind of man we need again.
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Being gay would explain his empathy for slaves. The LGBTQ+ Community and the Black Community have a close kinship (though, of course, the LGBTQ+ Community hasn't experienced the same level of persecution en masse).
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
You shift the narrative of masculinity presented by so many and make it balanced and real.