'Lover of Men' Director Shaun Peterson Says Evidence Is Clear - Lincoln Was Gay - video Dailymotion

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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.

Transcript

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.

'Lover of Men' Director Shaun Peterson Says Evidence Is Clear - Lincoln Was Gay

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