Was Abraham Lincoln Secretly Gay? What Scholars Know About His Male Relationships Meredith KileSat, July 4, 2026 at 12:15 PM UTC 0 A photographic portrait of President Abraham LincolnCredit: Hulton/Archive/Getty Rumors about Abraham Lincoln&x27;s sexuality have become a hot topic in American history The Tonywinning Broadway play Oh, Mary! satirizes the 16th president as a closeted man, playing off rumors that historians have floated about his male relationships Lincoln historians Callie Hawkins and Joan Cummins recently addressed the longstanding rumors, sharing what historians know for sure P...
Was Abraham Lincoln Secretly Gay? What Scholars Know About His Male Relationships
Meredith KileSat, July 4, 2026 at 12:15 PM UTC
0
A photographic portrait of President Abraham LincolnCredit: Hulton/Archive/Getty -
Rumors about Abraham Lincoln's sexuality have become a hot topic in American history
The Tony-winning Broadway play Oh, Mary! satirizes the 16th president as a closeted man, playing off rumors that historians have floated about his male relationships
Lincoln historians Callie Hawkins and Joan Cummins recently addressed the longstanding rumors, sharing what historians know for sure
President Abraham Lincoln's political legacy is firmly etched in the history books: he's the 16th president of the United States of America who issued the Emancipation Proclamation to free enslaved African Americans during the American Civil War.
The record of his personal life, however, is far murkier. Recent years have seen a rise in rumors about the president's sexuality; even the Tony-winning play Oh Mary! satirizes Lincoln as languishing in the closet while his manic wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, strives for stardom.
In honor of Pride Month, NBC Washington's Tommy McFly recently visited President Lincoln's Cottage, a hilltop house in the Petworth neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Also known as the Soldiers' House, Lincoln spent over a quarter of his presidency at the cottage, particularly during the hot summer months.
McFly met with Lincoln's Cottage CEO and President Callie Hawkins and Lincoln's Cottage Association President Joan Cummins while visiting the historic site, and the scholars admitted that, when it comes to Lincoln's sexuality, "the question comes up" among visitors.
"I try and be straightforward about what we know or don't know, and I try to understand, through the conversation, about why somebody is asking — the answer might be important to them," Cummins explained.
President Abraham Lincoln making his famous 'Gettysburg Address' speech on Nov. 19, 1863Credit: Library Of Congress/Getty
So, McFly questioned, what do we know?
"We know a couple of things," Cummins noted. "We know that Abraham Lincoln had a profound connection with someone named Joshua Speed while he was living in Springfield. They met each other, they were roommates, Speed is the one who took razors out of Lincoln's room when he hit one of his deepest episodes of depression. So they were sort of taking care of each other in that way."
Speed is the name that comes up most frequently in rumors surrounding Lincoln's possible homosexuality. In the 2024 documentary Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln, historians assert that the Springfield general store owner was the one who helped transform Lincoln from a country bumpkin into a politician that voters could see as presidential.
Joshua Fry SpeedCredit: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty
The pair lived together for four years. As with William Greene, the general store employee he met in his early 20s, Lincoln was known to share a bed with Speed, fueling the rumors about their relationship.
"We know for a fact they were sharing a bed," Hawkins confirmed. "The other [detail] that stuck with me is that Lincoln wrote Speed a letter that was like, 'It's been 10 hours since I got your last letter, and I have barely been calm the whole time,' which says to me, like, that person was really important to you."
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Moreover, Lincoln was said to be devastated when Speed moved back to his home state of Kentucky to help his mother run the family farm, falling into a period of dark "suicidal depression."
The future president wrote a letter to his law partner, John Stuart, in which he declared, "I'm now the most miserable man living. If what I am feeling were distributed to the whole human family, there would not be a cheerful face on the earth."
Rumors about Lincoln seeking male companionship persisted even throughout his presidency and during his stays at Lincoln Cottage.
"It exists in the primary sources and in the historical record that Lincoln shared a close relationship with Captain David Derickson, who was captain of the Bucktail soldiers, who were sent here to guard the president," Hawkins noted. "There were rumors around town that Captain Derickson had used one of President Lincoln's nightshirts."
The relationship between Lincoln and Derickson, his personal bodyguard in 1862 and 1863, may have truly been salacious, or the rumors may have been exaggerated through the years. However, Hawkins and Cummins told McFly that they don't feel it's inappropriate to continue being curious about one of the most notable men in U.S. history.
"For us here at the cottage, it's not a threat to talk about those kinds of things," Hawkins said. "Lincoln is a man about whom 17,000 plus books have been written. We think we know all there is to know about him. There is so much more to know. But you can't know any of that until you ask the question."
For as much speculation as there was and remains about Lincoln's sexuality, there were also plenty of rumors about his immediate predecessor, James Buchanan. To date, Buchanan remains the only U.S. president to serve out his term in office as an unmarried man. His niece, Harriet Lane, whom he adopted when she was orphaned, served as a de facto first lady during his time in the White House.
Moreover, Buchanan was known to have a close friendship with the Southern politician William Rufus DeVane King. It's said that rival politicians would mockingly call them "Miss Nancy” and “Aunt Fancy" and that Andrew Jackson referred to King as Buchanan’s “better half.”
Historian James W. Loewen is one of several who hold the belief that Buchanan was, in fact, homosexual. In his 2010 book Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, Loewen claims that, late in life, the president wrote a letter in which he stated that he might take a wife, on the condition that she could accept his "lack of ardent or romantic affection."
on People
Source: "AOL Entertainment"
Source: Entertainment
Published: July 4, 2026 at 08:36AM on Source: PRIME TIME
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