The Brooklyn Rail

In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln famously suggested that in the outcome of the pivotal battle, the “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” As the dust settles on the 2024 presidential election, the polarization and strife that has haunted the United States in the Trump era has caused many storytellers to look back at the time when the republic narrowly avoided its own destruction—the Civil War—to look for clues as to how the country may endure into the future.

And in the past few years that backwards-looking lens has zeroed in on a particularly enigmatic figure—Lincoln himself. Joshua Wolf Shenk’s 2005 book, Lincoln’s Melancholy, explored the president’s deep depression and suicidal tendencies, and what it meant that the most celebrated leader in American history had been intractably depressed. In 2024, even more Lincoln-themed works have followed. Broadway’s hit stage play Oh, Mary! followed an irreverent look at Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd, as a figure who always wanted to perform on the vaudeville circuit, and Shaun Peterson’s documentary, Lover of Men, argued that Lincoln had several romantic relationships with men.

Which brings us to Lovell Holder’s 2024 film Lavender Men, an adaptation of Roger Q. Mason’s 2022 play that not only explores the much-theorized romantic relationship between Lincoln and his legal assistant Elmer Ellsworth, but unfurls that story through the eyes of Taffeta, a queer person of color stage-managing a Civil War play in modern times. After a traumatic encounter with the actor playing Lincoln (Ted Rooney), Taffeta, played by Mason in both the play and the film, summons a “fantasia” of Lincoln (Pete Ploszek) and Ellsworth (Alex Esola). The film thus follows a series of dialogues between Lincoln and Ellsworth chronicling episodes in their romance, with interjections and commentary from Taffeta, who confronts the conjured spirits with the observation that even if they were marginalized in their own time due to their sexual orientation, they still wouldn’t view people like Taffeta—a queer, plus-sized person of color—as equal.

“To write a play about Lincoln being a queer person was really to shake up the foundation upon which we build the myth of American society, and to prove that it is much more complicated, varied, and queer than we originally thought it was,” Roger Q. Mason said. “[It] reveals a lot of interesting truths about not only that time but also our own.”

Mason has always been drawn to writing history-themed narratives, and initially, Lavender Men was conceived as a two-hander featuring just Lincoln and Ellsworth before Lincoln’s ascension to the White House. “For me it was interesting and political enough just to allow those two historical figures to exist in a queer space with no sort of contemporary commentary,” Mason said. However, Mason explained that early versions of the story were criticized by some radical queer storytellers who were “also gatekeeping and protecting this image of a man whose value system and whose ideals were adopted by a value system that didn’t include them.” After that, Mason said, they realized “the call is coming from within the house,” adding that they wanted to investigate the self-doubt and self-hate they perceived was coming from within the queer community. So Mason added the framing device of the quixotic narrator of Taffeta and expanded the character’s role until Taffeta became the story’s central figure.

At a 2019 Circle Series reading of Lavender Men held at Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theatre, the play started to take on a life of its own. “[The audience] went nuts,” Mason recalled. “They kicked us out of the theater, and then people stayed in the lobby; then they kicked us out of the lobby, and people stayed in the parking lot; then they kicked us out of the parking lot, and they wanted to stand in the street just to keep the moment of this reading and the message of self-love that it conveyed alive in real time.” At that point, Mason knew they had struck a chord.

The first run of the play was planned for spring 2020 in Los Angeles’s Skylight Theater, but COVID-19 postponed its production for two years. According to the film’s director, Lovell Holder, “It ultimately ended up being the best possible thing that could have happened for both the life of the play and the film, because we almost got more press out of it not happening.”

The long runway to the play’s eventual production in 2022 also allowed for a second project—to adapt the play as a film, with Holder taking the director’s reins. “Lovell was adamant about making sure the worldview of this piece was simultaneously panoramic but also deeply singular in a way that only cinema, through its capturing of character-based interiority, could provide,” Mason added.

But how could a series of dialogues and interjections filmed in a theater be adapted to the cinema? “My favorite thing about the play was that it defied adaptation,” Holder said. “There was no way you could ever make a movie about it, because it was so innately theatrical.” It was Holder who came up with the frame story, depicting Taffeta as a stage manager abused by the actor playing Lincoln in the world of the film, to both set up “why Lincoln” and to further establish Taffeta as the film’s protagonist. “What is true of both the film and the play,” Holder said, is that “it’s a journey of someone learning how to tell their own story and not try and insert themselves into things that are not going to let them thrive.”

The film was shot in just ten days, a speed only possible because of the fact that the three lead actors had also starred in the play, and being in the play had served as their rehearsal time. “It was just a seamless transition into actually filming,” producer Mia Chang said.

But, was Lincoln actually gay? And did he have a romantic relationship with Elmer Ellsworth, who ended up being the first casualty in the Civil War when he was killed trying to take down a Confederate flag in Alexandria, Virginia? Mason said that though we can’t know for sure, “what we do know about his relationship with Elmer is that when Elmer died, and he was lying in state, Lincoln went to visit his body and stayed with him for a very long time.” Mason added, “Whether the relationship was sexual or not, that anecdote alone speaks to a kind of homosocial, deep-seated devotion.”

For Mia Ellis, who produced and acted in the film, the speculation about Lincoln’s sexuality “brings people off their pedestals so we can look at them as human beings and recognize that none of us are perfect.”

On the festival circuit, taking Lincoln down from the pedestal has led to the film ascending to its own honored plinths—it won Best Feature at the Charlotte Film Festival, and Roger Q. Mason received the award for Best Actor at the Micheaux Film Festival in Culver City, California.

“I’m excited for people to hopefully see a new perspective, and know that by seeing a new perspective, it might provoke more questions than answers,” Holder said. “There’s merit in continuing to wrestle with those questions.”