I'm an actual historian as my job so I was quite excited about this film. I knew something about Joshua Speed but nothing of the other three "male loves" I really liked the enormous collection of 19th and early 20th century photos showing two same sex people looking very close and loving in every photo. But yet we are rightly told most of these are not "gay couples" as we think of them today. For a variety of reasons men and women would often sleep with a close same gender friend, tell them they loved them and spend quite a lot of time together. Society was very different then - men and women were mostly separated in every day life and there were many situations where there were a lot of men and few to no women.
It truly seemed as if Lincoln DID have romantic love for Speed. There were so many amazing letters and documents highlighted as well as it was just beautifully shot. The reinactments were well done and enlightening. I was loving this.
THEN in the last third it started to focus on the modern gay rights movement after making the case that the past relationships were NOT like modern "queer" relationships. Ok but a strong case WAS made that Lincoln loved men more then women. Ok fine but WHYYYY did they have to go into"queer tik tok" and show trans influencers?!?? This has ZERO to do with modern social media trans issues. There were not even any cross dressers shown in the vintage segments. Just irritating and made an excellent film suddenly look cheap. Why is Alok in this? And they lost three stars just for showing Dylan Mulvaney. Just NO!!!
