Hollywood is butchering history for Pride Month with The Book of Queer on Discovery+. The first episode on Thursday, 'Kings and Queens,' falsely painted late President Abraham Lincoln as a homosexual.
In its quest to portray Lincoln as an adulterous gay man, Book of Queer relies heavily on interviews with a professor named Thomas Balcerski from Eastern Connecticut State University.
"To be a queer historian is to read the past differently. It does take one to know one," Balcerski says.
In other words, Balcerski likes to "read" his own sexual attractions into the interactions of other men regardless of whether those men are homosexual or not.
"Lincoln's most intimate relationships were with men, not women. He wants to be around men, close-up, touching and personal," Balcerski says.
So, guys who like to be around men must only want to hang out with them because they are gay? The show also refers to Lincoln by names like "bearded daddy" because gay culture loves to emphasize daddy issues.
In "queering" Lincoln's past, the documentary alters the history of another famous man in Lincoln's life, Elmer Ellsworth. The show smears Ellsworth, the first Union soldier to die in the Civil War, by turning him into Lincoln's secret adulterous lover. The evidence for the supposed sexual relationship between Ellsworth and Lincoln? Lincoln eulogized Ellsworth as, "The greatest little man I ever knew."
Another man that Book of Queer claims was one of Lincoln's lovers is a Captain David Derickson. Why does the show claim this? Because the two men shared a bed when traveling, a common practice among heterosexuals in the 19th century, and Derickson sometimes used the president's nightshirt. That is it.
Book of Queer spends a significant amount of time on Lincoln's friendship with Joshua Speed. Lincoln and Speed were roommates when they were in their twenties. Again, the documentary obsesses over bed sharing between the men and pulls innocent lines each said about the other to make a fraudulent case.
What are some of the lines that Book of Queer cites as evidence of their homosexuality? Speed said of their friendship that "No two men were more intimate." The documentary ridiculously puts the words "actual quote" on the screen as though this is some sort of "gotcha." The series writers apparently have zero understanding of the meanings of the word intimate in 19th century literature. Have they read a book written in the 19th century?
Other "gotchas" include when Lincoln writes to Speed, "I shall be very lonesome without you. How miserably things seem to be arranged in this world."
That's the kind of "evidence" the episode keeps trotting out to try to make the case that Lincoln and his friends were really gay lovers, or as the show puts it "queer as fu*k". Needless to say, the documentary is dismissive about Lincoln's marriage to Mary Todd Lincoln, even though the couple had four children together.
"All historians have overlooked Lincoln's sexuality," Belcerski said. "I can count on one hand the number who have taken it seriously. They have tried to straightwash Lincoln's attraction to men."
Maybe historians don't take it seriously because it can be easily debunked?
"Straightwashing is when some stuffy-looking, usually white dude, decides to wash queerness right out of history. literature, tv, film and even the news," series creator and "Queer Theorist" Eric Cervini said, explaining the "straightwashing" term.
Americans don't hear enough about queerness in tv, film and the news? Our culture is inundated with relentless LGBTXYZ+-*^% messaging. Americans now dramatically overestimate the number of LGBTQUIA people that exist in the population. But in the eyes of a "queer theorist" it's never enough.
New episodes of Book of Queer are streaming on Discovery+ throughout the month of June.
