Director Lovell Holder on 'Lavender Men,' his Meta-Queer 'Fantasia' on Abe Lincoln

Asked whether he's seen the new documentary "Lover of Men," which presents a compelling case for America's 16th (and arguably greatest) president, Abraham Lincoln, being strongly attracted to other men, Lovell Holder – director of "Lavender Men," a highly meta queer "fantasia" – tells EDGE he has not. But, he adds, "I've heard very good things. I think Abe and his sexuality is very top of the conversation right now, and between the documentary and 'Oh Mary,' it's definitely it's in the zeitgeist."

Indeed, it is; "Oh, Mary" is a hit comedy on Broadway that reimagines Mary Todd Lincoln as an aspiring actress, while Lincoln himself is portrayed as unquestionably gay.

Speculation about Lincoln's sexuality has grown in recent years, but it's been around at least since Carl Sandberg referred to him and Joshua Fry Speed – a man with whom Lincoln, prior to marrying Mary Todd, famously shared a bed for several years – as having "possessed a streak of lavender and spots soft as may violets," with the reference to both lavender and softness piquing some speculation that Sandberg intended to convey a hint about Lincoln's sexuality.

Of course, contemporary notions of sexuality – including notions of "gay" and "queer" – didn't exist before the mid-twentieth century, so Lincoln and Speed (as well as other men with whom Lincoln was close, such as Elmer Ellsworth, a man of short stature who dressed as a zouave and served as a clerk in Lincoln's law practice) can also be seen as simply two regular guys who, like other men in a society where friendships were deeply felt and existed primary between people of the same gender, assigned no special significance to two men sharing a bed or writing affectionate letters to each other.

In "Lavender Men," though, there is no such delicate dance of semantics. Roger Q. Mason (who wrote the play the film is based on) plays Taffeta, a queer person of color who works as a stage manager at a theater where a patriotically anodyne play about Lincoln is being staged to minimal audiences. After a romantic disappointment – and an episode of sexual harassment – Taffeta begins to imagine what Lincoln (Pete Ploszek) might have been like in private moments with his clerk, Elmer (Alex Esola). Summoning the two historic figures to life in an imaginary play of their own, Taffeta embarks on a long, dreamlike night in which love, sex, politics, and war all intersect.

But Lincoln and Elmer seem to have their own agency. Elmer's destiny is to become "the first casualty of the Civil War" when he rips down a Confederate flag hung within view of the White House and is shot for his trouble. When Lincoln – his ghost, or at least the fragment of Taffeta's imagination that personifies him – asks for a new ending to this tragic history, Taffeta has to face personal doubts and demons and ask if what's really needed is a rewrite of their own life.

EDGE caught up with Lovell Holder to find out more about the film, the play it's based on, and a zeitgeist that seems fascinated with the idea of a queer Abraham Lincoln.

EDGE: The title for this movie comes from the Carl Sandburg biography about Abraham Lincoln, where he wrote that Lincoln and a man he famously shred a bed with, Joshua Fry Speed, "possessed a streak of lavender and spots soft as may violets". How quick should we be to interpret that as meaning Lincoln was gay?

Lovell Holder I think when the participants are more than 100 years past, there's always some degree of speculation that will never be able to be fully confirmed. But I know that that was something that had always stuck out for Roger Q. Mason, my dear friend who I co-wrote the screenplay with, based off Roger's original play. I think one of the things that Roger appreciated about that specific line was that it evoked something very sensorial about Lincoln, as well as the kind of presumption of the lavender code.

As far as our own speculations about Lincoln himself, it's not hard to argue that regardless of whatever his sexuality may have been, he had very strong, deep emotional attachments to specific men. When Elmer died, I believe [Lincoln] basically called for state mourning and could not leave his room for two weeks – which is a pronounced state of grief for someone who would have just ostensibly been one's legal clerk.

EDGE: This not being an actual historical document, maybe you've sidestepped the question of whether it's appropriate to use words like "queer" or "gay" when talking about people who lived before a time when we had those notions as they exist now.

Lovell Holder I think one of the things that we ultimately came down to was that, if we were going to label Abe and Elmer within this story, there's certainly a big Q [for "Questioning"] over them, if we want to assign that. Regardless, the ground zero for this story always had to be Taffeta, just because everything that Abe and Elmer, as they are conceived of within this piece, is some extension of her and reflects back on however she's feeling at a given time. The little joy of it is that the fantasia starts turning on her and forces her to start examining why she started telling the story in the first place.

EDGE: Why did you decide to make a feature film out of "Lavender Men?"

Lovell Holder When Roger and I originally began working on the play in 2019, I quite cavalierly stated that what I loved so much about the play was it could never be adapted to film. We had calendar dates for the play to go up in April of 2020, in Los Angeles. Obviously, that did not happen, because we were one week into rehearsals and down came COVID. But it did force us to examine the text in a slightly different way, because we had a producer in New York say, "Well, while you've got this time, why don't you shoot some promo footage?"

So in September of 2020, Roger and I decided to shoot that promo footage, pulling a monologue from "Lavender Men" and shooting Roger in a Mary Todd Lincoln outfit as they wander their family's empty house. We got about two takes in, and I called Roger over to the monitor and said, "I think we have something more here." So we crafted it into a short film called "Taffeta," and started sending it out as a short film to film festivals.

We were blown away with what the response was: We were accepted at Outfest and at BFI Flare and the film festival at SCAD in Savannah, where it won the Jury Prize.

We both started thinking, "Is there an angle here to telling this story for film?" Around the same time, I was aching to direct a second feature. The opportunity presented itself with "Lavender Men," and I think Roger and I both seized upon it.

EDGE: To make the film work, you had to cast two really hot actors. And you have: Pete Ploszek and Alex Esola.

Lovell Holder [Laughing] And they're talented, too!

EDGE: Yes, they are! But while you show a little skin in the movie, do you wish you could have shown more?

Lovell Holder No. I mean, one of the things that we really leaned into with that was, all of this is what Taffeta has seen. This is what Taffeta can wrap her head around. Not that our actors weren't more than prepared to do whatever was in service of the story, but I think we all very much felt that through the lens of Taffeta, sex is innately a little abstract because their experience with it is so limited. What Taffeta is really looking for is partnership and tenderness and comfort, not rough releases of physicality. Tailoring the sexuality and the fantasy became the guiding principle, as opposed to, "How do we crank up the thermostat a few notches?"

EDGE: Do you expect, or have you started to hear, any pushback around this movie's depiction of Lincoln being gay?

Lovell Holder No. It's funny, even when we were doing the play, we were kind of bracing ourselves for, "Oh, someone's gonna start wagging their finger." But I have only ever heard of universal interest. I think maybe part of that is that it's a self-selected audience. They know what they're coming in for. But I also think it's, like, you come for Lincoln, you stay for Taffeta. I think people are so instantly connected with Roger as that character, and with them as they go on this journey, that I haven't heard anyone say, "But Lincoln wouldn't have done this, Lincoln wouldn't have done that." I think the more common refrain we've heard is, "Wow, I did not know any of this." And they're always surprised to hear that there is more truth than fantasia in the Lincoln stuff.

"Lavender Men" is headed for release in 2025. Details will be added as they become available.