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‘Lavender Men’ Review: An Intriguing Play About Abraham Lincoln’s Gay Affair Gets an All-Too-Heady Film Adaptation
There are ideas aplenty in Roger Q. Mason and Lovell Holder’s 'Lavender Men,' but much of it gets bogged down in an overly theatrical conceit.
Described as a “fantasia” created within the mind of Mason’s Taffeta (the play’s stage manager), “Lavender Men” is a heady and meta-theatrical excavation of Lincoln’s long-rumored gay affair that’s wildly ambitious if a tad overstuffed. Alongside Shaun Peterson’s documentary “Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln” and Cole Escola’s Tony-winning play, “Oh, Mary!,” Mason and Lovell’s collaboration is clearly at the forefront of a queer reclaiming of that most revered of American presidents. If the result is at times clunky (its cinematography quite claustrophobic and stilted; its pacing rather listless), there’s no denying Mason’s vision for a welcome version of queer historiography that connects past and present to imagine a brighter and more vibrant future.
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