Joshua Fry Speed

This was in the Wall Street Journal's lifestyle section this week.

People are advertising for friends now, which seems embarrassing until you realize that it's very sad because it's a commentary on where our civilization is at with this particular moment.

The wall street journal reporter, Rachel Wolf published it under the headline, how to make a friend, tell the whole world you're looking for one.

And her point was that admitting that you're lonely used to carry a stigma, but now people are burying their souls in classified style posts on Tik TOK and Reddit, just looking for platonic connections, which you used to find on Craigslist.

In St. Louis, here in Missouri, an interior designer shared her love of Pilates, escape rooms, collecting these little angel figurines, and animal bones.

In Memphis, a scholarship coordinator wanted somebody to go thrifting, workout, or play board games, which is the one that I definitely would respond to.

I respect the baked good ladies because that's how friendships work for thousands of years.

You show up with food, right? The animal bones lady, she's either going to make a great friend or she's going to summon a demon with them and she puts them in the safe shape of a pentagram.

The actual man.

The one his closest friends recognized and the myth could not contain.

The actual man was a suicidal depressive and a cold political manipulator who watched his own suffering with clinical detachment and learned to use it as a weapon.

His best friend removed the razors from his room.

And to understand how that worked, what it actually looked like from the inside, in the specific documented moments that the myth was built to cover, you have to go back to before any of it.

Before the presidency, before the law practice, before the political machine.

Back to a man in the Illinois woods in eighteen thirty-five with a gun while his friends searched for him in the rain.

That is where this story begins.

Yeah.

So he moves to Springfield where he befriends local storekeeper, Joshua Speed, and he works for Speed in exchange for lodging.

So soon Henry starts sending Abe some secret notes, you know, telling him who amongst the townspeople are secretly vampire and Abe can't send down, starting with apothecary Abel Stibble Jr.

Remember, junior, not senior.

Yeah.

I like it.

In the same vein, Joshua Speed is based on a real person as well, a very significant person in Abraham Lincoln's life, depending on who you talk to, a very, very significant person in Abraham Lincoln's life.

So he is described, Joshua Fry Speed, as Abraham Lincoln's closest lifelong friend, whom he met in Springfield, in England.

And so Abe, who's the person whose family isn't approving, is, is struggling.

But what's, what's important about the show is that it's a kind of a beautiful time travel musical because this is our way of claiming queer history because Abraham Lincoln and his longtime love Joshua Speed, who he lived with and slept with in a bed for four years when they were young lawyers, y- lawyers and businessmen together, were, went on to exchange really what amount to love letters that are pretty well documented.

The, the, my, uh, collaborator Steve Fisher and I, uh, have studied it relentlessly over the last few years.

And so the stories run parallel to each other.

And maybe that's the real mystery.

Not whether Lincoln loved Joshua Speed, but why we're still afraid to ask the question.

The unsolved break-ins at Democratic headquarters before Watergate.

History tends to notice the explosion.