Roger Q. Mason’s (Communication M.F.A. ’16) movie “Lavender Men,” an intersection of queer and historical exploration, hit streaming services June 17.
Originally slated to be a theatrical production, Mason, a writer and performer, shifted gears to create a movie version as well when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The play went up in 2022 and was a “great success,” followed by a film adaptation released in select theaters across New York City, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles in May 2025.
“Lavender Men” centers around the fantasia of Taffeta, a queer multiracial femme played by Mason. Taffeta, who works as a stage manager, summons Abraham Lincoln and his legal clerk Elmer Ellsworth to her stage. Her fantasia explores queer intimacy between the two men and confronts issues of visibility with specific regard to race, gender, sexuality and body image.
The Daily spoke with Mason to learn more about their film following its recent streaming release.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
The Daily: Where did you get the idea for “Lavender Men?”
Mason: In Illinois, actually. I was touring Chicago to determine if I wanted to go to Northwestern or not, and I decided to take a train to Springfield, Illinois.
I had a series of short plays, about other figures in Lincoln’s life, and I was thinking about writing something specifically on him to round out the trilogy. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to work on, but I figured, “Well, I’ll go down to Springfield and see what I can find.”
There was this one book called “The intimate (World) of Abraham Lincoln.” I sat down, and I thought, “Oh, well, what is this about?” and I just couldn’t put the book down. It was all about his sexual life before meeting his wife, Mary Todd, during his life with her, and then who he was towards the end of his life, sexually. Of all the stories in the book, the one that stuck with me was about Elmer Ellsworth, this young dreamer, a 20-something-year-old kid who had moved to Springfield, of all places, from upstate New York because he wanted to be an army general one day.
Their interest in one another, which this book purports was an intimate and perhaps sexual relationship, was born of that time and of that experience.
The Daily: When I saw your movie, I immediately was like, “I would love to learn more” about Abraham Lincoln in LGBTQ+ history.
Mason: At the time I started writing the play, it was not a very popular thought to consider the queerness of Lincoln. This was about 11 years ago, and it’s only because we have insisted as a culture on entertaining the possibility of his queerness, that this myth has become more acceptable in the mainstream zeitgeist.
When I started out, even within queer circles, there was a little bit of shame and admonishment around insinuating that Lincoln was queer, and I think that that speaks more to the culture in which we live than anything in terms of why we need to keep our historical figures sanitized and romanticized. Why is it that they can’t have full-bodied, complicated and multivalent lives that might include same sex relations, differences of opinion, controversial or complex thoughts, or even contrarian ideas about the world that may not fit what is convenient for us to keep the established, normalized myth of America alive?
The Daily: How do you balance humor and entertainment with highlighting issues of racism, homophobia, visibility, body image and historical secrets?
Mason: I’ve gotten a lot better at it since writing that movie.
I just tell the truth, and sometimes the truth is more ridiculous and hilarious than any fiction you could write.
Whenever I write a piece, I start from what human question, eternal, deep and intergenerational … compels me to investigate this story, and from there, I just keep digging, always centered by the principle of what human truth am I trying to excavate by writing this piece. That center allows me to balance the space between entertainment and history, comedy and critique, satire and political.
The Daily: I’m intrigued by your decision to have Taffeta play every character in her fantasia besides Lincoln and Ellsworth. Why did you make this creative choice?
Mason: I think Taffeta plays all of the things that Lincoln and Elmer are not. If you look at the types of things that she plays, she plays trees and inanimate objects and outsiders and people who are hushed in the back of the room.
She does this as a way of demonstrating her own subjugation and silencing, and so from a thematic standpoint, it’s important for Taffeta to embody these people, because it symbolizes all of the limitations of self that she experiences, both in the fantasy, but also in her life outside of that fantasy.
The Daily: What message do you hope your viewers walk away with from watching “Lavender Men” and why is that message so important now?
Mason: At the core of “Lavender Men” is the biggest embrace to everyone who has ever felt different and other and alone. It is a cry out from the screen to let them know that they are valued, loved and essential in the world.
The reason why that message is important now is because erasure and censorship are the tools that our current political machine is using to control and disappear people, and that radical visibility is the ultimate weapon against tyranny. You cannot beat us back into the closet and out of the limelight that we fought to build for ourselves.
The mechanisms of hate that are trying to destroy us right now, and a movie like “Lavender Men,” which is a real rally cry for the transformative power of self love in concert with community, is exactly the situs for uplift, affirmation and jubilance that we need right now.
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