Curator, Samantha Friedman: When you think about his circle and his network, whether it's dancers, whether it's the Rockefellers, the Morgans, whether it’s sailors on leave downtown, artists, composers, any member of cultural and political life at that time, he found a connection to. And part of what allows him to make things happen is this incredible network that he's a part of and really in many ways at the center of.
Professor Nicholas Jenkins: He was also very much an outsider. This simply was not a story about a rich boy who used his money to set up a ballet company. He went to Harvard and he met a lot of rich WASP boys there, and he wasn't one of them. His family didn't live in the most prestigious part of Boston when he was growing up because they were Jewish.
I think it's not irrelevant at all that Lincoln throughout his life had a number of relationships with women, but also many many relationships with men. So, his dominant form of emotional experience was as a gay man.
Samantha Friedman: And I think that dual identity, being both an insider and an outsider in these ways, really informed his ability to move through the world, his ambition, his stubbornness in the best way, to make these things happen, and really fueled him in doing that.