I wrote previously about the fascinating Tablet article interviewing David Garrow, the biographer of Barack Obama.
As I noted, it’s an intriguing dive into the mind of someone who thinks very highly of himself, but it also lays bare a lot of his insecurities and how he sort of invented who he was—with things like his book “Dreams from My Father”—to make up for those insecurities.
One of the parts of the article that got a lot of attention was a letter that Obama wrote to his girlfriend Alex McNear, while they were at Occidental College together. When she showed the letter to Garrow, she redacted one paragraph, saying, “It’s about homosexuality.”
She later sold the letters and they ended up at Emory University. Then Garrow sent a guy named Harvey Khler to Emory to copy the letter. They wouldn’t let him photocopy it or remove it, so Klehr had to hand transcribe in person what it said.
Now Khler has provided a copy of the redacted part to the NY Post. Even the way it’s written, when it’s supposed to be a sex fantasy, it’s so Obama, so pseudo-intellectual, in his head and ponderous.
“In regard to homosexuality, I must say that I believe this is an attempt to remove oneself from the present, a refusal perhaps to perpetuate the endless farce of earthly life. You see, I make love to men daily, but in the imagination,” Obama, then 21, wrote to Alex McNear in November 1982.
“My mind is androgynous to a great extent and I hope to make it more so until I can think in terms of people, not women as opposed to men. But, in returning to the body, I see that I have been made a man, and physically in life, I choose to accept that contingency,” he added.
Even in his sexual fantasies, he doesn’t make it sound at all exciting.
However, I do wonder why a 21-year-old guy would be writing that to his girlfriend. I don’t know whether he’s trying to put her off or impress her, or perhaps trying to learn her feelings about gay men. Maybe it’s a soft-pedal way to talk about something that’s “in the imagination.” But I think it’s safe to say most 21-year-old guys aren’t writing that to their girlfriends.
It’s also curious that, given talk about Obama in the past, this paragraph has not gotten more coverage from the media, and it’s new to most people. Of course, it hasn’t because wouldn’t have served the Democratic Party. It probably wouldn’t have fit the image that Obama was trying to sell when he was trying to promote himself for president. He also did not initially support gay marriage, for political reasons.
President Obama publicly opposed same-sex marriages for political gain during the 2008 presidential campaign, his former political strategist says in a new book.
David Axelrod said that he and other political strategists advised him to say that he only supported civil unions, not full gay marriage rights, according to excerpts of his new book obtained by Time magazine.
“Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a ‘sacred union,’ ” Axelrod writes.
Naturally, the Obama folks are trying not to respond to the story now, or give it any more life, which if they truly have no issue with LGBT stuff, why not just acknowledge it? Maybe because they don’t want to raise any more questions about his life.
