A young Barack Obama wrote about his ‘androgynous mind’ and gay sex fantasies
In a letter written to his college girlfriend in November 1982, Barack Obama mused on homosexuality and gender. (Getty Images)
A 21-year-old Barack Obama believed that being gay was a way to detach from reality, and told an ex-girlfriend that he had fantasies of “making love to men”.
In a letter written to his college girlfriend, Alex McNear, in November 1982, the former president of the United States mused on homosexuality and gender.
Obama also spoke about his “androgynous” mind and hopes to see people as humans, not through the lens of binary gender categories.
McNear, who dated Obama during his year at Occidental College in Los Angeles, later redacted these paragraphs from the letter.
However, the 40-year-old letter has resurfaced in historian David Garrow’s biography “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama”.
The letter is currently owned by Emory University, which doesn’t allow anyone to photograph or remove it. To bypass this, Garrow’s friend Harvey Klehr transcribed the paragraphs by hand and sent them to the author.
Klehr provided the concealed section of the letter to The New York Post.
The 44th US president and first Black president wrote: “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.”
He also wrote about his conflicting thoughts on gender: “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.”
In response to the revealed contents of the letter, Garrow asserted that there was nothing atypical about young Obama’s sexual fantasies.
He told The Post: “As a historian and not a psychologist, I observe that it’s well-known that a significant majority of individuals have their share of sexual fantasies.”
Barack Obama’s record on LGBTQ+ rights
As president, Obama made some significant strides in advancing LGBTQ+ rights in the US.
In 2009, he signed a federal law which criminalised attacks based on the victim’s actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity as hate crimes.
A year later, he repealed the discriminatory Don’t Ask Don’t Tell law, which allowed gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans to serve openly in the Armed Forces.
Obama’s 2010 flagship Affordable Care Act reportedly made it easier for people living with HIV and AIDS to obtain private medical insurance, and supported efforts to ban conversion therapy against minors
Despite declaring that “I don’t think marriage is a civil right” in 2004, Obama also said he didn’t think homosexuality was a choice. Then, during his second presidential term, he celebrated the legalisation of same-sex marriage after the US Supreme Court struck down all state bans on same-sex marriage in 2015 and legalised same-sex unions in all 50 states.
Obama also signed an executive order in 2014, protecting LGBTQ+ people from workplace discrimination, and ordered schools to allow transgender and gender non-conforming young people to use the bathroom facilities that align with their gender identity.
The rights of trans youth in particular have been sadly rolled back in Republican-controlled states across the US.
Obama, a father of two, has been married to his wife Michelle since 1992.
