Former President Barack Obama went on his wife’s podcast to declare his intention to make more homosexual friends — and appearance that has raised new questions about his own past writings on sexuality and relationships with gay mentors.
Obama made the comments on his wife Michelle Obama’s “IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson” podcast, during an episode where the couple also addressed persistent divorce rumors.
The former president argued that having a gay friend was crucial for straight men for them to be “woke.”
“One of the most valuable things I learned as a guy was I had a gay professor in college at a time when openly gay folks still weren’t out a lot — who became one of my favorite professors — and was a great guy and would call me out when I started saying stuff that was ignorant,” Obama said. “You need that! To show empathy and kindness.”
“And by the way, you need that person in your friend group so that if you then have a boy who is gay or non-binary or what have you, they have somebody that they can go, ‘Okay, I’m not alone in this,’ right?” he said. “So that, I think, is — creating that community — I know it’s corny, but that’s what they [men] need.”
When Obama was 21 years old, he wrote to his ex-girlfriend Alex McNear that he “make[s] love to men daily, but in the imagination,” according to a letter obtained by Obama biographer and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow.
“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,” Obama wrote to McNear, according to The New York Post. “You see, I make love to men daily, but in the imagination.”
“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,” Obama wrote. “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.”
Previously, Garrow wrote in “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama” about the former president’s two years at Occidental College and his close relationship with his openly gay assistant professor Lawrence Goldyn.
The podcast appearance came as divorce rumors had circulated after Michelle Obama did not attend the funeral of late President Jimmy Carter and President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January. However, Michelle claimed that she had never considered divorcing her husband.
“There hasn’t been one moment in our marriage where I thought about quitting on my man. And we’ve had some really hard times … a lot of fun times, a lot of adventures,” the former first lady said. “And I have become a better person because of the man I’m married to.”
Obama has long positioned himself as an LGBTQ+ ally, becoming the first president to be featured in an LGBTQ+ magazine when he appeared on the cover of Out magazine in 2015.