Former President Barack Obama wrote in a letter to his ex-girlfriend, saying over 40 years ago that he “make[s] love to men daily, but in the imagination,” according to the New York Post.
Obama, 21 at the time, wrote to ex-girlfriend Alex McNear in November 1982 that his “mind is androgynous,” according to the letter the NYP obtained from Obama biographer and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow. Garrow recently discussed his 2017 biography on the former president, “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama,” in an a Tablet Magazine interview, where he revealed how he obtained the letter.
“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 NYP. “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. 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,” the letter says, per the NYP.
McNear initially redacted one paragraph of the letter “about homosexuality” when she gave it to Garrow for use in the book, though she sold the original letter around the time of the biography’s publication, enabling it to end up at Emory University, Garrow told Tablet in the Aug. 2 interview.
Garrow told Tablet he sent his friend Harvey Klehr to the Emory archives to copy the letter, which the university would not allow him to photograph. The NYP reported Klehr provided it with a copy of the letter’s contents.
“I’m a historian, not a psychologist, but I think it’s ‘public record’ news that a (vast?) majority of human beings have sexual fantasies!” Garrow told the NYP.
Emory University’s collection of nine of Obama’s letters span from 1982 to 1984, after he transferred to Columbia University, according to the university website. The letters “reveal the search of a young man for meaning and identity,” Emory University Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library Director Rosemary Magee said in a statement when the collection was announced in 2017.
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