According to Barack Obama biographer David Garrow, the former Democrat president once wrote a letter to an ex-girlfriend about his imagination of making love to men.

In a recent interview, Garrow described a letter Obama, then 21, wrote to ex-girlfriend Alex McNear in November 1982.

“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 wrote.

“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.

The New York Post provided additional details:

McNear, who dated Obama during his year at Occidental College in Los Angeles, later redacted the salacious paragraphs, which the Pulitzer- Prize-winning historian Garrow hunted down and included in his tome, “Rising Star.”

The letter is currently owned by Emory University, which doesn’t permit it to be photographed or removed. Instead, Garrow’s friend Harvey Klehr transcribed the paragraphs by hand and sent them to the author.

Klehr provided the redacted portion of the letter to The Post.

Obama, a father of two, has been married to his wife Michelle since 1992.

Garrow said there was nothing unusual about Obama’s youthful musings.

“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!” he said via email.

“David Garrow the author who wrote a biography of Barack Obama’s childhood and college years, has revealed that he previously discovered love letters that Barack Obama sent to his former girlfriend that describes how he fantasizes about having sex with men,” WLTReport noted.

After McNear told Garrow she redacted one of the paragraphs in the love letters Obama wrote her, the biographer questioned the subject of the redacted material.

“It’s about homosexuality,” McNear reportedly told Garrow.

Revolver News provided the following transcript from Garrow’s interview:

During an interview with David Garrow, the author who wrote a biography of Barack Obama’s early years called “Rising Star,” the biographer explains how he unearthed Obama’s weird love letters to a former girlfriend where he, uh… read it for yourself…

How did you get those three women, Obama’s college and law school girlfriends, to give you Obama’s love letters to them, and what was the most surprising thing you found in them?

With Alex [McNear, Obama’s girlfriend at Occidental College], I think she wanted to have her role known. So when Alex showed me the letters from Barack, she redacted one paragraph in one of them and just said, “It’s about homosexuality.”

And then sometime, right about when Rising Star came out, Alex indirectly sold the original, sold those letters, and they ended up at Emory. So Emory put out a press release saying, “We’ve gotten these rare letters by Barack Obama.” And no mention of this paragraph that was too sensitive. None of the papers mentioned it. Emory didn’t mention it.

So I sent one of my oldest friends, Harvey Klehr—Harvey was the guy going back to 1980 when I was trying to solve who fingered [Dr. King’s close advisor] Stanley Levison, how was it known to the FBI that Stan had been …

A communist.

Yes. So I emailed Harvey, said, “Go to the Emory archives.” He’s spent his whole life at Emory, but they won’t let him take pictures. So Harvey has to sit there with a pencil and copy out the graph where Barack writes to Alex about how he repeatedly fantasizes about making love to men.

Don’t write this guy Garrow off as a partisan hack, either. He’s actually one of the most nonpartisan and well-respected biographers in the business. The Tablet piece continues:

Yet when it came out six years ago, Rising Star was mostly ignored; as a result, its most scandalous and perhaps revelatory passages, such as Obama’s long letter to another girlfriend about his fantasies of having sex with men, read today, to people who are more familiar with the Obama myth than the historical record, like partisan bigotry. But David Garrow is hardly a hack whose work can or should be dismissed on partisan grounds. He is among the country’s most credible and celebrated civil rights historians—the author of The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bearing the Cross (which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography) and one of the three historian-consultants who animated the monumental PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize, as well as the author of a landmark history of abortion rights, Liberty and Sexuality.

Join The Conversation. Leave a Comment.


We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spam, instead of replying to it please click the ∨ icon below and to the right of that comment. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.