According to a new biography, former President Barack Obama “considered gayness” in his college years before ultimately deciding on a more “challenging” heterosexual lifestyle.
The biography, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, was penned by American historian, author and New York Times and Washington Post contributor David Garrow and is set for release on May 9. Garrow is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, known best for his work on Martin Luther King Jr.
Rising Star delves into the relationship Obama had with an openly gay assistant professor at Occidental College, Lawrence Goldyn, when Obama was a student.
“Goldyn made a huge impact on Barry Obama,” writes Garrow, according to The Daily Caller. “Almost a quarter century later, asked about his understanding of gay issues, Obama enthusiastically said, ‘my favorite professor my first year in college was one of the first openly gay people that I knew…He was a terrific guy’ with whom Obama developed a ‘friendship beyond the classroom.'”
“Goldyn years later would remember that Obama ‘was not fearful of being associated with me’ in terms of ‘talking socially’ and ‘learning from me’ after as well as in class,” adds the author.
The award-winning biographer continues: “Three years later, Obama wrote somewhat elusively to his first intimate girlfriend that he had thought about and considered gayness, but ultimately had decided that a same-sex relationship would be less challenging and demanding than developing one with the opposite sex,” he says. “But there is no doubting that Goldyn gave eighteen-year-old Barry a vastly more positive and uplifting image of gay identity and self-confidence than he had known in Honolulu.”
Speaking with The Daily Caller’s Jamie Weinstein on The Jamie Weinstein Show, Garrow declined to answer if Obama actually engaged in any homosexual activity. “I think anyone and everyone, no matter what their role in life deserves a certain basic degree of privacy, in that context,” said Garrow.
H/T The Daily Caller.
