Newsweek: Obama Is "The First Gay President"

05/14/2012

Not to be outdone by Time's controversial breastfeeding cover, this week's Newsweek will feature Barack Obama staring out from the newsstands with a rainbow halo over his head, above the tag "The First Gay President."

The cover is accompanied by a story by Andrew Sullivan, an openly gay blogger who really captures what it means to be in the tank for a candidate. (If Obama took candy from a baby, Sullivan would write a Newsweek story called "The Audacity of Candy Theft.") Sullivan foreshadowed the cover story in a blog post earlier this week:

I do not know how orchestrated this was; and I do not know how calculated it is. What I know is that, absorbing the news, I was uncharacteristically at a loss for words for a while, didn't know what to write, and, like many Dish readers, there are tears in my eyes.

So let me simply say: I think of all the gay kids out there who now know they have their president on their side. I think of Maurice Sendak, who just died, whose decades-long relationship was never given the respect it deserved. I think of the centuries and decades in which gay people found it impossible to believe that marriage and inclusion in their own families was possible for them, so crushed were they by the weight of social and religious pressure. I think of all those in the plague years shut out of hospital rooms, thrown out of apartments, written out of wills, treated like human garbage because they loved another human being. I think of Frank Kameny. I think of the gay parents who now feel their president is behind their sacrifices and their love for their children.

The interview changes no laws; it has no tangible effect. But it reaffirms for me the integrity of this man we are immensely lucky to have in the White House. Obama's journey on this has been like that of many other Americans, when faced with the actual reality of gay lives and gay relationships. Yes, there was politics in a lot of it. But not all of it. I was in the room long before the 2008 primaries when Obama spoke to the mother of a gay son about marriage equality. He said he was for equality, but not marriage. Five years later, he sees - as we all see - that you cannot have one without the other. But even then, you knew he saw that woman's son as his equal as a citizen. It was a moment - way off the record at the time - that clinched my support for him.

Today Obama did more than make a logical step. He let go of fear. He is clearly prepared to let the political chips fall as they may. That's why we elected him. That's the change we believed in.

Beneath Sullivan's melodrama, he's essentially saying the same thing the rest of have been since Obama's announcement last Wednesday, albeit with more rah-Obama pom-poms: this was clearly a calculated political move with no policy or legislative effect, and yet it's also a monumental step forward in the acceptance of gay rights, the chief civil rights issue of our time.

The problem, of course, is not that the announcement itself was not political—we've all suspected/pretty much known Obama has absolutely zero problem with gay marriage—but that the entire buildup to the announcement was so blatantly political. Did we really need three years of Obama's evolution on gay marriage when it was clear from everything about the man's biography and character and policies that he didn't give a hoot whether two men wanted to get married?

This is where commentary on Obama's announcement gets squeamish. We all want to laud the president for becoming the first man of his title to endorse gay marriage, and there really is no understating what this does for the future progress of gay rights. But it's hard to praise the end result without praising the years of political maneuvering that led to it. The way in which it happened underscored this; Joe Biden simply blurting out his support of marriage showed that it was really was no more difficult than saying the words.

For all that Newsweek's cover story likely will be a fawning encomium to President Fearless, perhaps we need someone like Sullivan to simply come out unabashedly in favor of the president's endorsement, politically-laden or not, so the rest of us can get compartmentalize away our memories of his years of dodging the question. Ultimately, Obama's feet-dragging on this issue says less about the future progress of gay rights than it does about the past bigotry against them. Obama may not be the first gay president—and Newsweek really needs to reign in its covers—but is it really so bad if that's how we remember him?

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