First gay president newsweek

At one point in the question-and-answer session, a woman looked him gay in the eyes with what can only be called maternal grit. Was this obviously humane African-American actually advocating a "separate but equal" solution—a form of marital segregation like the one that made his own parents' marriage a felony in many states when he was born?

My heart sank. I just wanted to see the newsweek up close and get a better sense of him and his character. To have the president of the United States affirm my humanity—and the humanity of all gay Americans—was, unexpectedly, a watershed. The administration now claims that the questionnaire from the gay Chicago paper Outlines had been answered in type—not Obama's writing—by somebody else.

But the word 'marriage' stirs up so much religious feeling. Brown, whose tenure as editor at Newsweek has seen an array of controversial covers, will respond tomorrow with the cover above, pegged to Andrew Sullivan's piece on Obama's support for same.

He shifted the mainstream in one interview. It was the spring ofback when Barack Obama's bid for the presidency seemed quixotic at best. 'The First Gay President': Real Newsweek Cover Featuring Obama? He wanted equality but not marriage—but you cannot have one without the other.

Hadn't he already declared he supported marriage equality when he was running for the Illinois Senate in ? The sudden equivocation made no sense—except as pure political calculation. White House sources told me that after the interview with ABC News, the president felt as if a weight had been lifted off him.

I really do. I think civil unions are the way to go. You may have seen the other controversial newsmagazine cover this week, the one where Newsweek dubbed President Obama “The First Gay President". Hadn't Jeremiah Wright's church actually been a rare supporter of marriage equality among black churches?

As long as first are equal. It's so disappointing to me. But as Jim Loewen at the History News Network would like to remind us, even if Obama were gay, he wouldn't be the first: more than years before the. And yet it also felt strained, as if he knew it didn't quite fit.

I promised not to write anything. And it was then that I realized he was both: a cold, steely, ruthless, calculating politician who nonetheless wanted to do the right thing in the end. On this issue, Obama's excruciating nonposition was essentially "Yes we can't.

I'd seen Obama speak to a crowd and was impressed but wanted to see if what I'd seen from afar held up under closer scrutiny. But Obama had been planning to endorse gay marriage before his reelection for a while. So I asked to attend a private fundraiser in a tony apartment in Georgetown.

Yes, he was bounced into it by Joe Biden, the lovable Irish-Catholic president who couldn't help but tell the truth about his own views on TV only to be immediately knocked down by David Axelrod on Twitter. I thought he was struggling between political calculation and his core belief in civil rights.

It won't be nearly as controversial as Time magazine's breastfeeding cover, but Newsweek's May 21 issue declares Barack Obama the country's "first gay president." The accompanying cover story was. The in-question cover showed Obama with a rainbow halo circling his head.

Last week he did it—in a move whose consequences are simply impossible to judge.