Why Barack Obama Wrote, "I Make Love to Men Daily But in Imagination," in Love Letters to Ex
Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, shared his alleged homosexual fantasies with his ex-girlfriend in a 1982 letter that got all of America talking. Obtained by The Post, the redacted portion of the notorious letter resurfaced in August 2023, after Obama's biographer David Garrow gave an in-depth interview on the ex-commander-in-chief.
The letter, now more than 40 years old, detailed the feelings of the then-21-year-old Obama as he narrated it to 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... 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."
Obama and McNear dated while they were at Occidental College in Los Angeles. The letter, now stored at Emory University, was redacted by McNear in certain other portions as well. But, historian and biographer Garrow discovered and consequently unsealed them to gain more information on Obama's early life and career for his 2017 book Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.
But who is McNear? Obama's college flame is the daughter of Suzanne McNear, an editor for Playboy Magazine's fiction features throughout the 1960s and 1970s. She is also a writer who's worked on a collection of short plays, 'each one with no more than two characters' but still 'humorous plays about catastrophes.' McNear was previously involved with Playboy but moved on to work with Paul Theroux and the late South African novelist Nadine Gordimer. She married the former Serbian boxer, Bob Bozic, in 1987 before they eventually parted ways.
McNear and Obama had a brief college romance from 1979 to 1981, but the relationship couldn't stand the test of time after the ex-US President shifted to Columbia University, as per Daily Mail. Initially, the ex-couple tried to work out a long-distance through occasional calls and letters, but the romance eventually fizzled out. However, despite their separation, the two met again over dinner a year after Obama joined Columbia. McNear is currently married to Dr. Robert Stein, a child psychotherapist in Long Island, New York.
The author of Barack Obama: The Story, David Marannis, also revealed McNear's feelings about Obama: "He really worked his way through an idea or question, turned it over, looked at it from all sides, and then he came to a precise and elegant conclusion." Meanwhile, Garrow, in an interview with Tablet, explained how he caught hold of the letters: "When Alex showed me the letters from Barack, she redacted one paragraph in one of them and just said: 'It's about homosexuality.'" McNear later sold those letters to Emory University, and they are no longer allowed to be photographed.
