As a representation starved people, bisexuals have employed a number of desperate measures to secure evidence of the existence of our own kind. A celebrity says that they’re straight but not narrow? Bisexual. A dead guy who was convicted of sodomy was also married to a woman? Bisexual. Emily Dickinson existed? Bisexual. Cast off statements, intimate disclosures contained private letters — none of these are off limits for bi hunters, who will turn the strayest of remarks into rock solid evidence that someone is a Kinsey 3.
Which is why I feel certain that we’re about to see Barack “44th President” Obama popping up on lists of Famous Bisexual People.
Thanks to some cloak and dagger efforts on the part of one of Obama’s biographers (recounted in a Tablet interview here) it is now a matter of public record that when he was 21, Barack Hussein Obama wrote letters to a girlfriend in which he confessed to having sexual fantasies about men. Although, uh, I wouldn’t call the passage (which is, naturally, making the rounds in the queer pubs) particularly LGBTQ friendly:
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.
And yet! It’s still enough for so many people to latch on to. (Honestly I’m kind of shocked that Bi.org hasn’t added Obama to their list of Famous Bi People yet.) Into has already made the leap to saying Barry O is bisexual “in theory, if not in practice” while also calling him non-binary because the same letter talked about feeling like his brain was androgynous which…. maybe? IDK, again, seems like a leap!
I mean look: is Obama a Kinsey 0? If he was being honest in that letter, then definitely not. But is he bisexual? I kinda feel like that’s something he has to claim for himself — that bisexuality requires some kind of affirmation beyond stray thoughts of queer sex. You don’t have to have gay sex — or any sex at all! — to be bisexual; but a straight-identified man who sometimes thinks about sex with other men? Until he decides to claim a queer label for himself, I think he’s probably straight.
(I also, for the record, think that a man can have and even enjoy sex with other men and still be straight, but it’s mostly because “straightness” is as much about affiliation as it is about sexual preference.)
Anyway. What does it mean to say that Barack Obama is bi, anyway? If it normalizes being twenty-one and having gay fantasies you don’t act on, then great; but I don’t know that foisting a bi label on to a man who hasn’t claimed it for himself is particularly helpful for anyone. It is certainly possible that Barack Obama is a long closeted bi man (and if he is, then I say JOIN US, BARRY); it’s also possible that he’s a straight boy who was just fucking around in a letter to a girl he was dating forty years ago. Or maybe it’s even more complicated than that. I don’t know.
What I can say, however, is that until Barack Obama makes some affirmative statement claiming a bisexual identity, then I don’t feel comfortable claiming him. He is always welcome in my big tent of bi+ activism, of course. He just has to want to be there.
Obama also famously pretended to be a Marxist in order to sleep with bi women. So the most popular theory I've heard is that these writings are a choice example of men pretending to be sensitive, liberal, even queer in a low commitment, insincere way in order to pull bi women.
It's a complicated topic - we don't want to do bi erasure or invalidate men's unspoken queer feelings, but at the same time acknowledge exploiting "queer adjacency" is a way that men can mistreat bi women in intimate contexts.
Agreed it’s not clear if he’s bi from this but he’s certainly very obscure in his writing!
- homosexuality as escape from earthly farce (how so? what the hell is he going on about??) &
- I make love to men every day in my imagination (this sounds more like a classic Obama desire to connect with his fellow men via high-falutin oratory, than a genuine desire for a bit of ‘every day’ MLM oral 😂?)