Obama biographer who revealed ex-president's 'gay fantasies'

August 5, 2023

Barack Obama biographer David Garrow who revealed ex-president’s ‘gay fantasies’ says ex-president is as insecure as DONALD TRUMP

Sitting down for a lengthy Q&A with Tablet, historian David Garrow also renewed claims Obama’s first memoir was fabricated – slamming it as ‘historical fiction’
He also said the former president is just ‘as insecure as Trump’ – and went on to claim he is too ‘lazy’ to serve as a justice on the United States Supreme Court
It also revealed how the ex-head of state – has made a career from speaking engagements and several book deals – once called America a ‘racist society’

A biographer who years ago revealed Barack Obama’s alleged gay fantasies has labeled the former president ‘as insecure as Trump’ – and says he is too ‘lazy’ to serve on the Supreme Court in a new bombshell interview.

Sitting down for a lengthy Q&A with Tablet, historian David Garrow also renewed claims Obama’s first memoir was fabricated – slamming it as ‘fictionalized’ and an attempt at ‘inventing a racial identity struggle that never happened’.

Previously, in the 1,078-page biography Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, Garrow unmasked how a young Obama considered a gay relationship while at college, and cheated on Michelle with his ex during their first year of dating.

It also revealed how the ex-head of state – has made a career from speaking engagements and several book deals – once called America a ‘racist society’ in an unpublished manuscript from his days at Harvard Law.

Already aired for some six years, Garrow, 70, addressed many of these revelations Wednesday in the 16,000 word interview, while also offering some new insight on the man commonly thought to be the Democratic Party’s most influential figure.

A biographer who years ago revealed Barack Obama’s gay fantasies has labeled the former president ‘as insecure as Trump’ – and says he is too ‘lazy’ to serve on the Supreme Court in a new bombshell interview

Quickly, Garrow – who spent eight hours chatting to Obama off-the-record while writing his tome – offered statements that seemed to contradict those claims.

‘He has no interest in building the Democratic Party as an institution,’ he told Tablet. ‘I think that’s obvious.’

In more than 16,000 words, he went on to lay out what he believed the newly 62-year-old politician’s true intent as a prominent figure is, as he continues to live in Washington and very much in the public eye.

‘I don’t think he had any truly deep, meaningful policy commitments other than the need to feel and to be perceived as victorious, as triumphant,’ he said of the two-term president, who was succeeded by Trump in 2016.

He went on to state: ‘I’ve sometimes said to people that I think Barack is actually just as insecure as Trump, but in ways that are not readily perceived by the vast majority of people.

‘I think that’s probably my most basic takeaway.’

The historian – whose 2017 tome was hailed as an ‘impressive’ book that ‘intended to break the 44th president’s monopoly on his personal narrative’ – proceeded to hone in Obama even more, going as far to call him ‘a creature from another planet.’

‘He’s not normal – as in not a normal politician or a normal human being,’ Garrow said, after offering an anecdote that claimed Obama’s lawyer, his go-between while he was writing his book, once advised him not to ask the ex-president about his father – a black Kenyan who met Obama’s white mother at the University of Hawaii.

Referenced in the title of Obama’s book, the late Barack Hussein Obama played a major part in Obama’s embracement of ‘Black racial consciousness’ in the 2004 narrative – which Garrow again Wednesday called a work of fiction.

‘It does go back to ‘Dreams’ being a work of fiction, that the absence of an actual personal story makes him need to compose one,’ Garrow – who has also penned books about Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement – continued.

‘For every time he says, ‘Oh, I spent years reading the history of the civil rights movement,” the skeptical historiographer said of the claims aired by Obama in the book, which sold only a modest 9,000 copies at the time of its release, but has since experienced a multimillion dollar resurgence since the politician’s presidency.

‘I know he read [my book ‘Bearing the Cross’], but I don’t think he read much else,’ Garrow said.

‘This is someone who … 98 percent of his reading has always been fiction, not history.’

He went on to cite Dreams’ sparse mentions of Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Obama’s live-in girlfriend in the 1980s who he proposed to – twice – before he met Michelle.

In the book, Obama, describing his journey from being an insecure young man of mixed-race to a proud black man, claimed his embracing of ‘black racial consciousness’ clashed with his girlfriend.

She, on the other hand, said their relationship ended when ‘he would not condemn antisemitism.’

Garrow compared Obama with his successor during the 16,000 word interview, saying ‘I’ve sometimes said to people that I think Barack is actually just as insecure as Trump, but in ways that are not readily perceived by the vast majority of people’

Garrow made the same ‘historical fiction’ accusation in Rising Star, which was released in 2017

The pair met at the University of Chicago, where she was studying in the mid ’80’s. Obama, at that point in his mid 20s and a graduate of Harvard law, was a community organizer.

The couple dated for a couple of years and met each other’s families before splitting up.

That said, Jager was almost entirely omitted from Obama’s own biography, and combined with his other white exes into one character.

On Wednesday, Garrow touted this, while going on to claim that Obama’s first named girlfriend in his book, described as a ‘beautiful blond’ at his alma mater Occidental College, sent him letters she shared with Obama with lines ‘about homsexuality’ stricken out.

‘Whose version of the story is correct? Who knows,’ Garrow said of Obama’s and Jager’s differing accounts of their live-in relationship.

‘The bridge between the two accounts is Obama’s emerging attachment to Blackness, which required him to fall in love with and marry a Black woman,’ he continued.

‘In Obama’s account, his attachment to Blackness is truthful and noble. In Jager’s account, his claims are instrumental and selfish; he grants particularism to the experience and suffering of his own tribe while denying it to others.’

The Pulitzer-prize winning writer then pivoted to the letters he compiled from Alex McNear, a young woman who Obama wrote was the focus of a crushes for many students at Los Angeles’ Occidental.

‘With Alex, I think she wanted to have her role known. So when Alex showed me the letters from Barack, she redacted one paragraph in one of them and just said, ‘It’s about homosexuality.”

He added that a man named Harvey Klehr, a tenured professor of politics and history at Emory University, was tasked with going through the letters, and redacted sensitive lines that laid bare the eventual presidents questioning sexuality at his behest.

‘He’s spent his whole life at Emory, but they won’t let him take pictures,’ Garrow recalled of the alleged arrangement.

‘So Harvey has to sit there with a pencil and copy out the graph where Barack writes to Alex about how he repeatedly fantasizes about making love to men.’

Garrow went on to reiterate his belief that Dreams from my father is no more than a work of fiction.

‘He wants people to believe his story. For me to conclude that Dreams from My Father was historical fiction – oh God, did that infuriate him,’ Garrow recalled, revealing he spoke with Obama for eight hours in three off-the-record sessions while he was still president.

‘He doesn’t want the writerliness challenged.’

Garrow also revealed how the ex-head of state – has made a career from speaking engagements and several book deals – once called America a ‘racist society’ in an unpublished manuscript from his days at Harvard Law

Garrow continued of the book’s claims regarding Obama’s race and sexuality: ‘It’s so inaccurate, whether about the dynamics among the guys in Hawaii or what’s going on in the community group on the far South Side [of Chicago]

He then asserted: ‘It’s my story and I’m sticking to it. The book [‘Dreams’] is so fictionalized.’

‘And it completely omits women. I’ve always thought that there’d eventually be a feminist critique of Obama because his mother and all the girlfriends – they’re not there. They don’t exist.’

Garrow made the same ‘historical fiction’ accusation in Rising Star, which was released in 2017.

Time magazine, at the time, conceded the polarizing book did ‘contain intriguing insight into the growing pains of a 20-something who would go on to become the leader of the free world, most vividly in the form of letters he wrote to friends.’

When the conversation turned to the Supreme Court and their recent series of sensation rulings, Garrow, when asked, said that Obama would be a ‘terrible’ candidate for a new justice, as several members of the country’s highest court continue to exceed retirement age.

He went on to cite Dreams’ sparse mentions of Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Obama’s live-in girlfriend in the 1980s who he proposed to – twice – before he met Michelle. In the book, Obama, describing his journey from being an insecure young man of mixed-race to a proud black man, claimed his embracing of ‘black racial consciousness’ clashed with his girlfriend. She, on the other hand, said their relationship ended when ‘he would not condemn antisemitism’

‘He’d be terrible because he’s too lazy,’ Garrow said, before going on to cite a passage from Obama’s book in which the politician makes an observation about his Hawaiian background as proof.

‘At one point, he says, ‘I’m fundamentally lazy and it’s because I’m from Hawaii.” Garrow recalled. ‘That’s close to the actual quote.’

He went on to criticize what he called a continued desire to stay in the limelight from the politician, along with his wife Michelle, who now has her own podcast.

‘I’ve always found [Barack and Michelle’s] need to hang out with celebrities bizarre,’ he said. ‘Because the people they both were, all the way up through at least 2000, would’ve had no desire to do that.’

He also questioned Obama’s current role as a political figure, after the recent release of his four-part series Working, which looked at the life of US workers through the lens of the former president, and ‘touch[ed[ on issues of race and democracy and civil rights’.

Garrow stated: ‘He lives in a large brick mansion in Kalorama. Doesn’t it strike you as weird that he’s an ex-president, he’s comparatively young, and he’s living in the center of Washington, D.C.?

‘The original excuse was that Sasha had to finish school,’ he continued.

‘Then you could say, ‘Well, the opposition to Trump needs a figure to rally around.’ But now Sasha has graduated from USC, Trump is gone, Joe Biden was elected present, but he’s still there.’

He asked Tablet’s David Samuels: Doesn’t that strike you as odd? I mean, I have heard from more than one source that there are regular meetings at Obama’s house in Kalorama involving top figures in the current White House, with Secret Service and cars outside. I don’t write about it because it’s not my lane.

‘There are over a thousand reporters in Washington, and yet there are zero stakeouts of Obama’s mansion, if only to tell us who is coming and going. But he clearly has his oar in.’

Meanwhile, with his kids now grown and multiple lucrative media projects to his name, Obama is now worth roughly $70million. He was worth just over $3.5million in 2008.

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