'' What’s Behind the Right’s ‘Obama Is Gay’ Conspiracy''

thenation.com/article/archive/whats-behind-rights-obama-gay-conspiracy

Neal Gabler October 23, 2012

Books & the Arts

October 23, 2012

''The wing-nuttery’s gaybaiting is not just a fringe phenomenon—it’s part of an old Republican tradition of macho posturing against Democrats.''

This article appears in the November 12, 2012 issue.

You probably know by now that President Obama is a Muslim who professes socialism and was born in Africa, making him ineligible to occupy our highest office. But here is something you may not know: Obama is gay. Not only is he gay; he frequented gay bathhouses in Chicago along with his former chief of staff and current Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel. And not only did he frequent those bathhouses; he was under the influence of a “transgender nanny” when he lived as a boy in Indonesia. Plus, he was “married” to his Pakistani roommate while attending Occidental College

(One theorist says that the ring he wore at the time was a “homosexual symbol for ‘women stay away’”); had a cocaine-fueled romance with a right-wing activist and ex-convict named Larry Sinclair in 1999 (who, of course, wrote a book about it); and orchestrated the murders of another gay lover and two gay associates from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church just before Iowa caucuses in 2008

—all of which helps to explain why he married, in the words of one Obama investigator, a “mannish wife with big, muscular arms.”

These stories have been standard fare in right-wing circles and on right-wing websites for years. Google “Obama gay rumors” and you get—hold on!—15.5 million hits, most of them crackpots like conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, one of the original Swift Boaters, who interviewed a man who knew Obama at Occidental and described the future president’s relationship with his roommate as a “close, intimate emotional attachment,” even though the only evidence for that attachment was the fact that “I saw them standing very close to one another.” Or a blogger named Kevin DuJan, who reports that Reggie Love, the former basketball player who served as Obama’s “body man,” was actually the president’s lover and that it is “quite clear that in the years ahead Barack Obama will replace Elton John as the reigning party queen, gay icon.”

(DuJan also says he expects that Obama will retire to Honolulu after his defeat by Romney, where, “draped in colorful muumuus, with a retinue of hunky shirtless Secret Service studs around him, Barack Obama will find himself in a new kind of paradise no doubt.”) Or right-wing journalist Wayne Madsen, whose eponymous newsletter is the source on Obama’s visits to the bathhouse and revealed how Obama used basketball pickup games to pick up men. Madsen says Obama had homosexual trysts with Representative Artur Davis, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and Senate majority leader Bill Frist! Who knew?

Meanwhile, Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute, another right-wing organization dedicated to protecting the country from the likes of Obama, told a radio audience on VCY Crosstalk that while “I’m not sure about the claims by various people who have reported that Obama has at least participated at times with them in homosexual acts, this [support of gay marriage] certainly lends some credence.” Case closed.

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>>19469154

Citing a remark by Fox News host Greg Gutfeld that “Obama is now out of the closet” after the president announced his support for gay marriage, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum blogged at the Daily Beast, “You cannot ‘get’ Gutfeld’s joke unless you ‘get’ that a large part of his audience ardently believes that Obama is in fact gay, that his marriage is a sham, and that Mrs. Obama leads a life of Marie Antoinette–like extravagance to compensate for her husband’s neglect while he disports himself with his personal aides.”

But as much as the most extreme tales of the president’s supposed homosexuality have been confined to the crannies of the Internet, mainstream Republicans routinely invoke the idea that Obama is, if not exactly gay, then less of a man. When a loud noise was heard during Mike Huckabee’s address to the National Rifle Association, the former Arkansas governor quipped that it was Barack Obama diving for the floor after someone pointed a gun at him (because, presumably, the president is a sissy). Similarly, when John Edwards endorsed Obama in 2008, conservative columnist Kathleen Parker joked, “Well, at least they didn’t kiss.” And after the death of the American ambassador to Libya, Sarah Palin weighed in with: “If [Obama] doesn’t have a ‘big stick’ to carry, maybe it’s time for him to grow one.”

Of course, there’s nothing unusual about the wing-nuttery fabricating stories to rally their fellow nuts, and nothing unusual about the homophobes among them, especially on the religious right, attacking Obama as gay. But the persistent charges of his unmanliness—as if all gay men are unmanly and all women fainthearted—are part of a skein of Republican accusations and innuendoes against Democrats that goes back decades. It isn’t always that Democrats are gay, exactly. Gay becomes a proxy for effeminacy so that Republicans, in their antediluvian view of the world, can present themselves as tough he-men, and Democrats as weak girls. Or, in conservative commentator Jude Wanniski’s terms, Republicans are the “Daddy Party,” while Democrats are the “Mommy Party.” That is not intended as a compliment to the latter. Indeed, “feminized” is one of the dirtiest words in the Republican lexicon.

Long ago, the GOP apparently calculated that this was a great way to appeal to male voters, especially white male voters, who, until recently, made up roughly 40 percent of the electorate. The GOP aimed at a tradition of machismo, bluster, saber-rattling and muscle-flexing. It assumed that white males revere warriors, prefer action to talk, love the idea of shooting first and asking questions later; their movie heroes are John Wayne and GOP poster boy Clint Eastwood. These assumptions may have been based on stereotypes, but they seem to have worked. The Democratic Party has won the white male vote only twice since 1944—in 1960, when John Kennedy beat Nixon by just 0.2 percent among that group, and in Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide, the only time since Roosevelt that Democrats won more than 50 percent of that demographic cohort. In short, if only white men voted, there would have been just two Democratic presidents since 1944. Not only that: every election save 1976, when Jimmy Carter eked out 47 percent of those voters, would have been a Republican landslide.

But even that may understate the extent to which Republicans have increasingly become the party of white men and the extent to which they seem to have sacrificed the female vote, especially the votes of single and minority women. According to a recent Pew Center survey, the GOP lead among white male voters has doubled, from 11 percent in 2008 to 22 percent in 2012. Men now constitute 52 percent of Republican voters according to the Pew survey, virtually all of them white, even though men make up less than 50 percent of the general population. By contrast, women constitute 57 percent of the Democratic vote, according to Pew. One might conclude that whatever other divisions there are between the parties, there is a gaping pink (Democrat) and blue (Republican) one or, to account for the racial component among those Republican voters, “pink and azure,” azure being a lighter, milkier shade of blue like the sky.

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>>19469157

It is impossible to say whether the Republican feminization of Democrats is a cause of this chasm or a result of it. There are obviously many factors at play. But it is certainly true that even as the white male vote as a percentage of the electorate has declined precipitously, the Republican proportion of that vote has steadily grown, from the upper fortieth percentile for Dewey in 1948 to the upper fiftieth percentile for Eisenhower to a consistent sixtieth percentile since 1980. The only disruptions in that trend are Carter’s 1976 election when Ford ceded some of those white Southern male votes, and the two Clinton elections, in which the tough-talking bantam billionaire Ross Perot siphoned off a large chunk of those voters.

The originator of the tactic to characterize Democrats as pansies and sissies may have been Wisconsin’s infamous junior senator, Joseph McCarthy. Though McCarthy’s stock in trade was wild accusations against alleged communists in the Democratic administrations of Roosevelt and Truman, he also brandished another, less remembered weapon: homosexual baiting, on the pretext that communists were often gay. This conflation of “treasonous” with “Democrats” and “gay” has proven to be a powerful one that seems to have had more legs than anti-communism by itself. As David Johnson documents in his history of political gay bashing, The Lavender Scare, once McCarthy publicized the accusations, his fellow Republicans and their allies in the right-wing press joyously leapt in. “Information is accumulating which shows that perversion has been so kindly regarded in the New Deal cult as to amount to a characteristic of that administration,” wrote the rabidly reactionary columnist Westbrook Pegler in June 1950. Along the same lines, Republican Senator William Jenner described the Truman administration as the “Fairy Deal.”

But the subtler message wasn’t that Democrats were gay. Again, it was that Democrats were like gays—that is, in the bizarre Republican equation, they were womanly, incapable of standing up to communists. Describing how McCarthy would deal with Stalin versus how the Democrats dealt with him, one of the senator’s aides said, “The two would talk man to man, not like a lot of pansy diplomats.”

The “pansy” in 1952 was Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate, and a former State Department official—one of those Ivy League–educated boys in striped pants that McCarthyite Republicans so reviled. Stevenson was divorced and had a reputation as a womanizer, but that didn’t stop Republicans from hurling innuendo. According to Stevenson biographer Porter McKeever, an Eisenhower supporter actively spread the rumor that Stevenson was gay, and someone even sent out an FBI impersonator to interview a friend of a Stevenson staff member about the governor’s alleged homosexuality. When Stevenson challenged Eisenhower again in 1956, gossip columnist Walter Winchell, who had traveled with Eisenhower during the campaign, compared Stevenson to transsexual Christine Jorgenson on his election night broadcast and said the election of Stevenson would put a “woman in the White House.” In four years, Stevenson had gone from being gay to being a woman.

It was much harder to stigmatize Kennedy, a war hero, or Johnson, a Texan, as effeminate, though their fear of being branded as such forced them into contortions. Johnson privately fretted that if he were to abandon Vietnam, the Republicans would question his manhood. But even as Republicans whispered about the Democrats’ lack of manliness, they managed to turn it into a loud metaphor—one in which government was, in Reagan’s words, “our national nanny” and diplomacy was another form of feminine surrender. In effect, the conservative message was not just that government was bad and that a less than bellicose foreign policy was feckless, but that government and diplomacy were emasculating. As Wall Street Journal columnist John Mihalic said of Jimmy Carter, he “didn’t like to threaten or rebuke. He wore sweaters and avoided the trappings of power. He even kissed Brezhnev!” All of which, he wrote, revealed Carter’s “true feminine spirit.”

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>>19469168

And so it has been ever since. Michael Dukakis was featured in a right-wing comic book titled Magical Mike in which Dukakis starred as “Sheriff Pansy,” who pranced around in a dress. George H.W. Bush beat Dukakis among men by thirteen points, and among white men by nearly thirty. Even President Reagan joined in; after Dukakis endorsed several of his military policies, Reagan quipped, “We haven’t seen such a radical transformation since Dustin Hoffman played Tootsie.” Given his womanizing, Clinton couldn’t be tarred as either gay or feminine, so the Republicans used another tactic: he was portrayed as having been emasculated by Hillary, “the Lady Macbeth of Little Rock,” as The American Spectator called her during the 1992 campaign. Clinton lost the male vote by nearly the same margin as Dukakis and received only 36 percent of the white male vote.

What makes this feminization even more effective is the way the media—and not only the conservative media—pick it up, perhaps because it gives them a neat dialectic that turns every campaign into a movie, strong against weak, which is what the media are always trying to do. No one has latched on to this more tenaciously than the cop’s daughter, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, even as she has deplored the “nasty Republican habit of portraying opponents as less than fully masculine.” So, in Dowd’s words, Al Gore is “so feminized and diversified and ecologically correct, he’s practically lactating”; John Edwards is a “Breck Girl”; Obama is “Obambi,” who preens like a “46-year-old virgin” and is “hung up on being seen as thoughtful,” even as he fears “being seen as a ‘dumb blond’”—which isn’t all that different from Ann Coulter calling Gore a “total fag” on Hardball or Edwards a “faggot” at a conservative conclave. As for John Kerry, the war hero, the Republicans, and the mainstream media quickly managed to make him seem French and effete against a swaggering cowboy Bush. And it was no surprise when a Newsweek cover story cast the 2008 election as a contest between beer (McCain) and arugula (Obama).

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The problem for Republicans is that while their sixty years of macho posturing and Democrat-baiting may have paid huge electoral dividends in the past, the demographics are now running strongly against them. The proportion of white voters in the electorate is falling rapidly—it shrank from 91 percent in 1948 to 70 percent in 2004—and the proportion of white male voters is plummeting even more rapidly. Pretty soon there’s not going to be much azure for the Republicans to capture.

But the dirty little secret of political feminization that borders on misogyny may be that it was never entirely about politics; it was about fear. No one would accuse the Republican Party or its white male supporters of having a massive case of sexual repression, but the passion with which the party has prosecuted its feminizing agenda, as well as the ardor with which married blue-collar white males have embraced the party, even against their own economic self-interest, does prompt one to wonder if it might be a case of “Methinks the party doth protest too much.”

The point is that even though machismo and feminization may no longer be good politics, the tactic isn’t likely to disappear, either electorally or as a way of governing, because the Republicans can’t help themselves. They have been playing this game so long that it’s now in their DNA, which is why every conservative crackpot can’t wait to tell you that Barack Obama is gay.

Our fag blogger Ben Adler has the downlowdown on “Where Crazy Conservative Memes Are Invented” (September 25).

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>>19469176

Founded by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation has long believed that independent journalism has the capacity to bring about a more democratic and equitable world.

https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/barack-obama-americas-first-gay-president

>>19469222

Barack Obama: America's First Gay President?

huffpost.com/entry/barack-obama-americas-fir_b_315860

Timothy Patrick McCarthyMarch 18, 2010

Our historic President is squandering an historic opportunity.

During his campaign, Barack Obama made some audacious promises to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community. He supported the repeal of both "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and the Defense of Marriage Act. He rejected the Federal Marriage Amendment and any attempt to stifle state efforts to legalize civil unions or same-sex marriage. He stated that the federal government should recognize all state laws respecting such relationships. He called for a more comprehensive Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and the inclusion of both sexual orientation and gender identity in federal hate crimes statutes. He supported Medicaid coverage for low-income, HIV-positive Americans, and sharp increases in funding for HIV/AIDS research. He endorsed the re-authorization of the Ryan White CARE Act and was a vocal advocate for expanding initiatives to deal with the increasingly global AIDS crisis. He wouldn't support marriage equality a stance we understood politically, but never accepted morally but he did endorse civil unions that give same-sex couples the same legal rights and privileges as married heterosexual couples.

On paper, then, Barack Obama was perhaps the most LGBT-friendly Presidential candidate in the history of the United States. He was our candidate. When he was elected last November, we had every reason to hope that there would no longer be a gay America and a straight America. Under his leadership, we would finally become full, free, and equal citizens of the United States of America.

We are still waiting.

Granted, there are a few glimmers of hope. Over the summer, he posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Harvey Milk, the first openly gay American political official who was murdered some thirty years ago by a fellow member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. In July, Obama signed an executive order extending some benefitsthough not full health-care coverageto same-sex couples employed by the federal government. He has appointed some openly gay and lesbian people to important jobs in his Administration, most recently, David Huebner, the prominent gay attorney, who will become the U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa if confirmed by the Senate. On the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellionthe series of protests that marked the formal birth of the gay liberation movement in June 1969President Obama invited 300 gay and lesbian leaders to the White House for a reception, where he gave one of his trademark speeches about "hope" and "change," honoring the historic commitment of LGBT activists and pledging to "not only be your friend," but also "an ally and a champion and a President who fights with you and for you." This weekend, as we prepare to march on Washington for full equality, the President will give another one of these speeches at the fancy Human Rights Campaign annual dinner.

>>19469237

This hardly constitutes the bold agenda he promised us. Indeed, when it comes to full LGBT equality, President Obama is more symbol than substance, a lot of talk and not much action. This is painful for me to admit, because I was inspired by his candidacy, and worked very hard, along with so many others, to get him elected. Election Day 2008 was one of the greatest days of my life, notwithstanding the painful setbacks that came with the passage of anti-gay ballot initiatives in California, Arizona, Florida, and Arkansas. Still, there was ample cause to celebrate and celebrate we did because we finally had an ally in the White House who would fight with and for us.

In retrospect, we were foolish to have such hope. After all, given the history of the United States, we should know that Presidents are almost never out in front on matters of great social change. Despite the preponderance of candidates historically who have run on platforms of "change," more often than not, Presidents play it safe. After all, Lincoln did not come into office an abolitionist. FDR did not come into office a union man. LBJ did not come into office a civil rights activist. And yet Lincoln saw to it that slavery was abolished, FDR signed legislation protecting the rights of workers to collectively bargain, and LBJ eventually pushed for the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Each of these menall great Presidents in terms of domestic policypresided over periods of profound social transformation because they were moved by the progressive forces around them. But they were exceptions to the general rule. By definition, Presidents are conservative, even the liberal ones. Jesse Jackson has reminded us that social change only occurs when enlightened leaders are moved by an energized electorate. If Obama wants to be a truly great American President, he will need to become an enlightened exception.

Barack Obama may yet become our President, but he has a long way to go. In the meantime, we must remember that Obama is not the leader of our movement; he's not even a member of our movement. He never has been and he never will be, and we cannot wait for him to come around. There is too much work to do, too many people suffering in silence and sickness, too many instances of violence and discrimination, too many laws to overturn and hearts and minds to change. Like the abolitionists and workers and feminists and civil rights activists before us, only we can determine our destiny and lay the path to our own liberation. Progress comes from the people, not the President.

That said, our movement stands in the midst of a curious paradox. On the one hand, it is intoxicating to think about all the progress we have made in a relatively short period of time. Many of usthough not nearly all of ushave a place at the table, a voice in the debate, the power and privilege to have some influence and get some things done. On the other hand, partial inclusion is not the same thing as full equality. It's nice that Obama invited 300 of us to the White House on the anniversary of Stonewall, but it was troubling to see so many angry activists transformed into smiling sycophants at the mere prospect of a photo op with the President and First Lady. It's gratifying to hear "gay and lesbian" included in the President's speeches, but it's frustrating to know that gay and lesbian concerns and perspectives are largely absent from his Administration's policy agenda. It was energizing to hear candidate Obama call for the repeal of DOMA and maddening to watch President Obama's Justice Department defend that same heinous law. It was a long overdue relief to know that candidate Obama would repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and an unexpected slap in the face to hear that President Obama would sooner increase troops to fight the "good war" than end discrimination in the military once and for all. It is inspiring to see so many gay and lesbian activists, myself included, protest this weekend's HRC affair, and insulting to hear that the dinner was sold out rather than shut down when the President agreed to deliver the keynote address. If the President wants to speak to usall of usand if he actually wants to hear from us, he should march with us, side by side, from this day forward.

>>19469243

Throughout his campaign, Obama frequently invoked the "fierce urgency of now." He was quoting Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech from the 1963 March on Washingtona gathering not unlike this weekend's march for LGBT equality. For King, of course, words meant nothing without action. And so it is worth remembering that nearly five months before his iconic speech, he had been arrested in Birmingham, AL"the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States"–for leading a series of protests against the city's racist Jim Crow policies. From his cell, King wrote the "Letter from Birmingham Jail," one of the great moral treatises of American protest literature, where he criticized not only the racists who sought to deny black people their full rights of citizenship, but also moderates who stood in the way of the more radical goals of the Civil Rights Movement. Five years later, King was dead, murdered in Memphis, TN, because he had the audacity to challenge his country to live up to its founding ideals.

Obama is hardly the first person to invoke Dr. King's words for political purposes. And he is hardly the least deserving, considering the fact that his success has been made possible, in large measure, by the courage and sacrifice of Dr. King and his compatriots. That said, we should remember that the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" also contained these words: "Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will." Before Obama was elected, he went out of his way to convince the LGBT community that he is a man of good will, and that is why we are so frustrated with his inaction as President. Again, we can't help but hear the words of Dr. King: "For years now I have heard the word 'Wait!' It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.'"

We will wait no longer, Mr. President. It's now, not never.

When Bill Clinton another great gay hope who proved a bust was elected, the Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison famously referred to him as America's "first black President." Of course, Clinton wasn't actually black. But Morrison meant it in a deeper sense – Clinton was a person who understood black people, who grew up with and around black people, who cared for them and about them, a white man willing to challenge America's brutal legacy of slavery and racism by embracing a broad civil rights agenda. Whether or not Clinton lived up to this billing is a matter for another day. But Barack Obama has a similar opportunity with respect to the LGBT community. He can stand with us or work against us. He can become an ally or an adversary. If Bill Clinton was America's first black President, surely our first black President can become America's first gay President.

Timothy Patrick McCarthy, Contributor