A love letter that former President Barack Obama wrote to his ex-girlfriend Alex McNear has surfaced where he reportedly confessed about his “androgynous” mind and imagining making love to men.
The 40-year-old letter to his ex-girlfriend recently resurfaced after Obama biographer David Garrow gave a long interview.
“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,” a 21-year-old Obama wrote to McNear in November 1982.
“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,” he added.
Who is Alex McNear?
McNear and Obama dated during his year at Occidental College in Los Angeles. The letter is currently owned by Emory University, which doesn’t permit it to be photographed or removed. Garrow’s friend, Harvey Klehr transcribed the paragraphs by hand and sent them to the biographer.
McNear said she thought Obama was “interesting in a very particular way. 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.” A year after Obama transferred to Columbia University in New York in 1981, the two reconnected over dinner.
“We sat and talked and ate and drank wine. Or at least I drank wine. I think he drank something stronger. It was one of those dark, old Italian restaurants that don’t exist in New York anymore. It was the kind of place where they leave you alone. I remember thinking how happy I felt just talking to him, that I could talk to him for hours. We walked slowly back to my apartment, on 90th, and said good-bye. After that we started spending much more time together,” McNear told David Maraniss, the author of Barack Obama: The Story.
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When McNear went back to Occidental, the two tried to maintain a long distance relationship through letters. However, the relationship did not last long.
McNear is the daughter of Suzanne McNear, who edited Playboy Magazine’s fiction features in the 1960s and 70s. he was born in Racine, Wisconsin and now lives in Sag Harbor, Long Island.
Alex herself is also a writer. She was working on a collection of short plays, “each one with no more than two characters… humorous plays about catastrophes.” After working at Playboy, she worked with Paul Theroux and the late South African novelist Nadine Gordimer.
Alex was previously married to Bob Bozic, a former Serbian boxer. They got married in 1987. Presently she is married to Dr. Robert Stein, a child psychotherapist in Sag Harbor.
