So beyond Newsweek
getting buzz for turning President Obama into a big gay angel on
its cover, what did writer Andrew Sullivan actually
have to say about our “First Gay President”?

First of all, let’s give Newsweek credit for cleansing
America’s palate of the curdled flavor of a woman breastfeeding her
three-year-old on the
cover of Time. Presenting a man who reserves the right
to
execute civilians in drone strikes and whose administration is
callously invading and shutting down legal medical marijuana
dispensaries with a halo is repulsive in its own way, though.
(Sullivan might grudgingly agree; he has criticized the
administration in these areas)

Like a lot of Sullivan’s writing on gay issues and especially
gay marriage, the essay is very much bound by his own feelings and
experiences on the matter. It’s written in first person, with
occasional drifting into the royal “we” as he speaks on behalf of
the gay experience. That generalization can be chafing to a gay man
or woman with different experiences and priorities than Sullivan’s.
His need for affirmation and approval from authority figures is on
naked display. As a result, Sullivan strives to acknowledge Obama’s
political calculations while also absolving him of having had to
make them.

He writes of first meeting Obama at a fundraiser in 2007 and
hearing him support civil unions over marriage for religious
reasons:

Was this obviously humane African-American actually advocating a
“separate but equal” solution — a form of marital segregation like
the one that made his own parents’ marriage a felony in many states
when he was born? Hadn’t he already declared he supported marriage
equality when he was running for the Illinois Senate in 1996? (The
administration now claims that the questionnaire from the gay
Chicago paper Outlines had been answered in type — not Obama’s
writing — by somebody else.) Hadn’t Jeremiah Wright’s church
actually been a rare supporter of marriage equality among black
churches? The sudden equivocation made no sense—except as pure
political calculation. And yet it also felt strained, as if he knew
it didn’t quite fit. He wanted equality but not marriage — but you
cannot have one without the other. On this issue, Obama’s
excruciating nonposition was essentially “Yes we can’t.” And yet
somehow, simply by the way he answered that mother’s question, I
didn’t believe it. I thought he was struggling between political
calculation and his core belief in civil rights. And it was then
that I realized he was both: a cold, steely, ruthless, calculating
politician who nonetheless wanted to do the right thing in the
end.

Obama was “obviously humane.” He opposed gay marriage, but
somehow, Sullivan knew Obama didn’t really mean it. Somehow, in the
way he answered the question. He knew it in his gut.

On the criticism from gay activists of Obama’s slow pace of
dismantling Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and resisting the Defense of
Marriage Act, Sullivan nearly apologizes on behalf of the gay
community:

He fooled most of us much of the time, our outbursts often
intemperate — I went on CNN at one point to say that the president
had betrayed the gay community on the military ban. We snarked
about the “fierce urgency of whenever.” Our anger built. And
sometimes I wonder if he goaded us into “making him do it.” If he
did, it worked.

It’s almost as though Sullivan thinks there’s something unique
or special about the president waiting until the
polls were going the right way before he took action and not
political business as usual. Obama was “leading from behind,”
Sullivan explains at one point. Somehow Obama gets credit for the
increase in volume surrounding gay activism on the marriage and
military front. By doing nothing, the president made gay activists
do the leg work. And thus he gets the praise. It’s almost zen.

If Obama’s poll-driven tactics feel different to Sullivan it’s
because he has crafted the story around himself and his own
experiences. He identifies as a conservative Catholic with an eye
on a very particular family dynamic he needs to preserve and adapt
to his own purposes. Like many desires, this one is not universal,
and attempting to make it so leads to strange projections:

Gays are born mostly into heterosexual families and discover as
they grow up that, for some reason, they will never be able to have
a marriage like their parents’ or their siblings’. They know this
before they can tell anyone else, even their parents. This sense of
subtle alienation — of loving your own family while feeling
excluded from it — is something all gay children learn.

Given how my parents’ and sibling’s marriages
ended I certainly hope I don’t have one like theirs.  Sullivan
is creating a narrative in which gay youths feel alienated from a
Disney-compliant vision of dream weddings and nuclear families.
Fears of exclusion, abandonment, humiliation and even violence can
contribute to that subtle alienation. But lack of marriage?
Really?

He then pivots to the argument that Obama is “just like us”; he
had to come out of the closet as a black man in a white family:

He had to discover his black identity and then reconcile it with
his white family, just as gays discover their homosexual identity
and then have to reconcile it with their heterosexual family. The
America he grew up in had no space for a boy like him: black yet
enveloped by loving whiteness, estranged from a father he longed
for (another common gay experience), hurtling between being a Barry
and a Barack, needing an American racial identity as he grew older
but chafing also against it and over-embracing it at times.

Yeah, thanks for perpetuating that stereotype about gay men and
their dads, Sullivan. He concludes that Obama “learned” to be black
the same way that gays “learn” to be gay, thus explaining the
attention-grabbing headline.

But even the idea of “learning to be gay” is getting
old-fashioned, and it’s a little odd for Sullivan to be invoking it
given his blog’s periodic chafing at the gay establishment. In his
need to make Obama “one of us,” he has nearly gone collectivist.
The gay community, to the extent one exists, has fractured and
diversified significantly since the days of Harvey Milk, and we’re
all the better for it. The shift in attitudes toward gay Americans
by the public (and Obama) reflects people’s real experiences with
gay people, not a belated pat of approval from the political
class.