How Close a Friend of Dorothy Is President Obama?
Deep inside his briefcase, beneath the pass codes to nuclear warheads and urgent memos about world crises, we’d likely find it: President Obama’s official lifetime membership card to a gay bathhouse—one that he purportedly used frequently during his years in Chicago.
How could I have missed such an important news story when it was first blasted through cyberspace by right-wing bloggers last summer? Oh, that’s right. It was because, like all real Americans, I was preoccupied trying to determine whether the President was born on another planet. Now that the nagging issue of his birthplace has settled back to earth, we can return to the equally important matter of Barack Obama’s clandestine sexual history—including experiences said to be shared with his former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who is now mayor of Chicago, the city where all the homosexual excitement reportedly took place.
According to articles spread by several hard probing blog sites, including beforeitsnews.com, the Wayne Madsen Report, and Rense.com, Obama and boy pal Emanuel both are “lifetime members” of the same gay men’s club/bathhouse in Chicago. As Madsen put it, “The bathhouse, Man’s Country, caters to older white men and…is known as one of uptown Chicago’s ‘grand old bathhouses.’ …The club’s computerized files and pre-computer paper files include membership information for both Obama and Emanuel.”
“Obama the Gayster,” as one blog described him, “began frequenting Man’s Country in the mid-1990s, during the time he transitioned from a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School to his election as an Illinois State Senator in 1996. Emanuel reportedly joined Man’s Country after he left the Clinton White House and moved back to Chicago in 1998.”
The two men sometimes came together, the blogs alleged. But wait, there’s more! “Man’s Country was not the only location for Obama’s predatory gay sex activities,” wrote Madsen. “The Chicago gay community is aware that Obama often made contacts with younger men at his famous ‘pick-up basketball’ games.” And it was during one such “pick-up” that Obama and Emanuel became close!
Oooh, how scintillating! But, if the now President is a card-carrying member of the club, some might wonder why he hasn’t been bold enough to come out (so to speak) more forcefully for gay rights, particularly same-sex marriage. Numerous left-leaning and gay bloggers have been quite critical of him lately for flip-flopping and then waffling on the issue. Of course, way back in 1996 he said he supported gay marriage; then in the run-up to his Presidential campaign he retreated to favoring civil unions. Meanwhile, public opinion appears to have moved ahead of him.
As Salon.com political writer Alex Pareene recently wrote, “It seemed in 2004 that gay marriage could swing a presidential election. A few short years later, a majority of Americans favor it. It’s hard to believe that support for equality would’ve caused Obama to lose the primaries or the general election in 2008. And there’s really no conceivable reason to continue to keep up the farce: His opponents already assume he’s the homosexual agenda’s best friend.”
Best friend? In fact, Alex, some of his opponents think he is a bathhouse-frequenting friend of Dorothy on the down-low. Whether his reluctance to weigh in on gay marriage is a matter of political pragmatism (likely) or a lack of courage, I share Pareene’s disappointment that Obama has not been a leader in moving the country closer to marriage equity. His argument that his view is “evolving” is getting stale. While he told a New York City fundraiser last month that he believes “gay couples deserve the same legal rights as every other couple,” which presumably would include marriage, Obama declined to recommend passage to New York legislators on the eve of their historic vote enacting marriage equality. His endorsement would have strengthened his support with an important constituency as he launches his reelection campaign. He may have been thinking that his involvement could hurt the proponents’ efforts to persuade a handful of Republicans to join them in creating a majority for passage. Politics is (often) complicated.
But to those of you who are ticked off with the President, it’s important to consider precisely how much he and his Administration have accomplished for gay people in a little over two years. Although change has come at a slower pace than we would like (in part because Obama has been dancing around resistance from so many Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats in Congress), no president has ever done as much to advance the civil rights and quality of life for LGBT citizens. I can’t imagine a presidential candidate on the scene today who will do a fraction as much—though I’m already studying the blogs to find out which GOP contenders might be secret members of Silver Daddies.
Meanwhile, Andrew Tobias, author of The Best Little Boy in the World and openly gay chairman of the Democratic National Committee,” has compiled a list of more than 50 notable accomplishments of the Obama administration for the gay community. The list is way too long to include in its entirety. You can read it on the Equality Giving website. Here are a few of the highlights, including some achievements you may not have heard about unless you’re a political junkie:
•Determined that Section 3 of DOMA is unconstitutional and the Justice Department will no longer defend this portion of the law in court.
•Signed “The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act” expanding federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.
•Campaigned for and signed repeal of “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell.”
•Required any hospital receiving Medicare or Medicaid funds (virtually all hospitals) to allow LGBT visitation rights.
•Extended benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees.
•Lifted the HIV Entry Ban and issued diplomatic passports and provided other benefits to the partners of same-sex foreign-service employees.
•Banned job discrimination based on gender identity throughout the federal government, the nation’s largest employer.
•Eliminated the discriminatory Census Bureau policy that kept gay relationships from being counted, encouraging couples who consider themselves married to file that way even if their state of residence does not yet permit legal marriage.
•Extended the Family and Medical Leave Act to cover employees taking unpaid leave to care for the children of same-sex partners.
•Extended domestic violence protections to LGBT victims.
•Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Harvey Milk and Billie Jean King.
•Appointed the first ever transgender DNC member.
•Testified in the Senate in favor of the Employment-Non Discrimination Act (ENDA), the first time any official of any administration has done so.
•Successfully fought for UN accreditation of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission against Republican attempts to block it.
•Adopted transgender recommendations on the issuance of gender-appropriate passports easing barriers to safe travel and providing government-issued IDs that avoid involuntary “outing” in hiring. Also hosted the first-ever White House transgender policy meeting.
•Advised the nation’s school districts of their legal responsibility to allow establishment of Gay-Straight Student Alliances.
•Issued guidance to 15,000 local departments of education and 5,000 colleges to support educators in combating bullying. Also convened the first-ever anti-bullying summit to craft a national strategy on bullying and launched stopbullying.gov website.
•Awarded $13.3 million to the LA Gay & Lesbian Center to create a program for LGBTQ youth in the foster care system.
•Appointed Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan instead of conservatives who would have tilted the Court even further to the right and virtually doomed LGBT rights for a generation.
Tobias also notes that the Obama Administration has “changed the culture of government everywhere from HUD and HHS to the Export-Import Bank, the State Department and the Department of Education.” It has also hired more openly LGBT staff members than any administration in history.
It may not be all we want or need, but the fact is that change has been emanating from the executive branch of government at the fastest pace ever. The legislative branch (Congress) needs to work harder to end DOMA and pass ENDA—and the President’s influence can certainly be helpful. But in the context of his job description he has proven to be a close friend of the friends of Dorothy—and he’s not trying to keep that record on the down-low.