A decades-old letter written by former President Barack Obama to a college girlfriend has revealed deeply personal reflections about sexuality, including an admission that he imagined having romantic encounters with men.
The correspondence, written in November 1982 when Obama was just 21 years old, became the subject of renewed attention after biographer David Garrow discussed the former president’s early life in a wide-ranging interview.
The New York Post published previously redacted excerpts from the letter in August 2023, providing a rare glimpse into Obama’s private thoughts long before he entered politics.
One passage immediately attracted attention.
“You see, I make love to men daily, but in the imagination,” Obama wrote to his former girlfriend, Alex McNear.
The statement appeared during a broader discussion of homosexuality, human relationships and the way Obama viewed his own identity.
At the time, Obama was a young college student exploring philosophical questions about gender and sexuality.
The letter went considerably further than the single sentence that drew headlines.
“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,” Obama wrote.
He continued by distinguishing those thoughts from his physical identity as a man, saying that he accepted that aspect of himself.
The correspondence dates to Obama’s relationship with McNear, whom he dated while attending Occidental College in Los Angeles.
Although the two eventually went their separate ways, the letters survived and later became material of interest to historians examining Obama’s formative years.
The particularly intimate portions were initially redacted by McNear.
Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who wrote the extensive Obama biography Rising Star, subsequently pursued the missing passages while researching the former president’s personal history.
The original letter is held by Emory University, which does not permit visitors to photograph or remove the document.
To obtain the missing material, Garrow enlisted the help of his friend Harvey Klehr, who visited the collection and transcribed the redacted paragraphs by hand.
Klehr later provided those passages to The New York Post, allowing the previously concealed remarks to become public.
Their publication generated interest because they offered an unusually candid view of Obama’s private reflections at a time when his future political career was still decades away.
However, the letter does not establish that Obama engaged in sexual relationships with men. The passage explicitly describes the encounters as imaginary.
Garrow himself cautioned against treating the remarks as something extraordinary.
“I’m a historian, not a psychologist, but I think it’s ‘public record’ news that a (vast?) majority of human beings have sexual fantasies!” he told The Post in an email.
His comments placed Obama’s youthful writing in the broader context of personal exploration rather than presenting it as evidence of an undisclosed relationship.
Obama went on to marry Michelle Obama in 1992, and the couple have two daughters.
The former president’s marriage and family life became familiar to the American public during his political career, particularly throughout his two terms in the White House.
The 1982 correspondence, by contrast, captures a very different period in his life: a young man writing privately to someone with whom he had shared a romantic relationship.
The intimate excerpts came to wider public attention more than four decades after they were written, following Garrow’s interview and the subsequent publication of the transcribed material, per the New York Post.
While the revelations prompted renewed discussion about Obama’s early personal life, the historical record presented in the letter is limited to his own words and the philosophical and sexual fantasies he described.
The correspondence remains part of the archival material documenting the former president’s years before public office, offering an unusually personal look at thoughts he expressed long before becoming a national political figure.
