Former President Barack Obama once wrote that he fantasized about having sexual relations with other men, biographer David Garrow said in an interview published on Wednesday.
The former president expressed his fantasies in a letter to a girlfriend at the time, Garrow told Tablet magazine in the interview. That letter has been redacted and is currently in the possession of Emory University, according to Garrow.
The ex-girlfriend provided a copy of the letter, but had redacted one paragraph, Garrow told Tablet, who said she revealed the paragraph was about “homosexuality.”
“Sometime, right about when Rising Star came out, Alex indirectly sold the original, sold those letters, and they ended up at Emory,” Garrow told Tablet while discussing his 2017 biography of Obama, “Rising Star,” which touched on Obama reportedly dreaming about homosexuality.
“So Emory put out a press release saying, ‘We’ve gotten these rare letters by Barack Obama.’ And no mention of this paragraph that was too sensitive. None of the papers mentioned it. Emory didn’t mention it.”
“So I emailed Harvey [Klehr], said, ‘Go to the Emory archives.’ He’s spent his whole life at Emory, but they won’t let him take pictures,” Garrow said later in the interview.
“So Harvey has to sit there with a pencil and copy out the graph where Barack writes to Alex about how he repeatedly fantasizes about making love to men.”
Obama married his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, in 1992.
