First gay president? Really? Make that his ungayness

It’s been a month since President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage and was declared, on the cover of Newsweek, “the first gay president.” That’s an eternity in politics, but Obama’s swing through California last week, which included a Beverly Hills fundraiser sponsored by the LGBT Leadership Council and a $25,000-per-plate dinner hosted by “Glee” creator Ryan Murphy, got me thinking about his gayness all over again.

Make that his ungayness. It’s not just that the president was clueless enough to overlook the possibility that a joke about his wife “not going down all the way” when competing against Ellen DeGeneres in push-ups would be interpreted as a dirty double-entendre. It’s that, well, he’s isn’t gay.

Not that this was in question. The Newsweek cover line was playing off the famous Toni Morrison quote about Bill Clinton being “the first black president.” Andrew Sullivan, who wrote the Newsweek story, didn’t say anything about Obama being gay but rather likened the president’s awakening to his black identity to a coming-out process. “Barack Obama had to come out of a different closet,” Sullivan wrote. “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.”

Morrison’s point about Clinton, which she expressed in the New Yorker in 1998, amid the convulsions of the Monica Lewinsky investigation, had to do with the degree to which the president’s upbringing — poor, with a single mother, saxophone-playing and junk-food eating — resembled cliched notions of the black experience. “Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs,” Morrison

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