Obama wrote somewhat elusively to his first intimate girlfriend that he had thought about and considered gayness but ultimately decided that a same-sex relationship would be less challenging and demanding than developing one with the opposite sex.
That was before he met Larry Sinclair.
Conveniently, Larry died at the hands of a hit and run driver who has never been apprehended.
See...you can learn a lot from the Clinton's.
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See...you can learn a lot from the Clinton's.
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New biography of Barack Obama is laying bare his life since he was born and discloses his relationships before he married Michelle
Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama by Pulitzer-prize winner David J. Garrow is published on May 9
It reveals Obama was long-term lover of Genevieve Cook, an Australian-born graduate who was three years his senior
She reveals they had sex on their first date and that the 22-year-old, who was then a journalist on a financial trade magazine, was 'earthy' and 'passionate'
She also reveals his use of cocaine aged 22 and 23 - far later than he himself has spoken of in his own memoir
Book reveals he proposed twice to another white girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager, who is now an Oberlin College, Ohio professor
He cheated on Michelle by going back to Jager, who now says 'I always felt bad'
The white girlfriends were made into a composite character in Dreams From My Father and Jager says Obama's own memoir is inaccurate
And he considered a gay affair while at college where his mentor was an openly-homosexual professor who Obama called 'a wonderful guy'
Published: 11:50 EDT, 3 May 2017 | Updated: 15:29 EDT, 3 May 2017
The sex secrets of the young Barack Obama have been revealed in an authoritative new biography of the ex-president.
Obama slept with his girlfriend Genevieve Cook on their first date, before she wrote him a poem about their 'f***ing' and called their sex 'passionate', the book about the former president reveals.
They also took cocaine together - and after they split she slept with his best friend.
Obama also considered a gay relationship while at college, twice proposed to another white girlfriend, and cheated on Michelle with his ex during the first year of their relationship.
His past is revealed in the 1,078-page biography Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, to be published on May 9.
Obama, a new Columbia graduate who was working for a firm that prepared financial reports at the time, made dinner for Cook at his apartment in Manhattan two weeks after meeting her at a New Year's Eve party and handing her his phone number.
It was the start of a relationship which is one of a series revealed in Rising Star.
Passionate sex: Genevieve Cook was an Australian-born 22-year-old who was Obama's first post-college lover. The two took drugs together and slept together on their first date
Older woman: Genevieve Cook was three years the senior of Obama and a daily pot smoker living with her mother and stepfather in their Park Avenue apartment
New York, New York: Obama was a graduate of Columbia working for a financial reports firm when he and Cook were lovers
Drug link: Obama would party with three friends including Sohale Siddiqi (pictured) with whom he would take cocaine. Siddiqi, Hasan Chandoo, Imad Hussain took 'lots of cocaine', the new biography of Obama says
The 1,078-page biography is the most comprehensive work ever on Obama and the first to be published since he left office.
It was written after exhaustive research by Pulitzer-prize winning biographer David Garrow, and also reveals how he asked another woman to marry him – and continued a relationship with her while dating Michelle, before she became his wife.
Cook was 25 when she met 22-year-old Obama on New Year's Eve in 1983.
Australian-born Cook was living in her mother and stepfather's Park Avenue apartment at the time, but had been brought up around the world, including - like Obama, Indonesia - as her father was an Australian spy and diplomat.
She wrote about it in a private memoir and said that at the party 'I remember being very engaged and just talking nonstop' with Obama.
'The thing that connected us is that we both came from nowhere – we really didn't belong.'
Their first date involved more than talk however, with Obama cooking at the West 114th Street apartment he shared with two other roommates..
'Then we went and talked in his bedroom. And then I spent the night. It all felt very inevitable,' she wrote in a private memoir, revealed by Garrow.
She spent the night again with him a few days later and rated him highly in bed – even writing a poem to him saying: 'B. That's for you. F's for all the f***ing that we do.'
Garrow reveals that she said: 'Sexually he really wasn't very imaginative but he was comfortable. He was no kind of shrinking "can't handle it. This is invasive" or "I'm timid" in any way; he was quite earthy.'
A new book claims that Barack Obama (left) proposed to Sheila Miyoshi Jager (right) before he met Michelle
According to Rising Star, by David J. Garrow, (left) Jager (right) played a huge role in Obama's formative years
First Lady: Obama continued to see Jager during the first year of his relationship with Michelle Obama, who he went on to marry
Their relationship appears to have been deeply sexual, with her writing that 'all this f***ing' was 'so much more than lust' and also saying in her diary: 'Making love with Barack, so warm and flowing and soft but deep - relaxed and loving - opening up more.'
She also wrote in her diary about 'passionate sex', the book says.
But the couple also used drugs and Cook reveals that Obama was still a cocaine user when they were together.
College girlfriend: Blonde Alex McNair was the focus of crushes by men at Occidental but it was Obama who became her boyfriend
He would spend time with other friends - Hasan Chandoo, Imad Hussain and Sohale Siddiqi, who he had been friends with at Occidental College, in Los Angeles - and Cook said the trio was taking 'lots of cocaine'.
They were far more prolific users than Obama, who she said probably preferred staying home to read than taking the drug. Chandoo - who was later to become a fundraiser for Obama - was the leader, the book claims.
'For every five lines that somebody did, he would have done half,' Cook said.
The book also notes that Cook and Obama would smoke pot but only at parties and records one time when during tension in their relationship she wrote in her diary that they went to a party and got 'high' on cocaine.
That Obama was still using cocaine in his early 20s is a significant revelation.
He had previously only disclosed that he used it as a teenage student.
The couple split in June 1985, after a year and a half together, the book says.
But she was hardly out of his life - because she became involved with his friend Sohale in September of that year.
She and Sohale did ecstasy together, and then had sex. When she wrote to Obama and told him he replied: 'The news of Sohale and you did hurt.'
He also used - possibly inadvertently - a racial slur to refer to Sohale and the other two Pakistani-born friends, calling them 'the Pakis' in the same letter.
When Obama came to write Dreams From My Father, he created a composite girlfriend from the early 1980s.
Another member of the cast of girlfriends - all white - who became the composite was Alex McNear, who is described as a 'beautiful blond' who was the focus of a crushes for many students at Occidental College.
One male student even fantasized that she was 'the most beautiful lesbian'.
However the book is far sketchier on their time together, noting that she knew him in Manhattan as both moved there when he transferred from Occidental to Columbia.
The book discloses that Jager felt particularity upset by his treatment of his white girlfriends in Dreams From My Father.
Not only did she become part of 'a woman in New York who I loved', their time living together in Chicago for two years was dropped, and - she said - love letters he sent her were the basis for much of the narrative.
'I never understood why he wrote it this way,' she said.
'I wonder if the unedited Dreams is as inaccurate as the published version.'
Barack Obama proposed to a different woman - twice - before he met Michelle and kept on seeing her for the first year of his relationship with FLOTUS.
Sheila Miyoshi Jager was almost entirely omitted from Obama's own biography, Dreams of My Father, where she was simply combined with his other white exes into one character.
But according to Rising Star, Jager played a huge role in Obama's formative years. So much so that even after Barack met his wife-to-be Michelle, he kept seeing Jager on and off for at least a year, the book claims.
The couple were very much in love in the mid 1980s when they were living together in Chicago, according to Jager, who described them as being 'an island unto ourselves.'
Their relationship quickly progressed and in the winter of 1986, while visiting his girlfriend's parents, Barack popped the question, Jager told Garrow.
Jager, 53, is associate professor and director of the East Asian program at Oberlin College in Ohio
But Jager's parents were concerned that she was too young - Jager was 23 and Obama was 25 - and refused his advances.
They remained together, but it was about this time that Jager began to realize her then-boyfriend's 'deep-seated need to be loved and admired.'
The book claims that Barack kept on seeing Jager for the first year he was dating Michelle but said it stopped after the couple married in 1992
Now 53, the associate professor and director of the East Asian program at Oberlin College in Ohio, told Garrow that Obama became 'so very ambitious very suddenly.'
'I remember very clearly when this transformation happened, and I remember very specifically that by 1987, about a year into our relationship, he already had his sights on becoming president.'
But Obama believed he needed to 'fully identify as African American' to fulfill his political ambitions - and believed that having a non-black spouse could damage his prospects, according to the book.
This reportedly put pressure on Obama's relationship with Jager who is of Dutch and Japanese heritage.
The book claims that Barack was living with Sheila Miyoshi Jager before he met Michelle in the late 1980s (pictured with FLOTUS)
By the time he was leaving for Harvard Law School, their relationship was on the rocks.
But Obama was not ready to give up on Jager, and proposed to her for a second time - asking her to join him in Harvard.
Again Jager turned him down.
She believed that his proposal was 'out of a sense of desperation over our eventual parting and not in any real faith in our future.'
The second marriage rejection was too much for their relationship, and the couple split.
Obama went to law school then met Michelle. The couple quickly fell for each other and began dating.
But Garrow claims that Jager and Barack continued to see each other on and off after she arrived at Harvard for a teaching fellowship.
'I always felt bad about it,' Jager said.
However, after Barack and Michelle married in 1992, Jager says that they stopped seeing each other and their contact was limited to the odd letter or phone call.
The Obamas have not publicly responded to the claims in the book.
THE GAY PROFESSOR AND HOW OBAMA CONSIDERED A SAME-SEX COLLEGE AFFAIR
President Obama considered pursuing a gay relationship while he was a college student.
Writing about the former president's two years at Occidental College in Los Angeles, Garrow discloses in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama the close relationship Obama had with assistant professor Lawrence Goldyn.
'Goldyn made a huge impact on Barry Obama,' Garrow writes. 'Almost a quarter century later, asked about his understanding of gay issues, Obama enthusiastically said, "my favorite professor my first year in college was one of the first openly gay people that I knew…He was a terrific guy." with whom Obama developed a 'friendship beyond the classroom.'
To say that Goldyn was out 'would be an understatement,' a fellow student at the college tells Garrow. Goldyn was 'funny, engaging' and 'wore these really right bright yellow pants and open-toed sandals.'
It was the winter of 1980 when Obama took a political science course at Occidental taught by the openly gay professor, a 1973 graduate of Reed College in Oregon with a Ph.D. from Stanford.
To say that Goldyn was out 'would be an understatement,' a fellow student at the college told Garrow. Goldyn was 'funny, engaging' and 'wore these really right bright yellow pants and open-toed sandals.'
Goldyn was one of the first gay people that Obama knew and Obama said the 'strong friendship that developed helped to educate me.'
Goldyn would remember that Obama was not fearful of being associated with him.
Three years later, writes the author, 'Obama wrote somewhat elusively to his first intimate girlfriend that he had thought about and considered gayness but ultimately decided that a same-sex relationship would be less challenging and demanding than developing one with the opposite sex.'
To say that Goldyn was out 'would be an understatement,' a fellow student at the college tells Garrow. Goldyn was 'funny, engaging' and 'wore these really right bright yellow pants and open-toed sandals.'
When the Advocate, a leading gay and lesbian magazine, asked president Barack Obama 2009 who had most profoundly influenced his ideas about gays and lesbians, he second person - after his mother -was his political science professor at Occidental College, Lawrence Goldyn, here visiting the president in the Oval Office. Goldyn has since become a doctor
The Advocate, a leading gay and lesbian magazine asked President Obama 2009 who had most profoundly influenced his ideas about gays and lesbians, the second person he named - after his mother - was Lawrence Goldyn.
'He was a wonderful guy,' Obama said. 'He was the first openly gay professor that I had ever come in contact with, or openly gay person of authority that I had come in contact with.
'And he was just a terrific guy. He wasn't proselytizing all the time, but just his comfort in his own skin and the friendship we developed helped to educate me on a number of these issues.'
Goldyn retrained as a doctor and is now an HIV specialist in Mendocino, California.
David Garrow, author of the wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr., and is a regular contributor to The New York Times and The Washington Post.
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