14 DAY TRIAL // Newsweek is out to shock and provoke debate again: its May 21 issue, out on newsstands today, has a “gay” President Obama on the cover, as you can very well see in the photo attached to this article.
“The First Gay President” reads the caption, while a rainbow halo hovers above Obama's head.
Without a doubt, the issue doesn't mean to question the President's orientation, but rather to honor him for choosing to publicly support gay marriage.
The piece found in the magazine is written by Andrew Sullivan, a conservative gay writer.
Now that gay marriage is part of the Presidential campaign, Newsweek states that the belief that he didn't go public with his support for it as part of a political ploy.
This announcement was at least 3 years in the making, Newsweek says in a preview sent out to the press.
“It’s easy to write off President Obama’s announcement of his support for gay marriage as a political ploy during an election year. But don’t believe the cynics. Andrew Sullivan argues that this announcement has been in the making for years,” the magazine says.
Sullivan argues that Obama struggled with his black identity just like gays struggle with theirs. Neither can move forward until they discover and embrace it, but both eventually did so.
“When you step back a little and assess the record of Obama on gay rights, you see, in fact, that this was not an aberration. It was an inevitable culmination of three years of work,” Sullivan writes.
“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,” he further says.
The Newsweek cover comes hot on the heels of another that's been getting a lot of people talking: the latest TIME issue tackles attachment parenting and features a young mother breastfeeding her (almost) 4-year-old son.