The Bearding of Barack Obama?

‘Beard’ – a man or woman used as a cover for a gay partner.

This month’s edition of ‘Vanity Fair’ features an article entitled “Young Barack Obama in Love: A Girlfriend’s Secret Diary” which features entries from a diary kept by Genevieve Cook, daughter of an Australian diplomat, who was one of the previously unknown  ‘girlfriends’ of  the 22 year old future President in New York in the early eighties.

Taken from a new book: ‘Barack Obama – The Story’ by David Maraniss, the diary extracts show Genevieve’s perception of the young man’s character as their relationship progresses.  On Sundays Obama would lounge around bare-chested, wearing a blue and white sarong, drinking coffee and solving the New York Times crossword puzzle.

“His warmth can be deceptive. Tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness—and I begin to have an inkling of some things about him that could get to me.

And as you say, it’s not a question of intent on your part—or deliberate withholding—you feel accessible, and you are, in disarming ways. But I feel that you carefully filter everything in your mind and heart—legitimate, admirable, really—a strength, a necessity in terms of some kind of integrity. But there’s something also there of smoothed veneer, of guardedness … but I’m still left with this feeling of … a bit of a wall—the veil.

Barack—still intrigues me, but so much going on beneath the surface, out of reach. Guarded, controlled.”

(As if he’s withholding something.  In a closet, perhaps?)

To another so-called Columbia graduate  girlfriend, Alex McNear, intellectualising Obama wrote: “You seem surprised at TS Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?”

It seems that Obama himself did.  For in another book written 5 years ago called ‘Barack Obama & Larry Sinclair: Cocaine, Sex, Lies, Murder’ the author Larry Sinclair claims to have twice given the budding President a blowjob in Chicago in 1999, once in the back of a hired limousine, the other in his hotel room.  On each occasion Obama was reputedly smoking crack cocaine.

Further, Sinclair claims that Obama was involved in an intimate and sexual relationship with Donald Young – the openly gay choirmaster at Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago which Obama attended for 20 years.

The 47 year old deacon was found murdered in his flat execution style with bullets to the back of his head shortly before the Iowa Causcus in 2007 which helped sweep Obama into power.  Two other young black male parishioners – Larry Bland and Nate Spencer, both gay, were found dead in similar circumstances within 40 days of each other.

Sinclair believes that the murder of Donald Young was an attempt to protect Barack Obama’s secrets, and  the Obama White House is trying to have his book withdrawn from circulation to avoid any further embarrassments about Obama’s homosexual past and the possible involvement of his top lieutenants in Young’s murder, which has yet to be solved by the Chicago police.

Of the two books the national media has shown a lot of attention to David Maraniss’ latest Obama biography but scant if any to Larry Sinclair’s scandalous account.

Opining more on the writer T.S. Eliot to ‘girlfriend’ Alex McNear in one of his literary epistles the young Obama wrote:

“Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality.”

Did Obama make the same choice?

Michael Dickinson lives in Istanbul.  He can be contacted via his website http://yabanji.tripod.com/

Michael Dickinson can be contacted at michaelyabanji@gmail.com.