Should You Believe in Obama?

Barack Obama had just finished a long day of campaigning for the U.S. Senate in 2004 when he called his daughters on the cell phone to say good night. Then he sat back in the car, turned to an aide (who had also been a close friend for more than a decade), and asked, “So, Kevin—have you and Greg thought about having kids?”

The aide, Kevin Thompson (who no longer works for the candidate), says Obama often asked questions about his life as a gay man: wondering how he and his partner made various decisions, why they didn’t want to get married, why they weren’t planning to have kids. And after Obama marched in a Chicago pride parade for the first time, Thompson says, questions again poured forth: “He wanted to know the history of Pride—how is it that every city has one, what was the origin of it, what was the whole story about Stonewall.”

Obama had seen Thompson through ups and downs. They first met when Thompson worked with Michelle Obama in the Chicago mayor’s office in the early 1990s. At the time, Thompson was married to a woman, but in the difficult period when his marriage ended and he started coming out, he says, Michelle became one of his closest confidantes. “I knew that [my coming out] made a lot of people uncomfortable, no matter what they said. I never worried, never wondered for a second what Michelle and Barack thought of me. They were the kind of friends who I knew would always be with me.”

Lately, though, a number of other gay people have been wondering what Barack Obama thinks of them. Obama’s record on gay rights is strong, but his history of advocacy at the national level is short—which leaves some uncertain of the depth of his commitment to gay and lesbian issues. A Harris Interactive poll in July found that Obama led John McCain among registered voters, 44% to 35%, and had a huge lead among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender respondents, but a potentially significant 17% of those voters remained undecided. “Some people don’t know what to make of [Obama] because he hasn’t known the leading gay activists or even his own advisers on gay issues for very long,” says David Mixner, who played an integral role in Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign and was one of the first openly gay senior presidential campaign advisers. Of the half-dozen or so gay men and lesbians who occupy top positions on the Obama campaign, deputy national campaign manager Steve Hildebrand, who first met the candidate for two years ago, has known him longest.

“The mafia doesn’t know him. David Geffen, James Hormel, David Bohnett -- they’re not his friends,” says another national gay political leader. “His real gay friends are regular people in Chicago.”

In interviews, more than a dozen of those old friends and other gay leaders in Illinois who’ve worked with Obama described more than a decade of consistent advocacy for gay civil rights. Their stories cast new light on Obama’s ties to antigay Christian leaders and on his tortured, though canny, position on marriage equality. They reveal long-lasting relationships with gay people that help explain his ease in talking about gay issues, and a legal disposition that helps account for his choice to speak about gay rights, even in settings where it’s not obviously in his best political interest to do so.

Most important, they suggest that an Obama presidency would offer gay people the possibility of grasping the most valuable political asset imaginable, one that they’ve never had in relation to the White House: accountability. Tracy Baim, the publisher and executive editor of Chicago gay newspaper Windy City Times, has covered Obama since his first race for the Illinois state senate, in 1996. “He and Michelle don’t just come to gay events for political reasons,” she says. “They come because they understand the issues, and they have friends in the community. If he were to betray us, it would be personal.”

If he were to betray his gay constituents, he might also consider it to be malfeasance. Jim Madigan, an attorney who was a student in professor Obama’s constitutional law class at the University of Chicago in the late 1990s, says Obama taught the course from a distinct perspective. Every civil rights case study, from Dred Scott v. Sandford to Bowers v. Hardwick, was made “from the perspective of the individual plaintiff,” Madigan says. Moreover, Obama approached race and sexual orientation with an even hand: “The approach was always, ‘Look at how the government is treating the individual,’ ” Madigan recalls. “What was personal for him and what was personal for me -- we treated them in the same way.”

This legal approach surely helps account for Obama’s fluency in the language of gay rights. When Obama announced his candidacy for the Illinois state senate, he invited Rick Garcia of the Illinois Federation for Human Rights (now known as Equality Illinois), the state’s largest gay and lesbian political organization, to meet with him. (The state senate has 59 seats, and Obama was one of only three senatorial candidates who requested meetings with the federation during the 1996 race.) Garcia’s first impression of the candidate concerned his rhetoric: “He was able to talk about the issues in a natural, normal, comfortable way. He didn’t struggle for language. He didn’t say things like ‘homosexual preference’ or ‘sexual preference.’ He was up to speed even before we started working with him.”

Once elected, Obama immediately signed on as a sponsor of legislation to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The latter is covered by only a handful of state laws and, because it’s the more radical idea, is often abandoned by mainstream politicians. But “Obama never wavered in his commitment to the gender identity piece, even when one of the gay sponsors wanted to take it out,” Garcia says, adding that Obama lobbied extensively for the bill. p

“One evening we were having difficulty with one of the other Democratic senators. We asked Senator Obama, ‘What can you do to help?’ And he said he would talk to his colleague. People make that kind of promise all the time, and you never know whether the conversations actually happen.” But not long after, Garcia adds, “I’m in the statehouse, and I hear a loud discussion on the landing below me on the staircase, and I peer over and see, it’s Barack talking to the other senator very passionately about how he should vote for the gay rights bill. He was confronting the senator -- without an audience, without any sense that anyone was watching.”

That other senator was James Meeks, who is also pastor of Chicago’s Salem Baptist Church and who last year was named by the Southern Poverty Law Center as one of the “10 leading black religious voices in the antigay movement.” (Among many other alleged declarations, Meeks is said to have denounced “Hollywood Jews for bringing us Brokeback Mountain.”) And although Meeks wasn’t swayed by Obama, the bill eventually passed in 2005, the year after Obama had left the legislature for the U.S. Senate.