Newsweek's Next Cover: Obama 'First Gay President'
Four days after President Barack Obama affirmed his support of gay marriage on Good Morning America, the editors at Newsweek are ready to anoint him with a new title, "The First Gay President."
At least, that's what it will say on the cover of magazine's May 21 issue, which is available on iPad today and will be on newsstands Monday.
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The cover shows a close-up portrait of the president with a rainbow-colored halo over his head, the colors referencing symbols adopted by the LGBT movement. The cover advertises an upcoming piece by Newsweek writer Andrew Sullivan in support of Obama's record with the gay community.
Newsweek has released this preview of the article to Politico:
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. "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." And President Obama has much in common with the gay community. "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," Sullivan writes.
The move comes mere days after Newsweek's competitor Time Magazine offered a controversial cover of their own, depicting a young mother breast feeding her 3-year-old boy. A Newsweek spokesman would later tell the New York Post that when their Editor-In-Chief Tina Brown saw the cover she responded, "Let the games begin."
Newsweek's cover may be designed to elicit the memory of another White House occupant with a not-so-fitting title. Supporters of then-President Bill Clinton dubbed him the "first black president" for his work with the African American community. The term was first used by author Toni Morrison in a 1998 issue of The New Yorker.