Like television serial killer Dexter Morgan in yet another improbable reboot, Barack Obama keeps getting resurrected by the legacy media — not as he was, but as the character they need him to be.

With their full cooperation, he has carefully crafted a public image tailored to middle-of-the-road sensibilities — one that conceals the more radical and uncomfortable truths about his early life. His latest reflections on his relationship with Lawrence Goldyn, his gay college professor at Occidental, are no exception.

According to Obama, Goldyn was a kind-hearted intellectual who helped broaden his perspective on gay people.  But I knew both men during that era, and I can say with confidence: This is not the full story — not even close.

When I met Barack Obama during his sophomore year at Occidental College in December 1980, he struck me as a quiet, intensely self-conscious young man.  Unlike most of the male students I encountered, he showed no apparent interest in women.  In fact, my immediate impression was that he was gay.

It’s no surprise to me that Obama chose Lawrence Goldyn as his academic adviser.  Goldyn, openly gay and politically active, was known on campus as a trusted figure among gay and lesbian students.  He wasn’t just a professor; he was part of a broader network of support for students wrestling with their sexual identity.

Unlike the other professors in young Obama’s orbit, Goldyn was not a Marxist.  Although Occidental employed him as an assistant professor of political science, his most memorable role was that of an in-your-face sexual revolutionary.  For that very reason, I remember thinking Occidental made the right call when it denied him tenure in 1981.

Obama’s recent comments suggest that Goldyn enlightened him on gay identity.  But this spin is merely a gentle pirouette designed to distract us from a more substantial pattern.

Obama didn’t need anyone to explain gay culture to him; he was already immersed in it.  According to Mia Marie Pope, who claims she knew Obama while he was a student at the exclusive Punahou School in Hawaii, he was frequently in the company of older white gay men and seemed completely at ease in that world.

Obama’s mentor back then, Frank Marshall Davis — a known Communist Party member — authored a book under a pseudonym that included graphic bisexual scenes.  These were the kinds of influences Obama had before he ever set foot on Occidental’s rose-covered quad.

We also have Obama’s bizarre poem “Pop,” published in 1981, full of unsettling references to “amber stains” and “smell his smell” connectivity — an earthy piece some have interpreted as a veiled account of sexual intimacy with an older man.

Thanks to presidential historian David Garrow, we’ve learned that Obama wrote letters to his then-girlfriend Alex McNear in which he openly discussed his same-sex desires.  Former classmates also recall his metrosexual style, soft voice, and emotional distance from women.  This wasn’t a guy discovering gay identity through a class — it was someone already deep in the experience, possibly trying to make sense of it all.

The Goldyn story is just one more example of Obama rewriting his past to fit a more electable narrative.  Just as he airbrushed his Marxist sympathies, blurred his religious convictions, and replaced real individuals with fictional “composites” in Dreams from My Father, here he repackages an adviser-student relationship to appear as a moment of enlightened tolerance — when in fact it may have been something far more personal.

Let me be clear: I’m not interested in shaming Obama for his sexuality, whatever it may be.  I am simply done with the absurd, unrepentant, self-curated mythmaking.

If a conservative candidate had maintained this level of personal obfuscation — on issues of sexuality, ideology, or even basic biography — the press would have diced him up as quickly as Dexter Morgan logs a souvenir blood sample.  Meanwhile, the legacy media let Obama escape the truth of his past the same way the law enforcement officers do in Dexter: Resurrection — by misreading every clue that points to guilt, simply because the show must go on and the franchise must be protected.

The real Obama chose Lawrence Goldyn for the same reason other gay and questioning students did: because he felt a personal connection, not because he needed an education in tolerance.  That’s not a crime.  But pretending otherwise is part of a larger deception: the effort to protect Obama’s personal credibility and to prevent any alteration in how he is portrayed in U.S. history — as America’s first post-racial technocrat, rather than someone who intentionally rebranded to achieve power.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is a political scientist and former college professor who earned his doctorate in government from Cornell University.  As a young Marxist, he met and debated Barack Obama in 1980.  His firsthand account of Obama’s early ideological views has been cited in Rising Star (2017) by David Garrow and Radical-In-Chief (2010) by Stanley Kurtz and reported directly in Obama’s True Legacy (2023), edited by Jamie Glazov.

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