Obama As The First Gay President Newsweek Cover
President Obama Gay Newsweek Cover
I neglected to comment earlier this year on the Newsweek magazine cover featuring President Obama with a rainbow-colored halo along with the headline “The First Gay President”.
The cover and the headline were, of course, engineered to be highly provocative, because Obama himself isn’t gay (one assumes), although his public support of gay rights and gay marriage were something of an historic watershed moment.
The headline perhaps takes too many liberties by playing on the whole stereotype wherein magazines have been known to loudly “out” some celebrity via a cover story (is outing nearly a meme?), intimating through the headline that Obama is gay. However, no one was really fooled by the almost satirical claim.
The question is whether the purposefully provocative cover sold magazines to both gay-marriage-supporters as well as to anti-gay-marriage conservatives? The image certainly would play directly into the fears of those conservatives, since right-wing talkshow pundits have continuously levied claims that Obama is a closeted fill-in-the-blank-with-everything-that-is-an-antithesis-to-conservative-Republican-ideals.
This almost certainly sold to enthusiastic gay marriage supporters, but did it also sell copies to curious conservatives?
No Comments