by Karen Ocamb

The first time most Americans heard about Barack Obama was through news reports about this young, black Harvard graduate and Chicago community organizer “with the funny name,” who was running unopposed for the Illinois state Legislature with what the New York Times would later call a “pragmatic and shrewd” style of politics.

Then Obama made Americans cry and curled political toes with his inspirational keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, during which he spoke of his inter-racial African-American heritage and called for an end to the Bush-Rove divisiveness.

“It’s that fundamental belief—I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sisters’ keeper—that makes this country work,” Obama said. “Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into red states and blue states; red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. … We coach Little League in the blue states and have gay friends in the red states ... We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”

Obama won his 2004 Senate campaign with 70 percent of the vote.

But perhaps the truest indication of how Obama became one of two leading 2008 Democratic presidential candidates lies in a 2006 appearance at Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin’s annual steak fry.

“There are two things in Iowa—corn and white people. Last Sunday, there were three—corn, white people and Barack Obama,” Todd Rowe wrote on his blog Technicianonline.com on Sept. 21, 2006 after watching Obama’s speech live on C-SPAN. “The fact that so many people at this rally urged him to run for president speaks volumes about his broad appeal, given that the rally was in Iowa, the seemingly whitest state in the union, not his home state of Illinois.” Indeed, Obama won the Jan. 3 Iowa Caucus.

Obama came to the attention of most LGBT people in February 2007 when openly gay Hollywood mogul David Geffen blasted Hillary Clinton in Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times. Geffen subsequently co-hosted a million-dollar fundraiser for Obama.

In Los Angeles, longtime ANGLE checkbook activist Jeremy Bernard and his partner, Rufus Gifford, joined Obama’s campaign early on as financial consultants. Longtime Democratic activist Steve Smith signed on as Deputy Political Director in California and opened for Obama during his recent rousing rally at Universal City. More recently, West Hollywood Mayor John Duran endorsed Obama as the candidate who spoke to his heart and mind.

On the Black AIDS Institute website, executive director Phill Wilson noted that Obama—who talked about AIDS in white evangelist Rick Warren’s church—“urged African-Americans to challenge stigma surrounding the virus, and notably cited homophobia as a roadblock” during a black-sponsored presidential forum last June.

Senior LGBT advisor Tobias Wolff, a noted author, scholar and legal activist on marriage and military issues, told IN Los Angeles magazine that while in the state senate, Obama exhibited “political courage” and passed legislation permitting pharmacies to dispense small amounts of syringes to people at risk of transmitting HIV, which subsequently precipitated a significant drop in new infections.

During the Logo/HRC forum in Hollywood last August, Obama said, “It is my strong belief that the government has to treat all citizens equally. I come from that in part out of personal experience. When you're a black guy named Barack Obama, you know what it's like to be on the outside. And so my concern is continually to make sure that the rights that are conferred by the state are equal for all people.”

Obama has promised to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, which he voted against in 2006, as well as the military’s anti-gay “Don’t Ask, Don’t’ Tell” policy. He opposes same-sex marriage, but supports civil unions and wants the word “marriage” with its religious connotations “disentangled” from the civil rights that are given to couples.”

Pressed on how that sounded like a “separate but equal” policy, Obama told the Logo/HRC audience about how the marriage of his interracial parents would have been illegal in the 1960s and therefore the matter was “something that I care about.”

But, the one-time community organizer said, “If I were advising the civil rights movement back in 1961 about its approach to civil rights, I would have probably said it's less important that we focus on an anti-miscegenation law than we focus on a voting rights law and a non-discrimination and employment law and all the legal rights that are conferred by the state. ... And look, you know, semantics may be important to some. From my perspective, what I'm interested in is making sure that those legal rights are available to people. And if we have a situation in which civil unions are fully enforced, are widely recognized, people have civil rights under the law, then my sense is that's enormous progress.”

Obama also noted that he has raised the issue in black churches. “I specifically pointed out that if there's any pastor here who can point out a marriage that has been broken up as a consequence of seeing two men or two women holding hands, then we—you should tell me, because I haven't seen any evidence of it.”

Indeed, during his remarks at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on Jan. 20, recognizing Martin Luther King Day, Obama said: “Unity is the great need of the hour—the great need of this hour ... and yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean. … We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them.” (Read the entire speech on www.barackobama.com).

But Obama has gotten into trouble with the LGBT community, too. A gospel tour through South Carolina intended to capture black voters was headlined by “ex-gay” singer Donnie McClurkin. Wolff told IN that the event planner booked McClurkin, a decision that was not vetted by the campaign. “It was a mistake,” Wolff said, “a big one.”

Obama was also roundly criticized recently when he philosophically seemed to praise Ronald Reagan’s “transformative” and optimistic presidency in an interview with a Reno newspaper, without qualifying that it was also marred by Reagan’s willful neglect of people with AIDS.

“We spelled ‘Morning in America’ with a ‘U’—Mourning in America,” said one disappointed Obama supporter.

“He may not have praised [Reagan], but he didn't condemn him either,” Marti Abernathey, founder of transadvocate.com, told IN. “The whole thing really bothered me. But then he goes into a hostile environment and speaks about equality for LGBT people ... it leaves me feeling kind of punch drunk. Don't get me wrong—I'll be out next weekend canvassing for him. It's just really odd.”

No one from the Obama campaign replied to a request for comment before press time.

For Wolff, two important questions LGBT voters must ask are: 1) who is going to put energy and political capitol into making progressive change for LGBT people, and 2) who offers a real and promising path to get that done?

“Sen. Clinton has not made the case that she has something new to offer that will produce different and better results at the national level for LGBT progress,” Wolff said. Obama “is the only person who is already doing the work of building the coalition that will be necessary to bring into the fold people who don’t yet agree with us on LGBT issues.”

Obama, Wolff said, knows how to get past the entrenched interests in Washington. “Tone matters in politics—but it is also about how you do business as a politician,” Wolff said. Bill and Hillary Clinton “define their political efforts in terms of friends and enemies—and that has not served us very well on LGBT issues.”

But another aspect of getting past the divineness is to act unified. “Old-style coalition politics is about showing up for other people’s issues, and I think LGBT folks need to start really showing up on issues of racial equality and clearly, LGBT gender equality issues, on issues of poverty. And in return, I think we can expect allies to start showing up for our issues,” Wolff said. “In Barack Obama, we have a leader who is setting that kind of tone. And that’s not something we have tried to do in American politics at a national level in a serious enough way for a long time.”

California’s Primary is on Feb. 5.