Newsweek Cover Calls Obama ‘First Gay President’ [Photo]

The cover story is said to focus on President Obama's recent shift on gay marriage.

By Jorge Rivas May 15, 2012

Newsweek Magazine isn’t going let TIME Magazine steal all the headlines with controversial covers. Last week’s TIME mag cover included an image of a mother breast feeding her son, now Newsweek’s cover includes an image of President Obama with a rainbow halo above his head with the headline "The First Gay President."

The cover story is said to focus on President Obama’s recent shift on gay marriage.

"Obama’s earned every stripe in this haloed rainbow," Newsweek’s editor-in-chief Tina Brown wrote on Twitter.

The cover story was written by openly gay Newsweek contributor Andrew Sullivan. Newsweek has released an excerpt in which Sullivan argues the president’s move to support same-sex marriage was not just a political ploy.

"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," Sullivan writes.

Sullivan goes on to draw comparisons between Obama’s growing up in a white household and the experience of gays who grow up in heterosexual families.

"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.