Barack Obama says having gay friends and role models can help young men develop “empathy and kindness.”

The former president joined wife Michelle Obama and brother-in-law Craig Robinson on the most recent episode of their podcast, IMO, to help answer a listener’s question about raising emotionally intelligent boys at a time when toxic messages abound in the online “manosphere.”

Related

Barack Obama admits he used anti-gay slurs before taking office
He also reveals that his great aunt was a lesbian.

Among Obama’s advice was to look to the community to find diverse male role models for young men.

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“I do think as a society, we have to create more structures for boys and men to … be able to meet a wide range of role models so that whatever their inclinations, they can see a path to success that isn’t just sports or money, making a lot of money,” he said. “That’s one of the things that I think a lot of times boys need, is not just exposure to one guy, one dad. No matter how good the dad is, he can’t be everything. And then that boy may need somebody to give the boy some perspective on the dad.”

The former president offered an example from his own life of a gay man who influenced him profoundly.

“I had a gay professor in college at a time when openly gay folks still weren’t out a lot, who became one of my favorite professors and was a great guy and would call me out when I started saying stuff that was ignorant,” Obama recalled. “You need that, to show empathy and kindness.”

Obama has told a version of this story before. In his 2020 memoir, A Promised Land, the former president admitted to throwing around anti-LGBTQ+ slurs with his friends growing up in the 1970s, describing them as “callow attempts to fortify our masculinity and hide our insecurities.” But, he wrote, once he came to understand the discrimination LGBTQ+ people faced from out friends and professors in college, he “felt ashamed of my past behavior – and learned to do better.”

The former president has specifically credited Dr. Lawrence Goldyn, who taught European Politics when Obama was a student at Occidental College, with reshaping his understanding of the LGBTQ+ community.

“He was the first openly gay professor that I had ever come in contact with, or openly gay person of authority that I had come in contact with,” Obama recalled in a 2008 interview with The Advocate. “He wasn’t proselytizing all the time, but just his comfort in his own skin and the friendship we developed helped to educate me on a number of these issues.”

“He went out of his way to advise lesbian, gay, and transgender students at Occidental, and keep in mind, this was 1978,” Obama told Out in 2015. “That took a lot of courage, a lot of confidence in who you are and what you stand for. I got to recognize Lawrence last year at our Pride Month reception at the White House, and thank him for influencing the way I think about so many of these issues.”

On IMO this week, Obama went on to add that cis, straight parents should also try to cultivate friendships within their own circle of friends. “That if you then have a boy who is gay or nonbinary or whatever, they have somebody that they can go, ‘Okay, I’m not alone in this,’ right?” he explained.

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