Barack Obama spent his college days reading Virginia Woolf to try and pick up an ‘ethereal bisexual’ girl
Former president Barack Obama (Scott Olson/Getty)
Barack Obama has recalled his days as a college student, reading Virginia Woolf novels to impress a bisexual girl he fancied.
The first volume of the former president’s memoir, A Promised Land, gave readers an insight to the former president’s romantic life in the years before before meeting Michelle, making attempts at romance while studying at Los Angeles’ Occidental College before transferring to Columbia.
Barack Obama recalls efforts to try and impress college girls.
He recalled: “Looking back it’s embarrassing to recognise the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know.
“[Karl] Marx and [Herbert] Marcuse, so I had something to say to the long-legged socialist who lived in my dorm; [Frantz] Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks for the smooth-skinned sociology major who never gave me a second look; [Michel] Foucault and [Virginia] Woolf for the ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black.
A young Barack Obama poses in the office of The Harvard Law Review (Lane Turner/The Boston Globe via Getty)
“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless; I found myself in a series of affectionate but chaste friendships.
“Still these halting efforts served a purpose: Something approaching a worldview took shape in my mind.”
Obama on his how his discovery of Marx and Foucault in college became inseparable from “a strategy for picking up girls”: pic.twitter.com/SWBvlb4c7j
— Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins (@daniel_dsj2110) November 18, 2020
The internet is a fan of the ‘ethereal bisexual’ who friendzoned the future president.
The passage has since gone viral on Twitter. A response quipped: “The ethereal bisexual who always wore black and who made Obama read Foucault only to friendzone him later is the coolest person who ever lived on this planet.”
Another joked: “Obama pretended to like Woolf in a failed attempt to hook up with an ethereal bisexual; I pretended to like Dave Matthews Band in a successful attempt to hook up with two closeted bro army recruits, but you don’t see me writing memoirs.”
Others were left with “‘Foucault and Woolf for the ethereal bisexual’ rattling around my head in Obama voice.”
Of course, few writers have more queer energy than Virginia Woolf, a staple of ethereal bisexuals everywhere.
