What do you think of this quote?

shit take. gay people shouldn’t have to act as a token friend to teach you not to be a shitty person. as a minority he should understand it even more. does he think all the dumb proud boys need a black friend so that black people can take on the burden of showing racist assholes they are normal human beings?

Also I know tons of gay dudes with 0 empathy barack, not every gay man is an empathic queen. Maybe you should have learned some empathy though before you droned all those people

I just fucking love little bites of information shared in meme form out of context. Really gives a good enough picture for judgement, right?
Here's the article that probably prompted this: https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/07/21/barack-obama-gay-college-professor/
If you read it through, the message is just a bit different from the sentence in this image.
Here's the pertinent section from the article:
Reflecting on his own experiences, Obama shared that young men need a “diverse” network of role models – and that one of his own was his out gay college professor.
“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 favourite professors and was a great guy and would call me out when I started saying stuff that was ignorant,” Obama shared.
“You need that — to show empathy and kindness.”
So his point was really that people need a diversity of types of people as role models, and that one of his own was a gay professor who showed empathy and kindness. The meme changes it a bit.
- So he words it better in the article but the core message that minorities should carry the burden of emotional labor and growth for the ill informed and bigoted is essentially the same
  “[the gay professor] would call me out when I started saying stuff that was ignorant”
  Granted one can’t learn the struggles of every single minority group in existence but maybe take it upon yourself to learn empathic approaches to listening and communicating. You won’t be perfect of course, no one is, but you’ll put a lot less people in the position of having to explain to you “this is why you’re being an ass right now”

It's an awkward way of saying that we should seek out a broad variety of peers, friends and acquaintances.

A shocking number of comments in this thread that apparently were not able to parse that out. Sure it was awkward but it wasn't that monumentally opaque this many people should have missed the message.
- Yet OP still felt so compelled, so out of the loop to ask… so here we are all talking about it.
  The entire post feels like it is made of false pretense… “what do you think of [obvious] X?”
  It feels pretty damn much like OP is cooking BS here… the original post feels disingenuous.

There are some horrible gay men out there. Ask gay men. Or look at Peter Thiel. Like yes you should ideally have some variety in your friend group because that helps with empathy but this is not explicitly about gay men. Kinda tokenizing to act like it is. Similar to "You need black friends so you learn to dance better" or some bs like that.

Yeah. I was about to post the first gay man (that I knew was gay) was an asshole. I didn't think all gay men were assholes, but I learned empathy before high school, so I was able to assume he was just a selfish dick.
- you met a gay man for the first time in high school ?

Nice in an ideal world

But just as it’s not a woman’s job to teach men emotional skills, it’s not a gay persons either.

Others can’t keep carrying the burden for this.

And then he started blasting

Isolating from people who haven't developed social skills is how we got incels in the first place.

Ahh yes because kindness and empathy is stored in the gay genes of course lmfao, what dribble.

There are not enough gay men around for that. But also who knows if this is really a Obama quote. And there are also enough wemen who can be role models for that an hetro, bi, and whatever non gay men who can be role models for empathy and kindness.

Obviously not drone-Obama.

Or other men. Anyone can be an ass, anyone can be kind. It isn't a sexuality or gender thing.
it was said at a 2015 WH conference on aging. he expressed the thought at other times, too. Yahoo seems to suggest he attributes the thought to a gay professor he had, who modeled empathy and kindness to him.
To be clear, having a role model that is empathetic and kind is what's needed. Looking for that in a particular flavor of humanity is... unnecessary. There are, IMO, rather few flavors of humanity in which you can't find those qualities. (not saying it's universal, but it's not something tied to race or creed or generic social constructs. Except fucking nazis and their ilk. we won't get into that.)

Kind of a dumb quote. We need to be around gay men to learn how women feel when we're trying way to hard to bang someone who isn't interested.

does this apply to women? do women need lesbian friend to learn empathy and kindness? asking for a friend.

how DARE you
- 🥰
- Jenny/Amber?
as a society we already teach girls to be more reserved, thoughtful and kind, which also encourages empathy. the problem is that we teach boys to be tough and strong, and not much else. so they either need to learn these values from women or gay men who may have avoided the traps of toxic masculinity. of course if you're friends with women or gay men you're already self selecting as you're also avoiding some trappings of toxic masculinity.
though Obama is bullshitting obviously because he showed none of that when he ordered drone strikes on random brown people celebrating and dancing in a wedding and shit... but the point stands.

I love this.

Well I'll tell you I think a lot more of it than I do of that engagement style title used on this OP.

I think it makes a lot of sense though if you actually pay attention to how teenage boys are behaving lately. There's a lot of anti-gay sentiment. The best way to fight bigotry is exposure. That's why conservatives hate the idea of college so much. They don't like people of different backgrounds and beliefs mixing.