Newsweek‘s eye-catching cover calls Obama ‘The First Gay President’

Newsweek is celebrating President Obama's support for same-sex marriage on its latest issue's cover, an image of which was released on Sunday.

Last week, Time magazine cover image of a young woman breast-feeding her toddler created hype and the cover caused a hike in magazine sales across the world. This led to a magazine war as Newsweek editor Tina Brown took up the challenge of coming up with an even more shocking, controversial and eye-catching cover. She is known for her love of controversial magazine covers to boost sales and maintain public interest.

The president is looking quite angelic on the magazine’s cover with a rainbow-colored halo above his head and his face is turned skywards. The image highlights the issue's cover story, written by Andrew Sullivan, titled "The First Gay President".

The Newsweek cover story by author Andrew Sullivan is based on the ideas behind Obama’s endorsement of gay marriages and compares Obama's experience as a biracial American to the gay experience in USA.

Sullivan argues that Obama's announcement has not come as a surprise and it was planned for years. He writes that Obama has many similarities with the gay community. He tells, “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.”

About the importance of the declaration of support for gay community, Sullivan writes that it is a huge step for the president and also a wise one. He writes, "Today Obama did more than make a logical step. He let go of fear. He is clearly prepared to let the political chips fall as they may. That's why we elected him. That's the change we believed in."

The controversial cover hits newsstands Monday, less than a week after Obama declared his support for same-sex unions. Obama explained how exactly his thoughts had developed on the subject, including the fact that his young kids have several friends who have same-sex parents.

However, his beliefs are opposite to those of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, who reconfirmed on Saturday that he firmly supports the notion that says "marriage is a relationship between one man and one woman.”