Former President Barack Obama said on a Wednesday podcast that male friendship groups should have a homosexual friend.

Obama made the claim on his wife Michelle Obama’s “IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson,” during an episode in which the couple also refuted divorce rumors. The former president seemed to argue that having a gay friend was crucial to create an inclusive community. (RELATED: ‘The Party Has Been Taken Over’: Former Clinton Pollster Tells Harris Faulkner ‘Far Left’ Made Democratic Party ‘Unrecognizable’)

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“One of the most valuable things I learned as a guy was 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,” the former president said. “You need that! To show empathy and kindness.”

“And by the way, you need that person in your friend group so that if you then have a boy who is gay or non-binary or what have you, they have somebody that they can go, ‘Okay, I’m not alone in this,’ right?” he added. “So that, I think, is — creating that community — I know it’s corny, but that’s what they need.”

The former president, when he was 21-years-old, wrote to his ex-girlfriend Alex McNear that he “make[s] love to men daily, but in the imagination,” according to a letter the New York Post obtained from Obama biographer and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow.

“In regard to homosexuality, I must say that I believe this is an attempt to remove oneself from the present, a refusal perhaps to perpetuate the endless farce of earthly life,” Obama wrote to McNear, according to the NYP. “You see, I make love to men daily, but in the imagination.”

“My mind is androgynous to a great extent and I hope to make it more so until I can think in terms of people, not women as opposed to men,” he wrote, according to the NYP. “But, in returning to the body, I see that I have been made a man, and physically in life, I choose to accept that contingency.”

Moreover, Garrow wrote in “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama” about the former president’s two years at Occidental College and his close relationship with his openly gay assistant professor Lawrence Goldyn.

Divorce rumors arose as the former first lady did not attend the funeral of late President Jimmy Carter and President Donald Trump’s inauguration in quick succession in January. However, she asserted during the podcast that she had never weighed divorcing the former president.

“There hasn’t been one moment in our marriage where I thought about quitting on my man. And we’ve had some really hard times … a lot of fun times, a lot of adventures,” the former first lady said. “And I have become a better person because of the man I’m married to.”

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