Of course he was, he’s a skirt chasing country boy from Arkansas, however, he was at least compassionate enough to open some of those doors for our LGBTQ allies, DOMA was shitty legislation but after it’s passing many other steps were made to help these folks.

I’m not sure how old you were in '96, but I was a Jr in Highschool at the time, most people still used “fag” and “homo” to joke around about stuff still. We only had two completely out gay dudes in my highschool, I was cool with both of them and knew them through some girls that we all were mutual friends with. At one point some of the more "white trash/racist kids that I’d already had a problem with started harassing these gay dudes pretty constantly and pretty aggressively and the girls we were mutual friends with got my friends and I to handle the situation for them, we out numbered the homophobes by quite a bit and they chose not to fight at that time.

Now mind you, this is on Long Island, just a short train ride to NYC, the Village, and Stonewall, and Pride parades happened each year at this point, so while there were only two out gay dudes in my school most likely many of us had a LGBTQ person we knew back then that was out. Now imagine how this situation would have gone down back in '96, in Arkansas, I can tell you exactly how it would go down based on my experiences living in Florida during the early 90’s as well, but also by how it would go down even now in Arkansas.

So sure saying Clinton was as homophobic as the rest in 1996 is pretty much saying that water is wet, most people were ignorant, and even worse many of us still believed the HIV based homophobic conspiracy theories, because AIDS was a huge problem at the time.