I was trying to build an encryption program in python 2.7. It would read the binary from a file and then use a key to encrypt it. However, I quickly ran into a problem. Files like image files and executables read as hex values. However, text files do not using open(). Even if i run 
file=open("myfile.txt", "rb")
out=file.read()
it still comes out as just text. I'm on windows 7, not linux which i think may make a difference. Is there any way i could read the binary from ANY file (including text files), not just image and executable files?
Your binary file is coming out looking like text because the file is being treated like it is encoded in an 8 bit encoding (ASCII or Latin-1, etc).  Also, in Python 2, bytes and (text) characters are used interchangeably... i.e. a string is just an array of ASCII bytes.
You should search the differences between python 2 and 3 text encoding and you will quickly see why anomalies such as you are encountering can develop.  Most of the Python 2 version encryption modules use the python byte strings.
Your "binary" non-text files are not really being treated any differently from the text ones; they just don't map to an intelligible coding that you recognize, whereas the text ones do.
Python read text file as binary?