What Everybody Doesn't Know About Mary Cheney
By Hank Stuever
Mary Cheney: Somewhere out there she exists, the actual Mary Cheney,
child of the nondisclosed location, the one who's the luh-luh-lesbian.
She's become this eternal and complicated mystery for people who are
gay, and without ever really knowing her or hearing from her, they've
spent four years writing poems, articles and protest songs about her.
They've implored her with open letters in forums she may or may not ever
read. They've waved signs with her name, started Web sites and put her
on a milk carton as though she were a missing child. Oh, Mary Cheney,
speak to us.
Then, after last week's final presidential debate, the subject of Mary
went surprisingly national, and she became her very own polling
question: Is it okay to drag Mary into this, as the Kerry-Edwards ticket
has done?
In the Oct. 14 Washington Post tracking poll, 64 percent of likely
voters said no, it was "inappropriate," and you get the feeling that
something like this makes most Americans feel kinda ooky. People don't
like to say the word lesbian, especially some mothers and fathers of
lesbians. The word summons up some outdated, maternal plea -- Couldn't
you wear a skirt just this once? Your father is running for office.
Mary, in pantsuits, with her life partner Heather Poe, transcends even
that small drama of the American family. She is here but not here.
Sometimes onstage, sometimes not, depending on the stage and the target
audience. On some level, the parent in everyone recoils when you start
talking about the other guy's kid, even though Mary is 35, and is in
charge of operations at her father's campaign office.
Vice President Cheney expressed outrage the day after Sen. John Kerry
brought it up ("Dick Cheney's daughter who is a" -- the pause here was a
fraction of time that might as well have been 10 seconds -- "lesbian,"
Kerry had said, in response to a question about whether lesbians and gay
men are born or choose to be homosexuals) in the last presidential
debate, just a week after Sen. John Edwards brought it up in the vice
presidential debate. Lynne Cheney, Mary's mother, was even more
incensed. She called it "a cheap and tawdry political trick. . . . The
only thing I can conclude is he's not a good man. I'm speaking as a
mom." (How dare they bring her daughter into this . . . this . . .
political debate. In a presidential election no less.)
"How incredibly sad for Mary Cheney, the lesbian in question. And not
for the reasons that her parents and the pundits have been screaming
about," journalist Dave Cullen wrote on Salon.com, deftly describing his
own offense at the latest chapter in the quiet saga of Mary. "It is not
an insult to call a proudly public lesbian a lesbian. It's an insult to
gasp when someone calls her a lesbian. . . . You're embarrassed for us.
And it's infuriating."
This is what Mary does. She inspires loads of typing and talking --
reading the "Cheney tea leaves," journalist Rex Wockner calls it in his
column this week on 365gay.com, a popular gay Web site. Wockner has read
a lot of Cheney tea leaves in his time, and it is exactly that --
studying facial expressions. Combing the clips looking for the cloaked
remark about Mary, or, in the rarest case, something actually spoken by
Mary herself. Looking for the content in statements or body language of
the Cheney family up on the dais, indulging in both the ironies and the
strange comedy of it.
Lesbian activist Chastity Bono apparently solved the conflict with her
sexual orientation and her father's politics back when her father,
Sonny, a Republican, was supporting the Defense of Marriage Act and
other laws that could restrict gay rights. "I was very naive in my
thinking," she said in a 2000 interview with the Advocate, a gay
newsmagazine, when asked to explain what life must have been like for
Mary, back in the last election, when Lynne Cheney was still huffily
denying, to Cokie Roberts and others, that Mary had even come out of the
closet.
"I still kind of believed in this idea of politicians caring about
people and voting based on a belief system of their own, as opposed to
really a bunch of people who are really trying to keep their jobs,"
Chastity Bono said. "[Politicians] are really concerned with power and
career, and that completely takes over anything else."
Andrew Sullivan, the gay conservative pundit and obsessive blogger,
takes a stab at the elusive Meaning of Mary:
"The Cheneys didn't respond to . . . [Republican senatorial candidate]
Alan Keyes' direct insult of their own daughter in Illinois. They have
not voiced objections to a single right-wing piece of homophobia in this
campaign," Sullivan posted Saturday.
"But they are outraged that Kerry mentioned the simple fact of their
daughter's openly gay identity. What complete b.s. . . . The GOP is run,
in part, by gay men and women, its families are full of gay people, and
yet it is institutionally opposed to even the most basic protections for
gay couples. You can keep up a policy based on rank hypocrisy for only
so long. And then it tumbles like a house of cards. Kerry just pulled
one card from out of the bottom of the heap. Watch the edifice of double
standards slowly implode. Gay people and their supporters will no longer
acquiesce in this charade. Why on earth should we?"
So. Mary is a lesbian.
Lesbian, lesbian, lesbian. (Do you have to keep saying lesbian?) This
is all she may ever be, at least in the history books. Before she became
a public enigma, she used to earn a nice living as a corporate liaison
for Coors Brewing Co., going into gay bars (sometimes with Mr.
International Leather 1999, who would wear his chaps and straps,
according to the Advocate) to convince everyone that Coors had changed.
For a long time, gay people were implored by activists to boycott Coors,
based on its funding of anti-gay causes. Mary got in there, talked about
Coors's new domestic-partner benefits for employees. Mary said, here,
try a Coors. She was good at that, and the boycott wafted away, and you
didn't see as much Bud Light in gay bars.
Mary is mythic, perhaps tragic, and don't forget sapphic. The conundrum
for the liberal-hearted, stereotypical homo voter is this: She likes
being Republican. She is a lesbian Republican.
One day, years from now, Mary may explain it to us. For now it's a
tale about a woman trapped in a tower circled by bats. This is a common
gay conceit, a misconception: Mary needs to be freed from all this. But
just when you think she's rescued, she's back in that fortress again.
Finally you realize that she returns there voluntarily, that she is not
trapped, that she was born and raised in the tower. Absent any words
from Mary herself, you can only assume that she would be the first to
tell you she belongs there.
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