What Everybody Doesn't Know About Mary Cheney
By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 19, 2004; Page C01
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 The word summons up some outdated, maternal plea -- Couldn't you wear a skirt just this once?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.http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43375-2004Oct18?language=printer
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msnbc.msn.com
Something About Mary
Gay-marriage proponents target the veep's daughter
By Mark Miller and Debra Rosenberg
Newsweek
Feb. 23, 2004 issue - In a campaign consumed with Vietnam War records and elusive weapons of mass destruction, the candidates have so far tiptoed around the season's touchiest wedge issue: gay marriage. Though advisers to George W. Bush hinted that the president would soon throw his support behind an amendment to the U.S. Constitution limiting marriage to the union of one man and one woman, he has yet to do so. And John Kerry hasn't been eager to detail his more nuanced stance against both gay marriage and any constitutional effort to ban it. The issue holds dangers for both sides. While Bush could rally his conservative base by backing an amendment, he doesn't want to alienate moderate voters by seeming mean-spirited. Kerry wants to stake out middle ground without seeming like another out-of-step Massachusetts liberal. Yet with grass-roots activists across the country ratcheting up the volume last week, the candidates may be dragged into the center of the latest cultural battle sooner than they'd like.
Activists on both sides are launching guerrilla strikes. Conservatives have railed against same-sex marriage on talk radio and e-mail networks for months. Now they're lobbying in statehouses across the country. In San Francisco, hundreds of gay couples raced to impromptu weddings on the steps of city hall's ornate rotunda, where Mayor Gavin Newsom defiantly began issuing same-sex licenses in apparent violation of California law. "I don't accept that I'm breaking the law," Newsom told NEWSWEEK. "This is about not allowing discrimination." In Massachusetts last week, foes of gay marriage scrambled to pass a constitutional ban. They failed but will try again next month. And in the most audacious surprise attack yet, a new Web site targeted Mary Cheney, the openly lesbian daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney. Within an hour of its launch, DearMary.com attracted 100 emotional letters pleading with her to weigh in against a constitutional amendment. "Where is your courage, Mary?" asked one. "Your community needs you to voice your dissent."
As director of vice presidential operations for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, Mary Cheney makes an inviting target. In 2000 the Cheney family insisted that Mary was a private citizen and off-limits to the press. Even so, her presence seemed to bolster the "compassionate conservative" image the Bush-Cheney ticket hoped to portray. After her father became veep, Mary joined the gay-friendly Republican Unity Coalition and gave speeches encouraging the GOP to reach out to women, minorities and gays. "We can make sexual orientation a nonissue for the Republican Party, and we can help achieve equality for all gay and lesbian Americans," she said in an April 2002 statement. But when she joined the '04 campaign last year, Mary quit the coalition and seemed to fade into her own undisclosed location.
Now that Mary, 34, is a senior campaign official, the Web site hopes to shame her back into the spotlight. Still, the effort's ultimate target isn't Mary but her dad's boss. (The Bush-Cheney campaign declined to comment.) Though Dick Cheney at one time seemed sympathetic to gay unions—in a 2000 debate with Joe Lieberman he said the issue should be left to the states—last month he said he would support "whatever decision" Bush makes. "I think the American people deserve to know he is willing to sell out his daughter for votes. It says something about his character," says John Aravosis, a Washington, D.C., political consultant who founded the site along with Los Angeles activist Robin Tyler. The two have a solid track record: in 2000 they helped force conservative talk-show host Dr. Laura Schlesinger off television with a similar campaign.
This week they plan an e-mail ad picturing Mary's face on a milk carton. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? it asks, noting that she's been "silent since her father endorsed anti-gay constitutional amendment making her and millions of Americans second-class citizens." Says Aravosis: "I think Mary is our last best hope to stopping this amendment." Even if last week's skirmishes turn out to be more symbolism than substance—it's doubtful the California marriages will hold up in court—they're proof that gay marriage is nudging its way onto the campaign trail.
With Karen Breslau in San Francisco |
