“I called Barney Frank,” writes Maureen Dowd about the prospects — pushed forward by President Jimmy Carter — of having a gay president one day soon, “assuming the gay pioneer would be optimistic.” Haha, Maureen. That was your first mistake: “He wasn’t.” Says Frank “It’s one thing to have a gay person in the abstract. It’s another to see that person as part of a living, breathing couple. How would a gay presidential candidate have a celebratory kiss with his partner after winning the New Hampshire primary? The sight of two women kissing has not been as distressful to people as the sight of two men kissing.” (Adds the always cynical, but realistic Frank: Because of DOMA, “it’s not clear that a gay president could use federal funds to buy his husband dinner. Would his partner have to pay rent in the White House? There would be no Secret Service protection for the paramour.”) Not mentioned once in Dowd’s column: The sure-to-be-unsuccessful Republican presidential campaign of Fred Karger.
(NB: The best part of Dowd’s column today is when she asked Vogue‘s André Leon Talley for his thoughts. He says he foresees a lesbian president, in the mold of Julie Andrews, and wears “ankle-length skirts, grazing the Manolo Blahnik kitten heels” to meet heads of state, while opting for a “butch trouser suit for weekends at Camp David and vacation hikes in Yellowstone. No plaid lumberjack shirts at any time.”)
ewe
Well it’s settled then. Barney Frank is an authentic psychic.
jacknasty
I really, really don’t like Andre Leon Tally, not because he is flamboyant but because he is a REALLY bad writer and has horrible taste in fashion and is baffling that he is the #2 at Vogue. However, that is a hilarious quote.
McMike
It’s beyond annoying to hear people ponder about if America is ready for a gay president when we’ve already had a gay president via James Buchanan. It’s sad America has back tracked so much since then.
Thom Freeheart
It depends on whether the candidate and his partner are good-looking or not.
ILoveDudes
Thom Freeheart : That sounds like a joke, but I think there’s a lot of truth there. So much on how we respond to people depends on the potential “yuck” factor. The standards for accepting two men kissing will be even higher than for heteros- they’ll have to be goodlooking, or at least pleasing-looking, to be mostly acceptable.
ILoveDudes
McMike : (rolling my eyes) Those at the time didn’t know James Buchanan was homosexual. We only know that he probably was in retrospect. A lot of more sophisticated folk might have suspected, but he was not openly gay. That’s ridiculous.
Ted B. (Charging Rhino)
If Buchanan were elected POTUS today, his “boyfriend” William Rufus King would already have Secret Service protection since he was the Vice President of the prior administration….
jason
There have been tons of bisexual Presidents. Abraham Lincoln was reputed to be bisexually oriented. So was JFK. Eishenower was reputed to have same-sex fantasies. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that 85% of all Presidents have had same-sex fantasies.
The difference then, of course, was that you didn’t discuss it. There was a DADT in relation to Presidential sex lives.
Thom Freeheart
JFK was bisexual? Eisenhower was reputed to have same-sex fantasies? Sources, please.
GregorVonK
Interesting thread. Can’t say it’ll NEVER happen. Who knew we’d be this far along even 30 yrs ago. But speaking of JFK, we still haven’t had a second Catholic prez. Romney’s Mormonism was said to work against him (and I’m not sure I’d disagree w/ such sentiments IF the candidate truly bought into all the tenets of their churches–Mormon, Catholic, whatever).
I’d say you’d see a (straight or ostensibly straight) woman president before you’d see an LGBT candidate. But who really knows? We do live in interesting times. Remember when they used to say you’d never see a prez whose last named ended in a vowel (other than e or y, I guess). They were, of course, thinking Italian, maybe Hispanic or even Slavic perhaps. Who would have guessed that the line would be crossed by a successful African-American candidate?
ILoveDudes
GregorVonk : Interestingly, Biden is the very first Catholic Vice-President. But, yes, still no second Catholic President. No Italian-American nor Jewish one either.
randy
Let’s elect a black gay female Jew in a wheelchair and be done with it!
L.
@Thom Freeheart: I admire your faith and optimism in expecting substantiated and sourced posts from certain persons on here.
L.
@Queerty: Your ability to twist words into headlines is getting more and more awe-inspiring by the day. It’s now *this* close to being worthy of an internship at Fox. Well done!
ousslander
I would be too if it was Frank.