Barney Frank Worries America Will Be Disgusted By A Gay Presidential Candidate Sharing A Kiss
“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.”)
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.
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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.
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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?
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@Thom Freeheart: I admire your faith and optimism in expecting substantiated and sourced posts from certain persons on here.
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Well it’s settled then. Barney Frank is an authentic psychic.