From the Washington Post:
Quote:
When Sexuality Undercuts A Family's Ties
By Marc Fisher
Sunday, February 13, 2005; Page C01
Maya Keyes loves her father and mother. She put off college and moved from the family home in Darnestown to Chicago to be with her dad on a grand adventure. Even though she disagrees with him on "almost everything" political, she worked hard for his quixotic and losing campaign for the U.S. Senate.
Now Maya Keyes -- liberal, lesbian and a little lost -- finds herself out on her own. She says her parents -- conservative commentator and perennial candidate Alan Keyes and his wife, Jocelyn -- threw her out of their house, refused to pay her college tuition and stopped speaking to her.
Maya, 19, says her parents cut her off because of who she is -- "a liberal queer." Tomorrow, she will take her private dispute with her dad into the open. She is scheduled to make her debut as a political animal, speaking at a rally in Annapolis sponsored by Equality Maryland, the state's gay rights lobby.
She plans to talk about "what it was like for me growing up as a liberal queer in a very conservative household. I've known so many other people in a position like mine, where their families really don't want much to do with them. Maybe I can help by talking about it."
During his failed campaign last fall against Barack Obama (D) for the Illinois Senate seat, Alan Keyes lashed out at Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of Vice President Cheney. Keyes told a radio interviewer that Mary Cheney was a "selfish hedonist." Then, without having been asked anything about his own family, he volunteered that "if my daughter were a lesbian, I'd look at her and say, 'That is a relationship that is based on selfish hedonism.' I would also tell my daughter that it's a sin and she needs to pray to the Lord God to help her deal with that sin."
Maya heard the comments and recoiled. "It was kind of strange that he said it like a hypothetical," she says. "It was really kind of unpleasant."
Alan Keyes (R) has made a career as a controversialist, an eloquent and passionate defender of traditional values and conservative thinking. He has run for the Senate three times and the presidency twice. Like his daughter, he took time away from education because of his politics, leaving Cornell University as a freshman after getting into a heated dispute with black students who had taken over the student center.
Maya is also an eloquent iconoclast, at once an adult and an adolescent, testing society's limits even as she expects her parents to give her the love and support they always have provided.
Her parents have known that Maya is a lesbian since they found a copy of the Washington Blade, the gay weekly, in her room and confronted her at the end of high school (she went to Oakcrest School for Girls, a Catholic school in McLean run by the church's highly devout Opus Dei movement.) Ever since, Maya says, her parents have told her that her sexuality is wrong and sinful.
"As long as I was quiet about being gay or my politics, we got along," she says. "Then I went to the Counterinaugural," last month's protests in Washington against President Bush. "My father didn't like that."
Maya returned from the demonstration to find that she had been let go from her job at her father's political organization.
She says she was told to leave her father's apartment and not to expect any money toward attending Brown University, where she was admitted but deferred matriculation to spend a year teaching in southern India. "In my father's view, financing my college would be financing my politics, in a sense," Maya says, "because I plan to be an activist after college."
She wrote to her parents to tell them about tomorrow's speech, but says she got no response.
After I contacted Alan Keyes's office, press secretary Connie Hair called back with a prepared statement from him: "My daughter is an adult, and she is responsible for her own actions. What she chooses to do has nothing to do with my work or political activities." End of statement.
Maya, too, has had her testy moments, which she has shared on the Internet. "Sometimes I cannot believe I am related to this man," she wrote in her online diary last fall. "Haha though I'm sure he feels the same way about me."
In another passage, she wrote of her parents: "I'm all about working for global justice. THEY don't care about that. THEY only care that I am an evil dyke."
Maya is more conflicted than her online rants might indicate. She shares some of her dad's political and religious foundations. She is religious and deeply opposes abortion, viewing it as the taking of life.
Still, when I asked Maya whether she is glad her father lost the election, she stopped short. "Should you really be asking that question? I mean, I suppose there is a conflict, but I'm not sure I wanted him to lose. I disagree with nearly all his views, but he's very honest and has a lot of integrity."
If she could talk to her parents now, she would tell them she does not intend to hurt them by going public. "I wish the fact that I was gay was not something that would hurt them either," she says. "It wasn't anything they did that made me this way. I really don't see why what I think should affect him in any way."
During the campaign, other bloggers discovered Maya's Web site and the electronic gossip flew for a while, but her sexuality was barely mentioned in the campaign or the corporate media.
The end of the campaign brought no respite from the tensions at home. Two weeks ago, her parents said she would have to make her own way. "After all the arguments and tensions over the years, I always hoped it would never actually get to this point," Maya wrote, "although I suppose given our vastly divergent political beliefs, it was inevitable."
But her friends told her no, there was nothing remotely inevitable about the break, that political differences and even sexual orientation ought not result in being kicked out. Maya wrote: "They say most parents would be thrilled to have a child who doesn't smoke, have sex, do drugs, hardly drinks. . . , does well in school, gets good grades, gets into the Ivy League. . . , goes regularly to church, spends free time mentoring kids."
Maya still sounds more sad than angry about her situation. "I wouldn't want to do anything to hurt my father," she says. Like other gay relatives of prominent conservatives, she has struggled with how public to be about her sexuality. Like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's sister Candace, who campaigned for John Kerry on behalf of a gay rights group, Maya says she has come to believe that "while we might be trading on our prominence, it's a good thing to do something good with our situation, and anyway, we didn't choose to be queer."
Maya is looking for work, planning to move in with friends in Washington or a brother in Boston. She hopes to get back in touch with her mom and dad.
On Thursday, the Point Foundation, a San Francisco-based charity that provides scholarships to students "who have been marginalized because of their sexual orientation," decided to pay Maya's expenses so she can begin her studies at Brown. "Many of the students we support have been disowned by their families because they've been honest about who they are," said the foundation's executive director, Vance Lancaster. "Maya's situation is especially poignant because of her father's position, but it's a situation that happens every day to hundreds of kids across the country." This year, Point has received more than 1,200 applications for about 40 scholarships.
Maya Keyes is looking for answers to all those conservatives who e-mail her about how she's going to burn in hell and to all those liberals who e-mail her about how she's a traitor because she won't disavow her father. And then there are the people who think she's a whiny brat, "that I'm immature for thinking that I want my parents to talk to me."
"It all seems kind of ridiculous," she says, "because I love him. He's my father." A man who specializes in explaining the complexities of a trying world ought to be able to see something as simple as that.
