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Jimmy Carter is putting the out in outspokenness.

In an interview with bigthink.com, the former president was asked, “Is the country ready for a gay president?”

Even as John McCain
and other ossified Republicans were staging last-minute manoeuvres to
torpedo the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal, the 86-year-old Carter was
envisioning a grander civil rights victory.

“I would say that the answer is yes,” he said. “I don’t know about the next election, but I think in the near future.”

The news that
Leonardo DiCaprio and Armie Hammer will smooch in an upcoming movie
about J. Edgar Hoover and his aide Clyde Tolson – buried near each
other in the Congressional Cemetery on Capitol Hill – is a reminder of
an “Advise and Consent” Washington where being a closeted gay official
made you vulnerable to blackmail.

Others feel we’re
not ready for a gay president, citing the fear and loathing unleashed
by the election of the first black president. “Can you imagine how much
a gay president would have to overcompensate to please the macho
ninnies who control our national debate?” Bill Maher told me. “Women
like Hillary have to do it, Obama had to do it because he’s black and
liberal, but a gay president? He’d have to nuke something the first
week.”

I called Barney
Frank, assuming the gay pioneer would be optimistic. He wasn’t. “It’s
one thing to have a gay person in the abstract,” he said. “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.”
Because of the Defence of Marriage Act, he added, “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.”

Frank noted that
we’ve “clearly had one gay president already, James Buchanan. If I had
to pick one, it wouldn’t be him.” (The Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan
aims higher, citing Abe Lincoln, who sometimes bundled with his
military bodyguard in bed when his wife was away.)

Frank said that
although most Republicans now acknowledge that sexual orientation is
not a choice, they still can’t handle their pols’ coming out. “There
are Republicans here who are gay,” he said of Congress, “but as long as
they don’t acknowledge it, it’s O.K. Republicans only tolerate you
being gay as long as you don’t seem proud of it. You’ve got to be
apologetic.”

Sam Adams, the
mayor of Portland, Ore., hopes that the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t
tell” will help persuade “the collective conscience of the United
States that gay people are just the same as anybody else. We shouldn’t
have to die in the closet. The irony is, as mayor, I marry people, but
I can’t marry Peter, my long time partner.”

There are no openly
gay senators, governors, cabinet members or Supreme Court justices.
There are four openly gay Democratic House members, once David
Cicilline of Rhode Island gets sworn in.

Representative
Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin recalled that during a race for State
Assembly, a voter she thought was “trouble” swaggered up to her. But
she need not have braced herself. “If you can be honest about that,” he
told her, “you’ll be honest about everything.”

She said she took
her former girlfriend, Lauren, to White House parties to meet three
presidents, interactions that she thinks “really helps change minds and
advance the cause.”

Representative
Jared Polis of Colorado said he took his boyfriend, Marlon Reis, to a
White House Christmas party this year. He said Marlon is “very popular
– some of his best friends are Republican spouses.”

Fred Sainz of the Human Rights Campaign fretted to his husband that a gay president would be anticlimactic.

“People expect this
bizarre and outlandish behaviour,” he told me. “We’re always the funny
neighbour wearing colourful, avant-garde clothing. We would let down
people with our boringness and banality when they learn that we go to
grocery stores Saturday afternoon, take our kids to school plays and go
see movies.”

After studying
polling data for a decade, Sainz thinks a lesbian would have a better
shot at the presidency than a gay man. “People are more comfortable
with women than they are with men because of stereotypes with gay men
about hyper sexuality,” he said.

André Leon Talley,
the Vogue visionary, pictures a lesbian president who looks like Julie
Andrews and dresses to meet heads of state in “ankle-length skirts,
grazing the Manolo Blahnik kitten heels.” She would save her “butch
trouser suit for weekends at Camp David and vacation hikes in
Yellowstone. No plaid lumberjack shirts at any time.”

2010 New York Times News Service