Feb 18, 2005  | COMMENTS     

“A selfish hedonist.” That’s what Alan Keyes, the former Illinois Senate candidate and outspoken conservative commentator, called Mary Cheney — the lesbian daughter of the vice president — during a radio interview last August. Keyes later added he would have said the same thing to his own daughter if she were a lesbian.

“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.”

And according to Maya Marcel-Keyes, his 19-year-old lesbian daughter, her father kept his word.

“‘Selfish hedonist’ wasn’t a surprise because that’s what I have heard before growing up,” Marcel-Keyes said in an interview with the Blade this week. “I was surprised he made it so public because my dad has a lot of integrity.”

Keyes, who ran twice for the presidency, has been an ardent opponent of gay rights and has declared that if the “radical homosexual agenda” is accepted “we are utterly destroying the concept of family.”

During Keyes’ failed U.S. Senate bid, bloggers and online chat rooms were abuzz over rumors that the former ambassador’s daughter was a lesbian.

Those rumors were confirmed when the gay group Equality Maryland announced several weeks ago that Marcel-Keyes would be one of its featured speakers at a gay rights rally in Annapolis for the group’s annual lobby day.

Within the past few weeks, Marcel-Keyes’ parents have stopped communicating with their daughter, thrown her out of the house and are now refusing to pay her college tuition, she said.

Her father’s press secretary, Connie Hair, issued a terse statement about his daughter’s participation in the rally.

“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.”

Marcel-Keyes’ speech at Monday’s rally had less to do with going public about her sexual orientation and more to do with highlighting the problems of “queer kids who have no place to go,” she said. She dedicated the bulk of her rally remarks to a gay male friend named Shymmer, who she said recently died.

Marcel-Keyes said she had much in common with Shymmer; both were raised in conservative households and were kicked out by their parents. In contrast to the overwhelming support Marcel-Keyes said she has received since coming out, her friend was living on the streets.

“[He was] going home with any man who’d give him a roof over his head for the night,” she said, adding that Shymmer eventually “wound up with some people who just abused him awfully.”

Marcel-Keyes described the contrast between the support she has found and the desperate situation of her friend as stark and unfortunate.

“The first time something goes wrong in my life I get hundreds of people offering support, prayers, donations, people offering me spare bedrooms to crash in and telling me how they were going to make sure that I got through school alright,” Marcel-Keyes said in her speech.

“And Shymmer, he’d been out there for over two years now; been hungry and freezing and beaten up and raped and his situation was so incomparably worse than mine. And what support was offered him? He got the support his handful of friends had to offer, but where is the community that offers to stand in solidarity behind him?”

A pro-life, ‘liberal queer’
Young and somewhat insecure, Marcel-Keyes calls herself a “liberal queer” and admits the term is very much “in your face.” She puts a positive spin on the term, noting that it represents a chance for gay men and lesbians to “reclaim” the word “queer.” Her blog includes poems and lengthy personal entries.

Like her father, she is strongly pro-life, noting that “the child in the womb is a human being and I don’t believe in killing people.” She was raised Catholic and attended the conservative Catholic school, Oakcrest Preparatory in McLean, Va. After graduating from high school, she spent a year in India working for a Non-Governmental organization focused on tribal rights.

She said her parents suspected her of being a lesbian shortly before she graduated high school when they discovered a copy of the Washington Blade “or some other gay newspaper” in her room. They told her that homosexuality was a sin and that she was doing something very wrong by “choosing ...