Shame on Alan Keyes, She Is His Daughter

Bloord runs thicker than water? Nope, not in conservative politics by Alan Keyes' standards. Outrageous to say the least.
THE ARTICLE:

PERSPECTIVE
Not her father's daughter
By MARC FISHER
Washington Post
03/13/2005


Maya Keyes loves her father and mother. She put off college and moved from the family home in Darnestown, Md., 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 campaign for the U.S. Senate.

Now Maya Keyes - liberal, lesbian and a little lost - is out on her own. She says her parents - conservative commentator and perennial candidate Alan Keyes and his wife, Jocelyn - threw her out of the 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." She has taken her private dispute with her dad into the open - speaking recently at a rally in Annapolis sponsored by Equality Maryland, the state's gay rights lobby. "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 Democrat Barack Obama 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 has made a career as a controversial, 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, 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, Va., run by the church's devout Opus Dei movement. Ever since, Maya says, her parents have told her that her sexuality is wrong.

"As long as I was quiet about being gay or my politics, we got along," she says. "Then I went to the Counterinaugural," protests in Washington against President Bush. "My father didn't like that."

Maya returned from the demonstration to find 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."

After I contacted Alan Keyes' 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."

Maya has her testy moments too, 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."

Maya is more conflicted than her online rants might indicate. She shares some of her dad's political and religious foundations. She deeply opposes abortion as the taking of a life.

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 corporate media.

The end of the campaign brought no respite from the tensions at home. Then a few weeks ago her parents said she would have to make her own way.

But her friends told her there was nothing 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, 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."

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. 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. 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 because I love him. He's my father."

Contact Marc Fisher at the Washington Post, 1150 15th St. N.W., Washington, DC 20071.