You know, when President Obama was elected, I thought the country would implode. America, I thought, wasn't ready for a brown person to come into office, and sure, they probably weren't and still aren't. But hey, it happened, and it changed history. You, on the other hand, are a totally different animal. An openly gay man in the White House is fabulous, and not in the ways that stereotypes would have you imagine. Having you in office would be subversive in so many change-making ways that one would think that change would have to occur, but it really won't. You'll have to play it safe. "Change" was left up to Obama and is not your problem. You are there to continue the lineage of white men in office, and your gayness won't differentiate you too much from those of the past.
You will be white, which is not a bad thing, but of course, we radical, leftist feminists will make comments like, "Of course a gay white man can be elected! He isn't really oppressed!" And you will smile -- with Hillary Clinton in the background -- and dance around your sexuality with comments like, "I am just like you!" and "Gay is not queer!" HRC will clap, GLAAD will smile, but ACT UP will, of course, act up.
You will be compared to Harvey Milk, Dumbledore (mainly by Potterheads), Harry Hay, and, most importantly, President Obama. You will spawn a million discussions and debates around living in a post-racial and post-homophobic society, but as CNN covers this celebratory event, another LGBTQ youth will sleep in a dark alley in Chicago, with no home, and another child will contemplate suicide as he or she drifts off to sleep -- because the reality is still not that accepting.
You will have a partner who probably works as a CEO of some major corporation, which the government will have dirty ties to, and with this partner you will have a dog. I picture something American and athletic, like a golden retriever. You will talk of having children in the future, someday, and the conservatives will use this as a crutch against you until the day, probably in your second term, when you decide to make public the fact that you are adopting a child from Africa. This child will most certainly be from an HIV-ridden place, in order to sidestep any real efforts to stop this systemically oppressing epidemic while still easing your neo-liberal desires to "care" for the children of the world.
You will have abs of steel, a blinding smile, and blond hair that will showcase your Anglo roots. With a masculinity that radiates off of you like steam from boiling water, you will have both women and men swooning. You're just the right amount of gay, not "too gay," which means I would barely be able to tell. In high school you played football; in college you dated a sorority girl named Bethany, and it was not until after Harvard Law School that you became conscious of your sexuality. This will serve to distance you from us queers who have struggled our entire lives with our identities and being publicly gay, making you safe for politics and the presidency.
You're American in the most apple-pie kind of way, but you probably never baked, because that's what woman do, right?
You will not be me, and I will not be you. I will yell at my television when you come on the screen, I will drink more whiskey when you're up for reelection, and I will cry when you don't ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. I will feel betrayed, and you will feel richer. I will protest you coming to town, and let's be real: you will probably make me so mad I will most likely move to Paris like Josephine Baker or James Baldwin.
But in the end you will be gay, and that's what everyone is wanting. So congratulations; I hope those adoption papers aren't too much for you.
Sincerely,
Zach