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A 1977 photo of Chrissy Gephardt, daughter of Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-St. Louis County and a 2004 presidential candidate

Chrissy Gephardt:
Dad’s Pride And Joy Comes Out Into The Political Spotlight
BY COLIN MURPHY

Coming out to your parents is tough, as any GLBT person will tell you. But coming out to your parents when one of them is a high profile, United StatesRepresentative is doubly so. Just ask Chrissy Gephardt, daughter of Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-St. Louis County and a 2004 presidential candidate.

"I had a lot of anxiety," explained Gephardt, 30, in a recent telephone interview with the Vital VOICE. "I didn’t sleep for many, many nights and you start thinking crazy thoughts like, my parents are never going to want to see me again — maybe if I just moved to an island somewhere and then they can pretend they don’t know me. You start just thinking all of these really strange things to think about how you can make this work out."

Gephardt had discovered she was a lesbian in the spring of 2000. Unhappy in her "passionless marriage" to Marc Leibole, an ambitious, handsome, young doctor who her parents adored, she began to confide in Amy Loder, a classmate she became a close friend with while going to graduate school for social work at Washington University. One evening, while having coffee together in the Central West End, Loder made a confession.

"I’m not sure if this is going to bother you, but I feel like I owe it to you to let you know that I’m gay," Loder told Gephardt, who immediately ran to the bathroom and threw up upon hearing the news.

It wasn’t disapproval or disgust that Gephardt experienced, but rather a moment of self-revelation, when she realized she had a major crush on Loder.

Gephardt tried desperately to talk herself out of her newfound feelings and spent months in therapy, but to no avail. In March 2001 she woke her husband in the middle of the night, and crying, told him that she was gay and that their marriage was over. A month later she told her parents.

Chrissy Gephardt

Congressman Gephardt, 62, and his wife Jane, 61 listened intently as their daughter sobbed, "There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you," and let her secret pour forth. Her parents immediately embraced their daughter and asked if, "she was sure." Gephardt said "she was," as the elder Gephardts put her fears to rest as they comforted their daughter and reaffirmed their unconditional love, and told her that they “loved her and wanted her to be happy” and that "we’re always there, no matter what."

"I was just so worried that I was going to disappoint them and that I would ruin my dad’s political career," Gephardt continued. "I had no intention of — I didn’t think that they would want something like this to come out. Which is why I came to them first because I was like, ‘OK, we’ll just keep it within our family.’ But then when they were so open about it, they were like, ‘this is the way it is and you’re part of our family and let’s just tell the truth.’"

Today Gephardt and Loder, 31, are both social workers in the Washington D.C. area and happily share a suburban apartment near the elder Gephardts. In fact, they moved in with Gephardt’s parents shortly after graduation until both found work and a place to live. Dick Gephardt’s campaign Web site, in a section about his family, makes mention of Loder, as Chrissy’s live-in partner, and Loder posed with the Gephardt family on their 2002 Christmas card.

"It’s like a weight being lifted off your chest — that you can just be who you are," Gephardt said of being out. "And I think that people don’t realize how freeing that can be. I know that an article came out recently about Richard Chamberlain and how he hid is sexuality for a long time. I mean years! And he just recently came out in his book and I could identify with almost every feeling that he had when I was reading this article. And he said something about how he felt like a new person, he felt free — that he felt alive. And I think that’s the best thing of all — just feeling good again."

No stranger to the world of politics, Gephardt has been stumping for her father since she was a child, going door-to-door in St. Louis every other year for the House reelections and trekking across Iowa during her father’s first presidential bid in 1988. But as an open lesbian, she wasn’t sure what her role should be when her father announced his candidacy for president earlier this year. It was a question she wouldn’t ponder for long:

"Chrissy is a lesbian. She's a great young woman. She's doing great work," Dick Gephardt said May 8 on CNBC's "Capital Report." "I'm very proud of her and I want her help in the campaign. She's going to help with gay and lesbian people, but she's going to help with people all over the country."

"Well he asked me [to campaign for him] because I wasn’t sure how to approach it and I mean I was interested, but obviously it’s his campaign and I wanted him to make the decision," Gephardt explained of her public role in the campaign. "So he did — he approached me and asked me if I’d like to work on the campaign and I thought about it for a long time. I didn’t necessarily jump right in just because I loved my job and actually it was hard for me to quit."

On May 23, Gephardt left her job counseling homeless and mentally ill patients to join her father’s presidential campaign full-time, doing fund raising, outreach to gay voters and other constituencies, and even stumping in early primary states. In doing so she becomes the first child of a national candidate to publicly discuss her homosexuality. Gephardt revealed that she and her partner have spoken to Candace Gingrich, lesbian sister of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich about what to expect as a "public, political lesbian."

Predictably, Gephardt’s public role has naturally drawn a comparison in the press between herself and Vice President Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter, Mary, who has refused to publicly discuss her sexuality and operated largely behind the scenes during her father’s 2000 campaign.

"I don’t know all the reasons of why she didn’t come out openly and talk about it," said Gephardt of Mary Cheney. "But there’s different issues — we all have different reasons for why we do certain things and I can’t make a judgment on her because I don’t know what she was dealing with. And we all have our different experiences, especially in terms of being out and loud about it, so I don’t know what her personal issues were."

Chrissy Gephardt’s partner Amy Loder, far left, with the Gephardts in a family Christmas photo.

Now entering the second month in her father’s campaign, Gephardt gives interviews and travels the country talking to various GLBT groups on behalf of her gay-friendly father — most recently giving her first official speech at a May 19 Human Rights Campaign dinner in San Francisco. She and her partner Amy will participate in this year’s Pride St. Louis celebration in Tower Grove park where Gephardt will speak on June 29 at 1 p.m. on the main stage.

Asked why GLBT voters should back her father with a field of nine equally queer-friendly candidates vying for the Democratic nomination, Gephardt is quick to reply:

"Well I think that my father, obviously, he has an advantage in that he has 27 years of experience in the leadership and in congress," Gephardt stated. "So I think that the other thing is he has the Midwest; he’s able to draw votes in the heartland. And I think he probably has the best chance of beating George Bush out of any of the candidates because of his experience, because he’s from the Midwest. Yeah, you’re right they are all on the same page in terms of where the gay issues are, but I do think that if people put their support behind my father he can make this happen and he can get it done."

In fact, there’s only one GLBT issue that Gephardt slightly disagrees with her father on — gay marriage. Rep. Gephardt is for "civil unions" while Chrissy is for "legalized gay marriage," a point she regularly lobbies for and has found to be the main issue of concern to many in the GLBT community as she travels the nation.

"I talk to him about it all the time," she explained. "He definitely knows how I feel and he knows what’s important to me and he knows why ... I think at this point he’s driving towards — he knows that civil union is something that can possibly be done and that it’s an incremental step towards marriage. And that right now he’s focussing on equal protection before the law, which a civil union could accomplish at the state level. But ultimately the goal is to get towards marriage. But I think that in terms of what he thinks could be done this year and actually be passed is civil unions and that we’re just not at that [legal gay marriage] step yet."

Yet Chrissy’s involvement in the Gephardt campaign is not without it’s detractors. Conservative Web sites quote Bible verses calling her "a sinner" and some Republican pundits accuse her father of using her lesbianism as a way to get the gay vote — a point Gephardt denies.

"I say I am who I am and my father’s just being honest about me," Gephardt commented. "It’s not that he’s using me in anyway. I mean — I’m being myself. He hasn’t "created me," you know. And I think that my dad is just being honest about his family. I mean he’s talked about my brother having cancer, he’s talked about my sister and how she made so little money when she graduated with her master’s degree in education that she had to live at home; I mean so he’s not hiding anything, he’s just being honest about his family."

As for the future, Gephardt admits to wanting to legally marry Loder and dreams of raising a family. And what would "Chrissy Gephardt, First Daughter" do?

"I haven’t given it that much thought — I’m just trying to get through the third week of the campaign here," concluded Gephardt. "But I do fully intend to do something with it. How that’s going to pan out, I’m not sure yet. But you know, I tell people I’m a social worker and before I joined the campaign I’ve been a clinical social worker working one-on-one with people. But ultimately what social work is about is social justice, and I think even if I do something like that on a macro level, and it’s having to do with gay and lesbian rights, that that is something I’m very interested in. So yeah, I can see myself doing something, we’ll just have to wait and see what kind of venue that will be."

You can reach Colin Murphy at LKPythias@aol.com

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