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Mary Cheney, an AOL executive, looks like a typical thirtysomething Washington professional.
She's well dressed, reserved and has an aura of self-confidence. She's dressed in an expertly tailored bright pink jacket and black trousers. Her makeup and hair are done simply but carefully. She shares an uncanny resemblance to her father, Vice President Cheney.
Mary Cheney is ready for her close-up. Her memoir, Now It's My Turn (Threshold, $25), will be published on Tuesday.
The attention is welcome now, but it wasn't during the 2004 presidential campaign, when her sexuality became, to her, an uncomfortable campaign issue.
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, his running mate, John Edwards, and various gay rights groups talked openly about her lesbianism. Cheney was just about the only person who didn't.
"I'd made a commitment to the campaign," says Cheney, who ran her father's 2004 vice presidential campaign. "My job was to do whatever I could to help my dad. It wasn't to be making policy statements of my own."
But Cheney, 37, is now ready to share her feelings and opinions.
She writes about the day she told her parents she was gay: She had just broken up with her first girlfriend and wrecked the family car. Her parents, Cheney says, were supportive, unlike the parents of other gay people she knows whose families abandoned them.
"It never even crossed my mind that there was a possibility that that's something my parents would do," she says. "Quite frankly, if it had, I wouldn't have come out to them when I was 16. My mom said, 'Your life will be so hard,' but she really understood there wasn't any choice in the matter."
Cheney says that she is close to her parents and her older sister, Elizabeth, who is now pregnant with her fifth child, and that family members try to get together for Sunday dinners whenever possible.
Her mother, Lynne, recently stopped by the Great Falls, Va., home outside Washington, D.C., that Cheney shares with her partner, Heather Poe, to look at some new furniture they had bought.
She says the vice president is "a wonderful father and a wonderful grandfather, but he's also a very private person in terms of family life."
She said of the quail hunting accident in which her father shot Harry Whittington: "Of course my dad was upset," she says. "It was a terrible accident, but his main concern was making sure that Harry Whittington was taken care of and that he got the medical attention that he needed, and that Harry's family was taken care of and that they had everything they needed."
Cheney says that she loved writing Now It's My Turn and that before she worked on her father's vice presidential campaigns, she started writing a novel. It's a political thriller that takes place in Washington and Moscow. "I had it pretty much outlined and have the first 50 pages written," she says.
But the story many people want to hear is why she didn't speak out about gay rights during the 2004 Bush/Cheney campaign, when Bush announced support for a constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage.
She makes it clear in the book that she and her father did not and do not support the amendment.
Numerous gay rights supporters -- and an infamous Web campaign called "Where is Mary Cheney?" -- called on her to speak out against Bush's stand and considered her sexuality fair game. "Fair game?" she writes in the book. "My sexuality is fair game? It was completely outrageous."
She also was roundly criticized because she and Poe did not stand onstage with the Cheney family at the 2004 GOP convention: "We decided that we were going to be low-key. ... We had talked about the possibility of going up onstage either after my dad's speech or after the president spoke. I was happier and more comfortable staying behind the scenes." Poe, she writes, was "more averse to stares and cameras than I am."
Asked whether she could have used her position as daughter of the vice president to help promote gay rights, Cheney, a Bush Republican, says: "I am and have always been very open and honest about who I am, about being gay. I'm about to publish a book that devotes a whole chapter to the issue of marriage amendments. Quite honestly, I think that's the way I can be most effective."
Cheney becomes more animated as she talks about her life with Poe, 45. The couple is renovating the Virginia house they bought about six months ago, around the time Cheney started her job at AOL's headquarters in Dulles, Va. She is chief of staff for AOL executive Ted Leonsis.
Poe, a former UPS manager, is devoting all her time to the renovations, Cheney says. The home is "beautiful on the outside but very confused on the inside," she says. "We're living in a construction zone."
Cheney says she and Poe met in 1988 while playing ice hockey. They had their first date in 1992 and have been together ever since.
They like to spend time outdoors walking their dogs and mountain biking, and, when they can, they travel out West for snowboarding. This year they gave each other kayaks as birthday gifts.
This fall, Virginians will vote on a proposed amendment to the Virginia Bill of Rights that would ban same-sex marriages and civil unions in the state. Cheney says she will vote against it.
"What you have to understand," she says, "is that as far as I'm concerned, Heather and I are married. We've built a home and a life together. She is the person I hope to spend the rest of my life with.
"We're just waiting for the state and federal laws to catch up with us."
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