Gravel Likes Those Gays
Maybe this campaign season--which is slowly creeping from the Jurassic to the Cretaceous--may prove to be interesting after all. It's not often that you get so many good-looking people to talk about things that most Americans don't really care about. But, for a moment, let's forget about the attractive candidates that are most likely to get a nomination (or another book deal) and focus on presidential hopeful [Mike Gravel]. The former Democratic Senator from Alaska (1969 to 1981) recently wrote a piece for [Queerty](http://queerty.com/) (a popular gay blog) [discussing the first gay man he met](http://www.queerty.com/news/exclusive-gravel-on-the-gays-20070608/) (way back in the 1950s). Most interesting is his creative writing skills in describing the strapping, macho man:
" I first met a gay person at army intelligence school in the 1950s. One of my teachers was a brilliant First Lieutenant who looked like Victor Mature, the strapping, dark haired actor who played Sampson. I cant use his real name, because he might still be in the military, so Ill just refer to him as Vic. Vic taught us a lot about the art of spying and information gathering. All of us spies-in-training admired him. At the end of the program I was assigned to counterintelligence in Germany and later Paris, where I was surprised to find Vic. My wavy haired teacher was now a fellow agent in the Paris office!" No, this is not some steamy memoir or the beginning of a tell-all homo tale (a la Lynne Cheney's fictional [Sisters]). But it is refreshing to have a straight politician discuss so candidly his interactions with a real live queer person. Gravel has made the military "Don't Ask" policy a cornerstone of his campaign and has promised that if he were elected he'd apologize to the 100,000 men and women discharged under "Don't Ask." And he's giving ol' [Hillary a hard time](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sen-mike-gravel/dont-ask-hillary-she-st_b_50885.html) about her ideas on the issue as well.
Well, Mike, no matter what happens, you have a way with those descriptive adjectives.