Gays put Dems on the spot

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

The Democrats showed up on the MTV-run gay and lesbian cable channel Logo TV on Thursday night for a historic, first-time-ever televised presidential forum on LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) issues.

What anyone watching Logo (which is carried in some 27 million homes) saw was a series of one-on-ones — each candidate interviewed, for 20 minutes or so, in the order in which their campaigns accepted the invite to the forum (Barack Obama first and Hillary Rodham Clinton last).

Call it a job interview, writ rather large, the candidates answering pointed questions from a moderator (Bloomberg News’ Margaret Carlson) and three panelists about their LGBT bonafides.

Now here was a show, the candidates in comfy chairs on a hardwood-floor stage, with rug. In contrast to the raucous AFL-CIO-sponsored debate on MSNBC on Tuesday night, live from Soldier Field in Chicago, the two-hour LGBT forum, live from some small studio in L.A., played like a closed-circuit broadcast of a living-room fundraiser in the Hancock Park manse of Hollywood money.

Hey, wasn’t that liberal mover-and-shaker/Hollywood producer Steve Bing in the audience? I know I saw two of the TV-monied — ‘How I Met Your Mother” co-star Neil Patrick Harris and “Will & Grace” co-creator Max Mutchnick.

Meanwhile, one of the panelists was rock star Melissa Etheridge, whose ‘I Need to Wake Up’ written for ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ won her an Oscar.

“I have heard that you have said in the past that you feel uncomfortable around gay people,” she said to Sen. John Edwards. “Are you OK right now?” she joked.

“I’m perfectly comfortable,” Edwards said, begging to add that she had it wrong, he said, because the offending comment was a misquote spread by a rival political consultant.

The Republican candidates, moderator Carlson said, have declined an invitation for their own such forum. For the Dems, the one-issue, one-evening pitch to the nation’s LGBT community was as much a creation of the explosion of niche channels as it was a microcosm of a powerful interest group.

I’m stereotyping here, but I bet more Republican candidates will find their way to Country Music Television or Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, just as more Democrats (so far) are making their way to Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

Democratic candidate Joe Biden was on “The Daily Show” on Wednesday night, and he fully agreed with Stewart’s weary gaze at a season of debates/forums that have taken on a “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” pace.

“We should have a 90-minute debate on nothing but Iraq,” Biden said, “and a 90-minute debate on nothing but what’s going on with your energy problem.”

Well, senator, if this is Thursday, this must be the LGBT forum. Biden, as it happened, had a prior commitment (as did Christopher Dodd) and couldn’t attend the event, sponsored by the gay and lesbian civil rights organization Human Rights Campaign Foundation.

It all had a certain intimacy — and tension — as each candidate was forced to answer whether or not they would realize, as president, the legalization of same-sex marriage.

Only two of the candidates, Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, treated the question as a no-brainer. The others bobbed and weaved and tried to find a crawl space between their support for equal rights, their empathy over the injustices in the culture — but also their opposition to sanctioning marriage.

“I prefer to think of it as being really positive about civil unions,” Clinton said, smiling.

-- Paul Brownfield

(Photo: Kevork Djansezian / AP)