Column: Hosting a hero

By Jon Monteith

(Editor’s note: Jon Monteith is a member of PRIDE, and is involved in Maya Keyes’ visit.)

I generally don’t offer my bed up to someone I haven’t personally met before. I will soon bend this rule to make a very important exception. Next Wednesday night, my apartment will serve as a makeshift hotel room for Maya Keyes, the daughter of former presidential and U.S. Senate candidate Alan Keyes.

Shocking, I know. Why would I offer my apartment, which I regard as a liberal paradise, to the daughter of one of the most outspoken homophobic conservatives in the country? Well, as it turns out, Maya Keyes happens to be both an out lesbian and a raging liberal, two things that don’t go over very well in the Keyes household. Given the circumstances, I figured it was safe to let her stay with me.

I first found out about Maya’s situation while being linked to her online journal one day. Shocked to find out that Alan Keyes had a child that didn’t spew fire, I did some more research and uncovered a column about Maya that appeared in the Washington Post back in February (“When Sexuality Undercuts a Family’s Ties,” written by Marc Fisher).

Maya’s parents have known about her sexual orientation since she graduated from high school, but according to Maya, they initially responded by telling her that she was either lying about it, going through a “phase” or being brainwashed. She deferred her acceptance to Brown University for a year to teach in India, where she said things cooled down with her parents as long as she didn’t bring up her sexuality.

Get The Daily Illini in your inbox!

  • Catch the latest on University of Illinois news, sports, and more. Delivered every weekday.
  • Stay up to date on all things Illini sports. Delivered every Monday.
Thank you for subscribing!

Recently, things have taken a turn for the worse. Since Maya’s decision to go public with her sexual orientation and speak at several rallies for LGBT equality, her parents have all but ended their relationship with her. According to Maya, her father told her that she is no longer welcome in their family’s Chicago residence, and that he would not provide the financial support for her to attend Brown. And what was his justification for blocking her path to a college education and forcing her to walk the streets of Chicago as a homeless young woman? “Our vastly divergent political beliefs,” Maya says.

Since learning about Alan Keyes’ complete disregard for his daughter – whenever quizzed about his daughter’s sexuality, he’s replied with non-answers – I have been shocked by Maya’s selflessness in dealing with the conflict. Rather than using her situation to publicly bash her parents, she has used her recent notoriety as a platform to speak out about a growing problem in America – gay and lesbian youth who are forced to live on the streets due to their parents’ reaction to their sexual orientation. Even when she wasn’t dealing with homelessness herself, Maya had seen friends die because they couldn’t make it out on the streets, and she has decided to devote her time to making sure this doesn’t happen to other gay and lesbian youth across the country.

This is not to say that Maya is not angry with her parents. She has written in a past blog entry that “sometimes I cannot believe I am related to this man.” Moreover, she has the self-respect to openly disagree with her father’s unbelievably harsh claims about the gay community – including the quote that Vice President Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter is a “selfish hedonist.” However, she has been able to disagree with her parents with an amazing level of restraint and tact, explaining that she still loves her father and looks forward to reconciling their relationship in the future. How many of us, if we were in her position, would be able to be so fair-minded while still maintaining our own identity?

Next Wednesday, Maya will be speaking at a 5 p.m. rally on the Quad to conclude the Day of Silence, an event in which hundreds of gay and straight students on this campus will join together to fight discrimination against the LGBT community. For Maya, this issue runs deeper than we can imagine. And I can say with great pride that on Wednesday night before she heads back to Chicago, I will be playing host to a hero.