Idea No.1
Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg would be the first openly gay president, if elected next year—but his campaign raises important questions about what it means to be a pro-LGBTQ+ candidate.
JUST TWO DAYS BEFORE THE 2016 presidential election, Zoe Leonard recited her iconic poem, “I Want a President,” at New York City’s High Line Park, documented for posterity on YouTube. She’s perfectly framed by three patriotic buntings behind her, wearing a brown leather jacket and a bulky burgundy scarf, with her hair styled in that close-cropped, curly on top, distinctly queer kind of way.
“I want a dyke for president,” reads the artist and activist, her tone measured and steady. “I want a person with AIDS for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want…”
The poem, inspired by poet Eileen Myles’s 1992 write-in presidential campaign as an “openly female” candidate, invites the reader to imagine a world where the most powerless people in the nation are permitted to ascend to its most powerful seat. Reading the poem at the High Line more than 20 years after writing it, Leonard notes that she no longer thinks that way about identity politics, that she no longer believes that a person’s identity tells you anything about their political leanings. Still, the question she asked in the poem remained an intriguing one to ponder on the eve of Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Had the former Secretary of State beaten eventual president Donald Trump, she would have become the first
