Lesbian rumors killed Condoleeza Rice’s shot at the Republican vice presidential nomination, according to investigative reporter, Ian Halperin, Queerty reported Wednesday.
Alaska’s Governor Sarah Palin infamously nabbed the spot as John McCain’s running mate but Halperin ‘s source said that the Republicans’ list of possible nominees was rife with women including Rice.
But gay rumors, fueled by reports that the Secretary of State shares a house and a bank account with a female friend Randy Bean lost Rice the nomination, according to Halperin’s source.
Reports that Rice and Bean owned a house together began circulating following the release of Glenn Kessler’s tell-all The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy, in which he revealed that Rice and her best male friend, a gay man, helped Bean out of a jam with medical bills by obtaining a shared line of credit and buying into a house with her.
However, Kessler said he didn’t know if the women were more than friends, reported Queerty.
At the time, Bean responded to gay rumors in an interview with Radar.
“Condi and I have been friends for 25 years. We co-own an investment property in Palo Alto. We do not share a home,” Bean said. “The insult to my integrity is not that I’m gay but that I’m closeted. For the record, I’m straight. Anyone who knows me knows how strongly connected I am to my values and political beliefs. If I were gay, I’d be out, loud, and proud.”
Still, according to Halperin’s source, a Washington insider who refuses to be named, the gay rumors haunted Rice and likely cost her a spot as McCain’s running mate.
HERE IS MORE FROM THE GIST ON SEPT. 14, 2007 (written by Michelangelo Signorile, who has a long history in this type of reportage):
Yesterday on the show I had an interesting conversation with Washington Post diplomatic correspondent Glenn Kessler, whose new book is The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy.
There have long been questions about Rice’s sexual orientation and her personal life in general. As Kessler notes, “She has built a wall of privacy around her that is never breached.” But Kessler had access to Rice’s closest friends and to Rice herself, and he reveals some eyebrow-raising information that hasn’t been out there before.
In the book and on the show, Kessler described how Rice’s “closest male friend” is openly gay, a man by the name of Coit D. Blacker, a Stanford professor (Rice was provost at Stanford in the late 1990s for six years) and a Democrat who served in the Clinton administration. Blacker, whose partner is also mentioned, advised Al Gore’s campaign in 2000, while his close friend Rice became a chief confidante to a president who has tried to make gays into second class citizens in the U.S. Constitution. But wait, it gets better.
Rice’s “closest female friend” is a woman named Randy Bean (pictured here), who is unmarried and whose sexual orientation is not stated. She is described as a “liberal progressive;” she’s a documentary filmmaker who works at Standford University and once worked for Bill Moyers. She and Rice and Blacker (again, who has a partner) are discussed as a “second family,” a term Bean uses, also saying that, “on friends, [Rice] goes narrow and deep.”
According to newly revealed information in the book (which Kessler found through real estate records), the two women, Rice and Bean (yes, hilarious), own a home together and have a line of credit together. Bean explains this to Kessler by saying that she had some medical bills that drained her financially years ago, and Rice and Blacker helped her out by buying the house with Bean. But over time Blacker sold his share of the house to Rice and Bean, and then Rice would later get the line of credit with Bean to do some renovations on the home. Kessler, when pressed, said he did not know if this meant there was something more to the relationship between the women beyond a friendship.
