This post is by TNG Associate Contributor Corey.

While at Solly’s last night for TNG’s “ban marriage” party, my friend Jimmy and I were talking about career aspirations. Hoping to be the ultimate socialite, he made an audacious claim: “In 2036, I will be America’s first gay First Gentleman.” We started arguing about whether or not the country would be ready for a gay president by 2036 – I told him no way – and whether he’d be more Jackie O. or Laura Bush.

Little did my friend know that the topic of America’s first gay president had already been making the rounds amongst the TNG contributing staff. Ben sent me this article from Slate which goes through various minority groups (women, Mormons, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, and gays) and comments on their likeliness of making it to the Oval Office. I’m not a fortune teller, but I think that there are a few safe guesses we can probably make about this possibility.

One big issue is culture. I actually think we’ll see a gay president before we’ll see an atheist (presuming the gay one is Christian). America is a place where religion is very important, if not often hypocritically, in people’s lives. Religion will probably open up to gays before America secularizes. We already have plenty of Jewish and Mormon people in high office, despite them being minorities, so electability seems to depend on presumed cultural assimilation – not on being exactly the same as the electorate.

More important to think about is that there are currently very few (out) gays in high elected office. There are three gay members of the House of Representatives, no senators, no cabinet members, and no governors. Someone could rise up pretty fast and take the nation by storm, a la Barack Obama, but it’s unlikely we’ll elect a gay president before there have been a lot more gays in public office. That will increase the chances of one rising up, and it’ll also make Americans more comfortable with the idea of a gay serving.

It will probably be very difficult to get to this point, as gays lack the advantages of some other demographic groups. There are some congressional districts, for example, that have huge African American or Latino populations; many of these have seats that always go to a candidate from that demographic, thus ensuring that there are at least a decent number of elected officials from racial minorities. Unless gays plan very strategically, they will never be majorities of 700,000-people districts. Gay candidates also don’t currently have the advantage of being able to transcend the political spectrum. Straight women and Jews, for example, have been able to win more seats because they have come from all over the political map. It’s hard to see anything other than Democratic gay politicians finding success for a long, long time – even if 70% of the country is perfectly okay with gays in office, the remaining 30% are the people you need to win a Republican nomination.

And finally, there are all the usual problems of electing a president from the liberal base. Take a look at this website that Michael found (see what a team effort this is?!), especially the map below:

That shows the electoral vote in this year’s presidential race, with state sizes changed to reflect population. Looks like a lot more blue than on the regular map, huh? It draws attention to the fact that because electoral votes are based on population-proportional House seats AND same-for-each-state Senate seats, the smaller your population the more over-represented you are. This gives a much bigger advantage to the Republicans, especially with their 3-5 electoral vote states out west. (As an example, each electoral vote in Wyoming represents an average of 174,000 people… in California, it’s 664,600.) Getting a gay in the White House means not winning 50% +1 of the popular vote, but 50% +1 of the electoral votes – which probably means convincing a lot more than half the population, due to the advantage the opposing candidate would probably have with this system.

So when will this happen? It took 54 years to go from Brown v. Board of Ed and 44 years from the Civil Rights Act of ‘64 to the election of Barack Obama last week. Women’s suffrage wasn’t granted nationwide until 1920, and it took only 5 years to have the first female governor (Nellie Tayloe Ross in Wyoming) and 12 for the first elected female senator (Hattie Wyatt Caraway in Arkansas); on the other hand, there still hasn’t been a female president or VP.

My guess is that it’s going to be a while. But as an estimated 5-10% of the population, gays are forging what will eventually be a pretty formidable voting block, and a significant enough chunk of the population to produce plenty of skilled politicians. If you told civil rights activists in the 1960s that many of them would live to see a black man elected president, you probably would have seen a lot of skepticism, but that didn’t stop folks then from working hard for equality and knowing that someday it would happen. And that’s the spirit with which we should live and work today as we fight for rights, respect, and the possibility of a better (and gayer) future.