When the Republican landslide of 1994 propelled her brother, Newt Gingrich, to the top of national politics, Candace Gingrich knew her life would never be the same. Alarmed at the epidemic of gaybashing in America and her own brother's support for antigay legislation, Candace felt she had to act.The Accidental Activistchronicles her journey from being an unknown, part-time truck loader for UPS to a nationally renowned activist for gay rights.Whether she is exposing the hypocrisy in Newt's "family values," discussing the experiences of famous families with gay members, or trying to reconcile her love for her brother with her hatred of his politics, Candace Gingrich's poignant memoir -- now updated with a new epilogue -- reflects her extraordinary candor and courage.

Candace Gingrich received her BA from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She was the Human Rights Campaign's National Coming Out Project Spokesperson for 1995 and, the same year, named one of Esquire's "Women We Love" and Ms. magazine's "Women of the Year." She is currently Spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign's voter mobilization project. The lesbian half-sister of Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, she lives in Washington, D.C.

Author's Note	p. 9
Introduction: Why The Accidental Activist	p. 11
Growing up Gingrich
The Metamorphosis: From Packages to Politics	p. 19
Lifelines: The Gingrich Family Tree	p. 29
Wayward Girl: A Rebel Is Made	p. 37
Tomboy: The Troublemaker	p. 45
Growing Up Gay: A Coming-Out Story	p. 53
Life and How to Live It: A Philosophy to Live By	p. 63
Awakenings
"Imagine My Surprise ...": The First Smooch	p. 73
"Jesus Can't Play Rugby": The Sporting Life	p. 79
Working for a Living: UPS and the Politics of Labor	p. 89
Candyfruit Jungle: Rugby, Harrisburg, and the D-Gem	p. 95
Feeding Frenzy: The Media Discovers Newt's Little Sister	p. 109
"The Perfect Human Being": Brother and Sister Meet	p. 119
Candace the Menace: Changing the Nation	p. 127
The Hoekstra Hoax: Facing Down the Enemy	p. 139
Crybaby: MLK, Race, and Air Force One	p. 151
We've Got the Power: Getting Out the Vote	p. 163
Sister of the House
"We Can Work It Out?": Relations and Religion	p. 175
Family Matters: Gay Children Speak Out	p. 185
Friends of Newt: Newt's Liberal Allies	p. 193
To Revise America: Correcting Newt's Errors	p. 207
No Place Like Home: Rebellion in the Backyard	p. 217
The Political Animal: The Confrontation	p. 225
Epilogue	p. 235
Acknowledgments	p. 241
Index	p. 243
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

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IntroductionThere is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hand.

-- Richard Bach,Illusions

I COULD NOT BELIEVE my ears. As I nervously approached the podium at the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation awards dinner in March 1995, I suddenly realized that the more than sixteen hundred people in attendance were on their feet, giving me a thunderous ovation. Recovering my composure, I mumbled into the microphone, "I don't understand why you are applauding me; I should be applauding you. You are the ones who have earned recognition, working in the trenches for years. I was just born into it."

The crowd laughed, and I relaxed a bit as I delivered my speech, in what was one of my first public appearances. But the fear remained. What had I done to deserve the recognition, even adulation, I had received since coming out with great fanfare as the lesbian little sister of House Speaker Newt Gingrich? I was not the only one asking the questions. Some reporters, not to mention the ubiquitous antigay activists, were asking essentially the same thing. Was I jealous of the fame and power my big brother had achieved? Was I being used as part of a liberal plot to bring him down? I knew that writing this book would only exacerbate the difficult questions about my motives. After all, I can hardly plead neutrality.

It didn't take me long, however, to overcome the reservations -- my own at least. I quickly realized that I was striking a chord with people, and not just because of my surname. To my surprise, my family situation seemed to resonate with all kinds of people because I could be anyone's dyke little sister. Not only that, I turned out to be pretty good at telling my own story and advocating gay rights: Growing up a Gingrich meant that I had some practice making my point.

In the spring of '95, after I began a fifty-one-city tour for the Human Rights Campaign Fund (the country's largest gay and lesbian political organization, which shortly thereafter dropped "Fund" from its name), I realized I had a way with the press and with audiences. At my first appearance in Seattle, I sweated and stumbled through a short speech. After that debacle, however, it was pretty much smooth sailing. I felt at ease in front of audiences, no matter how large or small. I enjoyed meeting people across the country, all with different stories to tell. I don't know if I inherited the same genes that make Newt such a phenomenally successful politician, but I feel I have an important contribution to make to American politics in general and to gay politics in particular. Some people say that I was pushed into gay activism. But I wasn't pushed. I jumped -- headfirst. At age twenty-eight, I had found my calling, at long last.

At the GLAAD dinner, Robin Abcarian, a Los Angeles Times columnist to whom I presented an award, said that Newt's elevation to Speaker answered the prayers of "columnists of the humanitarian persuasion." "Dear God," she had repeated to herself before the Republican victory, "please give us a way to put a face on the conservative menace now sweeping the country like a plague." Not only did God give her Newt, Robin said, "she gave Newt a gay sister." (The lesbian comic Lynda Montgomery told audiences that "learning Newt had a lesbian sister was like finding out that Dan Quayle had a brother in MENSA," the society of certified geniuses.)

I was happy to fill the role of liberal counter-balance to Newt's conservative excesses, but I didn't just want to be a warm body blocking my relative's so-called revolution, like a lesbian Patti Davis. Nor did I see myself as that Chinese student heroically standing in the tank's path at Tiananmen Square. I wanted to use the opportunity to become a top-notch advocate in my own right. Suddenly, a whole new world was opening up in front of my eyes. What others would call courage just felt like being myself and doing what needed to be done. Courage, it seems, is a word usually applied in retrospect.

This was my chance to make a difference. I had quietly watched for all of my adult life while Newt had been crusading for conservative causes. Now it was my turn. My brother's celebrity (or should I say notoriety?) offered me a platform from which to raise a strong, distinctive voice for gay and lesbian rights. There have been many talented gay and lesbian leaders over the years -- Barney Frank, the Democratic whip in the House from Massachusetts; Urvashi Vaid, the former director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force; Del Martin and Phyllis Lyons, a couple instrumental in the formation of the modern gay rights movement; and my boss at the Human Rights Campaign, Elizabeth Birch, to name just a few. But these trailblazers have never had a soapbox anywhere near as prominent as Newt's. Maybe, with some hard work and a little good luck, I could contribute to correcting that disparity.

Of course, I was also aware of a deeper criticism. Some said that I was feeding directly into an obsession with celebrity politics at the expense of substantive debates. FromMs.magazine toThe Wall Street Journal, reporters were having a field day pitting me against my famous brother and watching the two of us squirm. Even though I tried my best to steer journalists to a more pertinent discussion of antigay discrimination in America and the political agenda of the Human Rights Campaign, many, under pressure from editors for juicier copy, could not resist circling back to the family drama. While that angle can be productive -- gay politics is more about family than about sex -- it risks glossing over some pretty profound questions about American society and how it treats its sexual minorities.

I can't pretend that all my motives in gay activism were altruistic. At the GLAAD dinner, for instance, I had the privilege of meeting pop singer Melissa Etheridge and her girlfriend, Julie Cypher. I had been a fan since 1988, when a friend in college turned me on to her music. She came up to me and said, "I thought you were taller than you are," which was funny, because at just over five foot one, she's only about a quarter of an inch taller than I am. (I've been described in the press as everything from "elfin" to "ninety pounds sopping wet." I like to think of myself as petite.) I also met Roseanne, who, in a quip characteristic of her gift at reversals, said, "Don't worry, honey, I've got a weird brother, too."

In November 1995, I traveled to Los Angeles at the invitation of a producer to appear on an episode of the hit sitcomFriends.I got paid union scale to play a minister who performs a commitment ceremony for the lesbian couple on the show. (Despite boycotts from two TV stations, the show had the highest ratings that week, with an estimated 37 million Americans tuning in.) Meeting politically progressive celebrities, traveling, and having a say are all opportunities I would probably not have had if I had stayed in my hometown of Harrisburg working for United Parcel Service for the rest of my life -- and if Newt hadn't assumed the Speakership.

At the GLAAD dinner, Los Angeles writer Andy Friedman prepared a brief speech for me. One of his jokes went, "Newt asked me to apologize for not being here. But he did give me his AmEx card. Dinner's on Newt!" In the speech Andy dubbed me the "accidental activist," which has since found its way onto the cover of this book. I'm fond of the term because it indicates that anyone, sometimes involuntarily, can become a protagonist in social change. Being gay gives many a special motivation to become active, but all people have something in their lives that might prompt more vigorous participation. I don't want to give the impression that political engagement is simply a big accident. As I've become more involved over the last two years, the term reminded me that the most successful social movements are anything but accidental.

In general Americans tend to be reactionary. Most people, gay or straight, don't become activists until something alarming happens to them. But Americans concerned about fairness can't afford to sit around and wait for good things to happen or for some benign outside force -- as inStar Wars,one of Newt's favorite science fiction movies -- to reach down and organize us. No one is going to hand us our rights, particularly in Newt's Congress. We can even learn from the opposition: despite their belief in divine justice, the religious right's leaders didn't just sit around and wait for power to be bestowed upon them. They worked hard, employed savvy organizing strategies (and a heavy dose of verbal gay-bashing), and grabbed that power.

And I'm not just talking about gay issues. If I could achieve one thing with this book, it would be to encourage Americans to become activists on whatever cause is dear to them, whether it be a woman's right to control her reproductive choices, rescuing our streets from the scourges of guns and drugs, or reversing the decline of our cultural institutions due to a lack of funding for the arts. Every program the Republicans have targeted for cuts offers a chance for community-minded Americans to band together. If we're smart about it, the Contract with America may turn out to be one of the best organizing tools since the Great Depression. But no one is going to create change for us. I like to think of liberalism as a sleeping giant; it just needs to be roused.

What follows is the story of how and why I became an activist and some tips for how you can do the same. In the process, I hope to shed some light on the gay movement and the role of antigay activism in Newt's self-proclaimed Republican "revolution." Like filmmaker Michael Moore inRoger & Me,the funny chronicle of Moore's search for General Motors chairman Roger Smith, I've set out to discover the "real" Newt, the Newt I knew growing up as a kid. The Newt who believed in justice and equality for all and accepted me for who I am without question.

Most importantly, it's the story of family -- the Gingrich family and its peculiar dynamics that produced two often-clashing activists, how we became who we are, and what might bring us together again. Whether the subject is my staunchly Republican parents, sister and Christian Coalition member Susan, pro-choice niece Kathy, or gay cousin Darell, the Gingrich family has usually managed to place love and respect for one another's humanity over ideology. Now it's time for Newt to join the fold. Mom, doing her best Rodney King "can't we all just get along" imitation, likes to tell me, "If we could just get you and Newt to sit down in a room together, we could work it all out." In the pressure cooker of American politics, I hope Mom's old-fashioned wisdom is not simply naïveté.

In my often awkward attempt to transform myself from an accidental activist to an effective political agent, I'm certainly going to do my best to make Mom's wish come true. I'm sure Newt will, too. He's doing what he felt called to do. With regard to me, I think Andy Friedman put it best in a letter to me after the GLAAD dinner: "Despite what I wrote, it's no accident. You're obviously meant to be doing what you're doing." On that count, I hope Newt agrees.

Excerpted from The Accidental Activist: A Personal and Political Memoir by Candace Gingrich, Chris Bull
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