Remembering James Hormel

James Hormel

James Hormel died this year. 

Many good people died this year - Colin Powell, Desmond Tutu, Ed Asner, Olympia Dukakis, Cloris Leachman, just to name a few of those I admired and respected - and the year's not over yet. But as we exercise our annual habit of remembering the folks who went on before us this year, I want especially to remember James Hormel.

James Hormel was 88 years old and his wife Michael Peter Nguyen Araque is around 55-58 years old.

That's a headline from 101Biography.com, a site that keeps track of the lives of "trending" people, i.e., the rich and famous we mere mortals like to gawk at and trash or put on a pedestal, as the spirit moves us - a gossip site, not one to fuss over. Except that, in this case, Michael Araque is a man, and was James Hormel's husband, not his wife.

Even in death, this marvelous man, James Hormel, gets messed with or misunderstood, and we are reminded that the long hard struggle he engaged in for the rights of LGBT people isn't over yet. Even in relatively enlightened corners of the planet like the U.S., where gays like me live lives immeasurably better than we dreamed of as young people - thanks in great measure to the likes of James Hormel.

I first took notice of him not for all the contributions he made to the cause of improving the lives of LGBT people - that came later - but when President Bill Clinton appointed him as ambassador to Luxembourg and all the rats came out of the woodwork. 

When you hear "Hormel" you may find yourself thinking of spam. The meat, not the junk that invades your inbox. His grandfather made a fortune grinding up meat parts and putting them into cans, and James inherited the family fortune - which enabled him to contribute big time to Clinton and thus get rewarded with the cushiest of ambassadorial appointments - Luxembourg.

Hormel was born in 1933, a year indistinguishable from the dark ages for gay people, the year Hitler took power, the height of the depression, when a quarter of Americans were out of work, when winds were blowing the topsoil from American farmland and creating the Dust Bowl, when gangsters ran Chicago, when the gatling gun, which could fire 1000 rounds a minute and would help the slaughters that were to come in the Second World War possible, was invented.

I like to think that Hormel was a piece of the antidotes to that series of horrors, along with the building of the Golden Gate Bridge, which started that year. And the election of FDR. He would, of course, have to endure a vicious age of homophobic bigotry, seven more years than I did, in the end. And, unlike me, he went with the flow, married a woman he loved and made a happy family. When he died, he had helped create five children, fourteen grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. When he died, his former wife, Alice, shared the podium with his gay partner to remember him fondly. One can do worse than live a life that ends with that kind of display of affection. 

If I were a more generous sort, I'd stop here and comfort myself with the cliché that all's well that ends well. But I also have a great respect for history. I don't want the world to forget that while Michelle Obama is all kissy-face with George W. Bush, he is in my mind a war criminal, a man who smeared Colin Powell's sterling reputation for integrity and loyalty by pressing him into helping us lie our way into bombing Iraq and killing hundreds of thousands in a futile attempt to make the world better for imperial America. 

And I don't want the world to forget that when Hormel's ambassadorship was announced, the only way Clinton could get the appointment to go through was to do it when the Republicans in the Senate were out of town. And that Fiji was the first choice, but didn't want a gay man to come to town as ambassador. And the Catholic Church, singing out of tune, as they so often do, insisted the good catholic folk of Luxembourg would feel the same way. Fortunately, Clinton overrode those objections, Luxembourg officials welcomed his appointment, and it went through. But in the meanwhile, Hormel had to endure delay thanks to the efforts of conservative Senators Jesse Helms and John Ashcroft, and three other Republicans, James Inhofe, Tim Hutchinson, and Bob Smith. Trent Lott, the Republican Majority Leader, worked to block the vote and publicly and called homosexuality a sin, comparing it to alcoholism and kleptomania. 

Hormel was, among other things, a smart fellow. He graduated from Swarthmore and then Chicago Law School and ended up dean at Chicago, and director of admissions. He was one of the founders, in 1981, of the Human Rights Campaign. He was a member of the 1995 United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the 1996 U.S. delegation to the United Nations General Assembly, and the boards of directors of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the American Foundation for AIDS Research. He funded the creation of James C. Hormel Gay & Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library in 1995, a priceless collection of materials documenting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender history and culture, with a special emphasis on the San Francisco Bay Area.

For that last bit he was criticized by the homophobes because those materials contained information about NAMBLA, the man-boy organization. Never mind that he had no say in which materials the library would choose to include, or the fact that those same materials are in the Library of Congress.

He was a big supporter of People for the American Way.  He is a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Grand Marshal Award by San Francisco Pride Board of Directors.

He broke the mold. Since his time, President Biden has appointed Chantale Wong to be the director of the Asian Development Bank - that's an ambassador-rank position if I'm not mistaken. And then there's Pete Buttigieg in the Biden cabinet.

We're getting there. Very slowly. But surely.

I hope we don't fail to remember the rungs on the ladder.

Like James Hormel.

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