Maya, too, has had her testy moments, which she has shared on the Internet. "Sometimes I cannot believe I am related to this man," she wrote in her online diary last fall. "Haha though I'm sure he feels the same way about me."
In another passage, she wrote of her parents: "I'm all about working for global justice. THEY don't care about that. THEY only care that I am an evil dyke."
Maya is more conflicted than her online rants might indicate. She shares some of her dad's political and religious foundations. She is religious and deeply opposes abortion, viewing it as the taking of life.
Still, when I asked Maya whether she is glad her father lost the election, she stopped short. "Should you really be asking that question? I mean, I suppose there is a conflict, but I'm not sure I wanted him to lose. I disagree with nearly all his views, but he's very honest and has a lot of integrity."
If she could talk to her parents now, she would tell them she does not intend to hurt them by going public. "I wish the fact that I was gay was not something that would hurt them either," she says. "It wasn't anything they did that made me this way. I really don't see why what I think should affect him in any way."
During the campaign, other bloggers discovered Maya's Web site and the electronic gossip flew for a while, but her sexuality was barely mentioned in the campaign or the corporate media.
The end of the campaign brought no respite from the tensions at home. Two weeks ago, her parents said she would have to make her own way. "After all the arguments and tensions over the years, I always hoped it would never actually get to this point," Maya wrote, "although I suppose given our vastly divergent political beliefs, it was inevitable."
But her friends told her no, there was nothing remotely inevitable about the break, that political differences and even sexual orientation ought not result in being kicked out. Maya wrote: "They say most parents would be thrilled to have a child who doesn't smoke, have sex, do drugs, hardly drinks. . . , does well in school, gets good grades, gets into the Ivy League. . . , goes regularly to church, spends free time mentoring kids."
Maya still sounds more sad than angry about her situation. "I wouldn't want to do anything to hurt my father," she says. Like other gay relatives of prominent conservatives, she has struggled with how public to be about her sexuality. Like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's sister Candace, who campaigned for John Kerry on behalf of a gay rights group, Maya says she has come to believe that "while we might be trading on our prominence, it's a good thing to do something good with our situation, and anyway, we didn't choose to be queer."
Maya is looking for work, planning to move in with friends in Washington or a brother in Boston. She hopes to get back in touch with her mom and dad.
On Thursday, the Point Foundation, a San Francisco-based charity that provides scholarships to students "who have been marginalized because of their sexual orientation," decided to pay Maya's expenses so she can begin her studies at Brown. "Many of the students we support have been disowned by their families because they've been honest about who they are," said the foundation's executive director, Vance Lancaster. "Maya's situation is especially poignant because of her father's position, but it's a situation that happens every day to hundreds of kids across the country." This year, Point has received more than 1,200 applications for about 40 scholarships.
Maya Keyes is looking for answers to all those conservatives who e-mail her about how she's going to burn in hell and to all those liberals who e-mail her about how she's a traitor because she won't disavow her father. And then there are the people who think she's a whiny brat, "that I'm immature for thinking that I want my parents to talk to me."
"It all seems kind of ridiculous," she says, "because I love him. He's my father." A man who specializes in explaining the complexities of a trying world ought to be able to see something as simple as that.
