Farewell To Steven Hormel,Thanks for $pam and All You Did For Your Community
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| James Hormel and Husband Michael Araque, 52 yrs his jr. |
A philanthropist who parlayed a Spam fortune and a Senate standoff into a place in gay history.
It is hard to conceive of a less crucial post in American diplomacy than the ambassadorship to Luxembourg. The country, which is smaller than Rhode Island and only slightly more populated than Wyoming, is the sort of cushy diplomatic posting typically reserved for generous but not terribly distinguished political donors. So when Bill Clinton tapped one such donor, James Hormel, for the post in 1997, there was little reason to think the decision would prompt a protracted and vicious battle with congressional Republicans and end by making history.
Hormel belonged to one of America’s most prominent business families. His grandfather George started the Minnesota-based meatpacking company that his father, Jay, later turned into a corporate juggernaut with the invention of Spam. But Hormel, who grew up on a 200-acre estate in a house with 26 bedrooms, did not want to follow them into the family business. After graduating from Swarthmore in 1955, he married his classmate, Alice Parker. He attended the University of Chicago Law School and later worked as a dean there.
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Ten years into his marriage to Parker, with whom he had five children, they divorced. Soon thereafter, Hormel came out to his family members as gay. “I tiptoed out of the closet,” Hormel later wrote — this was the mid-1960s, after all. But “the more open I was, the more confident I became,” he recalled, “and the easier it was to be out.”
After a decade or so of political and spiritual peregrinations — working in Washington for a left-wing third party that ran the comedian and activist (and vegetarian) Dick Gregory for president, moving to Hawaii and devoting himself to EST self-help practice — Hormel settled down in San Francisco in 1977. Though he did not have an interest in the family business, he did have some ideas about how to spend the family fortune. He became a philanthropist, with a specific focus on gay equality and rights, giving more than $15 million to L.G.B.T.Q. causes over his life and establishing himself as one of the most generous gay donors in U.S. history.
Hormel provided the seed money for the Human Rights Campaign Fund — now the Human Rights Campaign and the largest L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group in the country — and the American Foundation for AIDS Research. He also made smaller donations to countless other groups and efforts, ranging from a documentary film that taught tolerance to elementary-school students to an annual L.G.B.T.Q. academic conference at his alma mater. Alongside the conference every year, Swarthmore students hosted a debauched, gender-bending party, where the silver-haired Hormel, in a business-casual uniform of oxford shirt and khakis, would dance awkwardly but enthusiastically alongside cross- and undressed college kids.
“The early ’90s were still a time when we’d come out to friends and family and were often met with rejection,” says Kari Hong, who came out as gay in her first year at Swarthmore and is now an immigration attorney. “Jim was just a source of joy. He was a terrible dancer, but he didn’t care. He showed us there’s a pathway to happiness and a pathway to having a very delightful life.”
But it was the ambassador appointment from Clinton, one of the many Democratic politicians to whom Hormel had donated prolifically, that cemented Hormel’s place in L.G.B.T.Q. history. Hormel was poised to be America’s first openly gay ambassador, and Senate Republicans objected to his nomination not because of his lack of foreign-policy experience — awarding ambassadorships to political contributors was a bipartisan practice — but because of his sexuality. Hormel, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma warned, was “a gay activist who puts his agenda ahead of the agenda of America.”
Suddenly, the issue of who served in a sleepy ambassadorship was transformed into an important struggle over gay rights. Clinton had been an unreliable ally in that struggle, caving to Republican attacks when he enacted the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act. But in a symbolic fight over a deep-pocketed donor, he went to the mat. Despite Senate Republicans’ refusal to put Hormel’s nomination to a vote, Clinton refused to withdraw it. Then in 1999, nearly two years after first nominating him, Clinton used a recess appointment, which doesn’t require Senate confirmation, to install Hormel as ambassador to Luxembourg.
The job was not without its downsides. In an effort to win Republican support for his nomination, Hormel had pledged that his partner at the time would not live with him in Luxembourg. He spent much of his 14 months in Luxembourg alone, attending commemorations of World War II events. He left the post shortly before Clinton exited the White House.
After returning to the United States, Hormel resumed his philanthropic endeavors. In 2006, he paid for a group of L.G.B.T.Q. Swarthmore students to attend a charity gala for a Philadelphia gay-rights group. At the event, Hormel met a student named Michael P. Nguyen Araque. Although Hormel was 52 years older than Araque, the two soon developed a romantic relationship. “We liked to joke that when I was a sophomore,” Araque says, “James was a senior.” After Araque’s graduation in 2008, he moved to San Francisco to live with Hormel. Gay marriage was legalized in California the same year, and in 2014, Hormel and Araque were wed in a ceremony officiated by Nancy Pelosi.
Although Hormel’s children initially disapproved of the relationship, they came to accept and appreciate Araque. “It was hard at first, but eventually it was like, ‘What are we bitching about? He makes Dad happy,’” Alison Hormel Webb, his oldest child, says. At Hormel’s memorial service in October at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, Araque and Hormel’s ex-wife, Alice, took turns reading from the Book of Isaiah.
Jason Zengerle is a contributing writer for the magazine.
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| Spam by Hormel and a product made to work for the LGBT Community by James Hormel who used his family fortune to help people with his orientation that were being mistreated and even him got plenty of it. The GOP in Congress refused to Confirm his nomination as Ambassador because he was gay. Could not get married at the time and could not be employed by the government because he was out. Ive written a few times about Mr. Hormel but it hurt when I announced months back about his passing. Now that the year that he died is leaving us for ever, I wanted to say a final good bye. “You had a wonderful life and had your priorities lined up just right! Adam |
James Hormel Book: Fit to Serve
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