August 19, 2020

At this hour twenty-eight years ago, I was preparing to keynote the Republican National Convention in Houston. I’d been raised in a Republican home. I’d worked in Gerald Ford’s Republican White House (the first female “advanceman”). So, in ’92 I spoke from the Republican stage.

Were I to speak now, it would be from the platform where Barack Obama will appear tonight. I’d be at the Democratic Convention because I no longer have any place in the chamber of horrors that is Trump’s Republican Party. I will, as a survivor of HIV and of cancer, use every remaining breath to speak against Trump’s lies and brutalities, to hold up the truth of America’s promise for my infant granddaughter.