Unconfirmed reports came early this year that President Biden had tapped the Bay State’s own Rufus Gifford to be the next US State Department’s chief of protocol. But as Gifford told Boston Spirit back in February, the reports were just that — unconfirmed. Until last Friday, when The White House at last made it official.
If confirmed by the Senate, Gifford, the openly gay former ambassador to Denmark under the Obama administration, would be back on the front lines of American diplomacy, but now in a much wider, global role.
The Massachusetts native most recently served as President Biden’s 2020 deputy campaign manager for finance, external outreach and coalition building. He lives with his husband, Dr. Stephen DeVincent and their two dogs, Argos and Svend, in Concord, Massachusetts.
In that Boston Spirit magazine interview back in March, Gifford recalled what it was like for him to be confirmed by the Senate for his previous ambassadorship:
I think back to say 1997, 1998, when Jim Hormel was nominated to be the US ambassador to Luxembourg, the first time that openly gay man had been appointed ambassador, and he was blocked by the Senate. US Senators actually blocked him from being confirmed because they deemed a gay man not suitable to represent the United States overseas.
I’ve told the story all the time because obviously I was confirmed as an ambassador [in 2013], and I was confirmed unanimously. There wasn’t a single senator voted against my nomination, and at the same time there were a number of other gay men who were being confirmed at the same time.
Of course we live in different political times today, but Gifford’s qualifications remain strong. You can read about them in The White House announcement, and we’ll be following the story as it moves forward.
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