Rufus Gifford is the ‘American welcome’ to foreign leaders. He credits his success to being gay

Rufus Gifford, one of the nation’s highest-ranking officials, is certain that he wouldn’t be where he is today if it wasn’t for his sexual orientation.

“I would never have been an ambassador had it not been for the fact that I was gay, because I had to fight for where I was in the world,” the 48-year-old tells The Independent during a video call in late May. “That sort of forced me to get out of my comfort zone and take risks in a way that I may not have done had I not been gay, so it has defined every part of my life.”

The chief of protocol at the State Department and former US ambassador to Denmark describes his current role as “the first handshake and the American welcome for leaders” from around the globe.

It's a big job. Mr Gifford advises the president and vice president on diplomatic protocol - and he travels with Joe Biden on all official international trips. His office arranges the itineraries of foreign officials visiting the US, and is in charge of accrediting foreign diplomats and sharing a list of foreign consular offices in the US. It also organises treaty signings and ceremonies for state arrivals and the swearing-in of new ambassadors.

Some of the officials Mr Gifford interacts with represent countries with anti-gay policies, where being anything but straight and cisgender may be difficult or even illegal.

The Massachusetts native doesn’t let that get in the way of his work. “It’s not my job to, in any way, confront these leaders, I leave that for the policymakers,” he says.

But he believes that “representation matters” and that “it’s my responsibility to be very public about who I am because of the opportunities that I’ve been given”.

The diplomat thinks his hiring is a policy decision in and of itself.

“The people who you hire to do these jobs matter,” he says, mentioning factors such as ethnicity and sexual and gender identity.

“When I smile and extend my hand to a leader that has notoriously anti-gay policies, or a leader from a country that has … very pro-gay policies, I treat them all the same,” Mr Gifford says. “But I do it as an openly gay man.”

He believes anti-LGBT+ policies are driven by “ignorance”, meaning that the people behind those efforts usually haven’t met a substantial number of people who are openly LGBT+.

“I will be open in part because maybe, just maybe, there’s a mind or two that I might be able to change in some way. And I’m not talking about a world leader with notoriously anti-gay policies necessarily at all,” he says, adding that he hopes to give “closeted gay LGBT staff permission to be more public”.

“There’s no doubt in my life that my sexual orientation is … one of the most defining realities of who I have become as a man,” he says.

Growing up as a young gay kid in Massachusetts in the 1980s, the diplomat recalls that the state wasn’t living up to its progressive reputation at the time.

“I knew no gay people growing up, my parents had no gay friends. The word ‘f****t’ was not only your standard insult that you would hear on TV, but also very much a part of my reality growing up, as connected to weakness, connected to being a failure, connected to not being a man,” he says, describing the period between the ages of 10 and 12 as a “rough chapter driven by sadness and feeling inadequate, lesser than my brothers and sisters,” and “a full-on disappointment to my mom and dad”.

The 48-year-old recounts how when he initially wrote down the phrase “I am gay”, he felt tears streaming down his face as he looked at the words and a “heartbreaking reality” set in.

“To know you’re not alone is the most important thing to learn,” he says. “Before I came out, the loneliness and the isolation, in addition to depression, was so striking.”

He came out at 18 after realising that he “couldn’t fight it anymore”. Mr Gifford says he couldn’t rely on the “structures I was born into” while also acknowledging that they were structures of privilege.

“They didn’t know what to do with me, including my family,” he says.

The first 10 years after coming out, he was still shy about his sexuality, even as he dated. It was a state of “constant depression” with thoughts of self-harm in high school and early on in college.

Things got better when he found his community, but there was still that struggle of how to “fit in”.

His adolescent experience has allowed him to “understand firsthand some of these concepts that are sort of thrust in our face as Americans – concepts of inequality, fairness … even as a white guy”.

After attending an Episcopalian boarding school in New Hampshire, and Brown University in Rhode Island, Mr Gifford moved to Los Angeles.

“My dad is one of my best friends in the world, but I kind of wanted to be the anti-Chad Gifford,” Mr Gifford says of his father, a former Boston banker. “And to me, that was a creative type so that meant moving to Hollywood and trying to figure out my own way.”

“When I graduated from Brown, I would have said I wanted to act, I wanted to write, I wanted to produce interesting, thoughtful movies, but I didn’t really have a roadmap, I had no real ability to do any of those kinds of things,” he says.

An IMDB profile lists his acting appearances in Garfield: The Movie and The Hiding Place.

“The Hiding Place was some UCLA student film … I sent my headshots to some random person and they cast me,” he says, adding that he was edited out of the final product.

Garfield: The Movie was produced by his boss at the time. “I was his assistant on set and they said, ‘Hey Rufus, do you want a role in this movie as dog owner number one’?”

The role had no lines and again, “I was cut out for sure”.

“But I still have the credit and I still get residual checks – $12 once a year or something like that, but I didn’t audition for these things,” he notes. “I did do some like commercial auditioning, but I didn’t do any meaningful acting when I was in Los Angeles. This was me trying to figure out what I was professionally meant to do.”

Calling his work “uninspired,” he quit the entertainment industry at 29. “I really do consider my 20s … to be just a series of failures.”

“I found myself feeling like I’d hit rock bottom. Everything I’d wanted to do in trying to define myself in my 20s, as a creative type, was a failure,” he says. “And that’s when I essentially quit my job and went to go volunteer for John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004. And that changed my life in every way.”

Mr Gifford says politics allowed him to figure out how to “balance my head and my heart”.

“In Hollywood, I found myself neither inspired, nor particularly good at what I was doing. When I started working in politics, I felt like I was good at it, and I loved it,” he adds.

After doing two months of unpaid work, he was hired on the campaign, making $30,000 a year, “which is definitely not a salary you can live on in Los Angeles, even back then”.

“I really do believe that being gay is inherently political in some way,” he says, explaining that even more so today than back then, “your life, your marriage, your whatever it may be, is actually part of the political discourse.

“In my mind, it’s our responsibility to be politically engaged.”

After Mr Kerry lost the election in 2004, Mr Gifford started his own political consulting business and had a brief meeting with the future president, then-freshman Illinois Senator Barack Obama.

It was “the next thing that changed my life,” Mr Gifford says.

At the beginning of the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, Mr Gifford joined the campaign of North Carolina Senator John Edwards, who, in the diplomat’s words, “famously crashed and burned politically”.

Mr Edwards, the 2004 vice presidential nominee, was indicted in 2011 by a federal grand jury on six felonies connected to campaign finance violations as he tried to cover up an affair.

“I pretty much knew that I was going to leave that campaign,” Mr Gifford says.

In early 2007, he was offered a job on the presidential campaign of then-New York Senator Hillary Clinton. Around that time, he attended a reception at the office of Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy: “As a Massachusetts boy, the closest thing you get to royalty are the Kennedys.”

At that reception, Mr Obama walked up, escorting Ethel Kennedy. Meeting the young senator, “felt like five minutes, but I’m sure it was 30 seconds,” Mr Gifford remembers. “He felt transformational. He felt he felt unique and special.”

To the “chagrin” of his family and friends, he turned down the job on the Clinton campaign and waited for the Obama team to call, which they did two weeks later.

After Mr Obama’s 2008 victory, Mr Gifford became the Finance Director for the Democratic National Committee in Washington, DC, before he moved to Chicago to hold a similar role on the 2012 Obama re-election campaign.

On 1 August 2013, he was nominated to be the next US Ambassador to Denmark, presenting his credentials to Queen Margrethe II the following month. He held the post until President Donald Trump entered the White House in early 2017.

“I was told by mostly Americans that when I got to Copenhagen, that no one would care about my sexual orientation, that this is like a post-gay culture in essence … I found the exact opposite,” he says. “The Danish media … was very intrigued by my sexual orientation … it was very often the first question that I got asked by journalists.”

Mr Gifford says part of that interest was an effort to bring up the US evolution on LGBT+ rights, noting how he brought his husband to see the Danish Queen, unlike some other gay ambassadors.

“It raised eyebrows, mostly for the better in a place like Denmark, but it became a part of the conversation,” he says.

While the Danes were “enormously supportive” of him and his husband, veterinarian Stephen DeVincent, he notes that “Scandinavians are famously discreet about their personal lives … so that I was out there very publicly didn’t feel particularly Scandinavian”.

“Even though a number of their leaders in the country were openly gay, they would never talk about their spouses. And I was always asked about my spouse, so I would talk about him – it became a really interesting cultural conversation,” he says.

While Mr Gifford “loved” the discussions, “there was a lot of scepticism at the embassy about whether or not I should engage in this”.

“I think the embassy was nervous that I’d be labelled a gay ambassador and people would only see me that way. And I actually disagree with that 100 per cent,” he says. “If they were interested in talking about it, then hell yeah – I was going to talk about it.

“It might be interesting to a certain extent, but fundamentally, it’s pretty boring. I’m married and have two dogs – my life is pretty standard.”

His marriage to Dr DeVincent was delayed by his appointment as US ambassador. About two years into their time in Copenhagen, they made their move to get married at City Hall.

It was at that point they learned that Denmark was the first country in the world to recognise same-sex couples as legal couples in 1989.

“That felt like an amazing thing to celebrate as American ambassador,” Mr Gifford says, adding that he wanted the Danes to “understand their role in this world”.

It’s a country of almost six million people – about a million fewer than that of Mr Gifford’s home state – “but had they not done what they did back in 1989, you may not have ever had an American ambassador getting married [there]”.

Mr Gifford says it was a “hat tip to a country like Denmark that took this bold, world-leading step and was … kind of mocked for being crazy and out there”.

Their wedding, attended by Danish royalty, took place just a few months after the Obergefell Supreme Court decision which made gay marriage federally legal in the US.

Mr Gifford said what the Danish did “allowed us to catch up eventually”.

In his role as chief of protocol, the Mr Gifford hosted a Pride reception for the first time last year at Blair House, the presidential guest residence, which is overseen by the Office of the Chief of Protocol. “I think the expectation was that we invite a lot of Western Europe and Canada. And sure, we invited them. But that’s not who the target audience was for this event,” he says.

The event was also not aimed at countries with “notoriously anti-gay policies” but at countries who are “interested in moving in a direction towards fairness and equality but are not there yet” such as nations in Eastern Europe, Asia, and parts of Africa and the Middle East.

“We may not be at marriage equality yet in any of those countries, but perhaps we can, through events like this, help bring them closer to a conversation about equality,” he says.

He’s been told by embassy officials that the event “gave them permission to be more public about who they are”.

“Once these conversations happen, in some ways, it’s kind of hard to put them back in the bottle, so I think the more we can have these conversations openly, the more we can build this collection of countries that do value equality and fairness,” he says.

When it comes to LGBT+ rights, Mr Gifford acknowledges that we “have to look ourselves in the eye as Americans – I remember when Jim Hormel was nominated to be an ambassador by the Clinton administration and the Senate blocked that nomination”.

Ambassador Hormel, the heir to a meatpacking fortune and a founding member of the Human Rights Campaign, served as the US ambassador to Luxembourg from 1999 until early 2001. President Bill Clinton used a recess appointment to designate him when the Senate declined to confirm him.

At the time Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi called homosexuality a sin and compared it to alcoholism, kleptomania, and “sex addiction”.

Following his cabinet nomination, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg mentioned the struggle over Mr Hormel’s nomination.

“I can remember watching the news," Mr Buttigieg said. “And I learned something about some of the limits that exist in this country when it comes to who is allowed to belong. But just as important, I saw how those limits could be challenged.”

Mr Gifford notes that it wasn’t until Mr Clinton signed an executive order in August 1995 that gay people were allowed to get security clearances to handle classified information.

“We’ve had to go through the same journey that some of these countries that we’re talking about right now have gone through,” Mr Gifford says. “Like a lot of American things – once we do it, we go all in.

“I don’t want to preach at other countries, because we’re not Denmark, we’re not the Netherlands, we’re not Sweden … who have had it intrinsically as part of their DNA [to] view these ideas as something [that’s] part of who they are as countries.”

Mr Gifford says that he’s had ambassadors tell him that they’re making progress on LGBT+ rights but that it’s not something they can “lean into publicly”.

He compares it to the process within the Democratic Party during the 2008 campaign, before any of the candidates had come out in support of marriage equality.

“I think that there’s a time and a place for insisting that people come along. But there’s also a time and a place for the process of getting there,” he says.

As vice president, Joe Biden forced the hand of the Obama administration when he went off-message during a May 2012 TV interview, becoming the highest-ranking Democrat to publicly support gay marriage.

Mr Biden’s evolution on gay rights was a long time in the making. As a senator, he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, which blocked the federal recognition of same-sex marriages. Earlier in the 1990s, he voted to remove federal funding for schools that taught acceptance of homosexuality. In 1973, he was captured wondering aloud if gay people may be security risks while serving in government or military roles.

Mr Gifford calls the president’s journey on gay rights a “very American story”.

“I think about my own evolution on equality, I think about my parents’ evolution on equality. And it’s a beautiful thing,” he says.

“[Mr Biden] opened his heart and mind to new ideas. And isn’t that all we want from our leaders?

“I mean, sure, let’s debate the evolution to a certain extent. But let’s lean into the fact that this evolution is real, it’s meaningful, and it’s actually impacting our lives.”

Even as Mr Gifford is bringing a message of acceptance to foreign officials, domestically, the US is sliding backwards on LGBT+ rights on the state level.

More than 520 anti-LGBT+ bills have been introduced in state legislatures in 2023, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

Mr Gifford says it’s essential for US diplomats “to be very realistic with foreign audiences as it relates to the journey that [the US] is going on”.

“I think it’s very important for us to acknowledge that despite the massive gains that we have made as a relates to equality on LGBT issues, there are forces in the country that are looking to roll that progress back,” he says.

But he adds that he doesn’t believe the US is set to lose credibility on the international stage, citing Americans’ support for marriage equality, which polling suggests is around 70 per cent.

While acknowledging his concern for the forces trying to roll back LGBT+ rights in the US, Mr Gifford says it’s “still regional”.

After the end of his ambassadorship in Copenhagen, he considered leaving politics behind.

“I had served President Obama for 10 years at that point and was so proud of what we’d accomplished,” he says.

“But then you realise that the moment you think that you need to take a breath and step back is the moment you maybe start to slide backwards too, and I think we saw that. This will never end. This fight for equality can never be over.

“I just hope that some of this stuff that’s happening at the state level wakes the community up, and makes folks understand that we have fights to fight.”

Mr Gifford acknowledges that it’s easy to get “depressed” about the state of discourse on LGBT+ rights in the US and around the world, but he isn’t discouraged. He calls these “trends” a “reaction to the progress that we have seen”.

”Ultimately, we are winning ... hearts and minds in one country after another,” he says. “We just can’t take our foot off the gas.”

The Independent is a proud partner of Pride in London and supporter of Pride Month in the US. We are dedicated year-round to writing on issues facing LGBT+ communities across the globe. You can find our latest content here in the US and here in Europe.