The impact of Barack Obama’s support for LGBT equality is being felt on many levels around the globe.

It sends out a vital message to isolated LGBT people, young LGBT people and LGBT people living in oppressive regimes such as Iran and Russia. And, of course, it’s triggering some long overdue legislation around the world too.

For many of us, it’s what you’d expect from a Democrat President: it’s something that should flow naturally from the party’s core values and principles. But, as we know only too well, Obama has very much been the exception rather than the rule.

In the 1988 Presidential race, LGBT voters in the US were faced with a choice between Right-wing Republican George Bush and homophobic Democrat Michael Dukakis. Bush was clearly not an option but even those who wanted to find a reason to support Dukakis had their work cut out for them.

Throughout the 80s, Dukakis had not only failed to support equal rights, he had made it quite clear that he saw us as unequal to heterosexuals. During his time as Governor of Massachusetts, for example, his approach to gay fostering was, at best, unsupportive and generally suspected of being actively hostile. In 1985, for example, it was widely believed that he was behind the removal of two foster children from the home of a gay male couple.

He was further suspected of driving subsequent changes to the state’s adoption policy that effectively excluded lesbian and gay adopters. Whilst every effort was made to deny his involvement in this, it is clear that he deliberately ignored recommendations from his own Special Commission on Foster Care in 1987. This stated quite clearly that a person’s sexual preference should not be “an over-riding determinant in a person’s eligibility to foster”.

Dukakis accepted all the Commission’s recommendations apart from the ones relating to lesbians and gay men. What made this particularly galling was that, throughout all of this, he knew that the treasurer for his own 1982 gubernatorial campaign was gay and had adopted two boys in the late 1970’s. [There’s a more detailed account of this in my book Gay in the 80s]

As his candidacy for the US Presidency approached, Dukakis continued to antagonise the LGBT community with his repeated statements that the heterosexual nuclear family was “ideal”.

Undoubtedly driven by a desperate need to find an alternative to George Bush, gay community leaders tried to find ways in which Dukakis could redeem himself. In May 1988, a coalition of gay rights organisations known as the Western States Political Action Committees arranged a public forum with him in Los Angeles.  The Los Angeles Times reported:

An attempt by Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis to mend troubled relations with the gay community was met Saturday with occasional hisses and boos at a public meeting that turned into a critique of the candidate’s gay rights positions.

Dukakis stuck tenaciously to his views during the tense half-hour session, finally defending the Massachusetts policy that gives homosexual couples less chance to become foster parents than heterosexuals by declaring: “There is no civil right to be a foster parent.”

Many in the crowd at Los Angeles’ Four Seasons Hotel then hissed with displeasure, and some responded with applause when a heckler called the presidential candidate a “bigot” and “anti-gay.”

And still, in spite of this, gay community members maintained their support for him – only to have him throw it back in their faces. Millions of dollars were raised within the community to support his campaign – and he refused to accept it, on the grounds that this would damage his image in the view of ‘mainstream’ voters.

Of course, history records his fate. He was soundly – and unsurprisingly – thrashed in the Presidential elections, with polls suggesting that some 35-40% of gay and lesbian voters chose Bush instead of him. And his anti-gay adoption policy was over-turned in the Massachusetts State Court in 1989.

It’s somewhat ironic then that his cousin – actor Olympia Dukakis – went on to play the iconic role of transsexual landlady Anna Madrigal in the television serialisation of Tales of the City. But then, that’s families for you – they come in all different types!