Doug Emhoff has described being caught by surprise by the timing of Joe Biden’s announcement last Sunday that he was dropping out of his re-election campaign, telling an LGBTQ+ fundraiser that he was in an exercise class in Los Angeles when he heard the news.
Emhoff, 59, the husband of US vice-president Kamala Harris, explained to attendees on a fundraising call organized by a group called Black Gay and Queer Men for Harris that he was with “a gay couple friend” having “coffee, messing around and talking” when people started coming up to them.
He recalled his friend’s partner showing him his phone with news notifications and saying: “Um, you need to look at this.’”
“Of course I didn’t have my phone, so I ran and ran and got into our car, and of course my phone is just on fire, and it’s basically, ‘Call Kamala,’ ‘Call Kamala,’ ‘Call Kamala,’ from everyone,” Emhoff continued, according to the LA Times. “And of course, the first thing she said was, ‘Where the ... were you? I need you.’”
Emhoff, an entertainment business litigation lawyer by trade, who is Jewish, is engaged in a Biden administration antisemitism task force to combat what he was called an “epidemic of hate” in the US.
He added he’d had a “whirlwind” of a week after receiving the news.
“We’ve just been hustling; I’ve barely even seen her or talked to her since this all happened,” he told the outlet.
Emhoff has also emerged as a key figure in Harris’s outreach to LGBTQ+ communities: he’d earlier called into a fundraiser organized in part by the Human Rights Campaign, while Harris was in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at an LGBTQ+ fundraiser the night before Biden stepped aside – where she raised $2m.
On Thursday, it was announced that Emhoff and Chasten Buttigieg, married to Pete Buttigieg, the US secretary of transportation, will hold a fundraiser in New York’s Fire Island Pines, a popular LGBTQ+ summer destination.
The event is set to be hosted by Andrew Tobias, a gay economics writer and author of The Best Little Boy in the World, a 1973 memoir.
The Advocate, a long-running LGBTQ+ magazine, said Harris “brings a long and strong record of support for LGBTQ+ equality” and that she would “most likely be the most pro-LGBTQ+ president”. As San Francisco district attorney, Harris officiated same-sex marriages and has said: “One of the most joyful [moments of my career] was performing the marriages in 2004. Truly joyful.”
As California attorney general, she was involved in efforts to abolish gay and transgender “panic” defenses in criminal trials but also backed the state when it sought to deny gender-affirmation surgery to a trans prisoner. Among the queer-themed merchandising on Harris’s campaign website are “Kamala Trans Pride” sticker sets and mugs with her wearing different pant suits in colors that, put side-by-side, echo the rainbow.
At the Thursday event for Black gay and queer men, Emhoff promised that Harris would “be there” for the LGBTQ+ community moving forward.
“As it relates to this wonderful, beautiful community of Black gay men, she has always been beside you, with you, has had your back, and always will have your back, just like she’s going to have everyone else’s back,” he said.
Meanwhile, Harris had crashed the season finale of the hit show RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, urging Americans to vote, the Associated Press reported, in an appearance taped before Biden dropped out of the campaign and anointed her as his preferred successor.
She says into the camera: “Each day, we’re seeing our rights and freedoms under attack, including the right of everyone to be who they are, love who they love – openly and with pride.”
Harris adds that the way to counter that is to “make sure your voice is heard this November and register to vote”.
The episode was scheduled to stream on Friday night.
