“I am so tired of looking at hairy men in leather!”

Who among us has not uttered those words at one time or another? Oddly enough, the list apparently also includes Mary Cheney, daughter of the vice president and the woman John Kerry so cruelly outed during the third presidential debate. Turns out – and you read it here first – people already knew she was a lesbian.

No offense intended, but this woman does a crappy job of covering her tracks. Mary, dear, if you want to stay in the closet, don’t spend months traveling around the country in the company of International Mr. Leather. You read that right. As “corporate relations manager” for Coors Brewing Co., reports salon.com, much of Cheney’s work during 1999 “involved outreach to various gay subcultures, from drag queens to cowboys on the gay rodeo circuit.”

You see, the nice people at Coors were trying to buy their way back into the good graces of the gay community and, most importantly, win a bigger chunk of the lucrative gay beer market. Gays had been boycotting the company’s products for more than 20 years, in part because Coors used to give lie-detector tests to potential employees to screen out the queers. The ultra right-wing Coors family had also donated millions of dollar to antigay causes, including a big chunk of the seed money Jerry Falwell used to fund his now-defunct “Moral Majority”.

According to salon.com, Cheney focused the bulk of her outreach efforts on the leather community because of its “tight network of aficionados who maintain close links through the Internet as well as annual events like the International Leather competition.” She spent “months researching the leather phenomenon… carting home stacks of books from the library and bookstores.” Whew! Were there no job openings at Halliburton?

At that point, Mary hit the road with another Coors spokesperson, 1999 International Mr. Leather Bruce Chopnik, and the two traipsed around the country for months trying to get bar owners to stock the company’s products. How well they succeeded isn’t clear, but apparently Cheney tired of the effort after a while. “My partner wants me to get rid of all these books,” salon.com quotes her as saying. “I am so tired of looking at hairy men in leather!”

On a related note, Coors’ company chair, Peter Coors, lost his bid for the U.S. Senate from Colorado yesterday. Coors, running as a Republican, strongly opposed same-sex marriage and said gays and lesbians shouldn’t be able to adopt children. But he still wants you to buy his beer.