WASHINGTON (AP) — Chrissy Gephardt will join her father’s presidential campaign full time, stumping on her father’s behalf and showing that gay children are part of families just like everyone else, she said.

Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.), his wife Jane, and daughter Chrissy, 30, have started speaking publicly about Chrissy Gephardt’s sexual orientation.

Gephardt said he isn’t worried about damage to his political career, and that he only wants his daughter to be happy.

Chrissy Gephardt was married and in graduate school for social work at Washington University, when she became friends with a classmate, Amy Loder.

One night Loder told Chrissy Gephardt that she, Loder, was gay.

Gephardt said she ran to the bathroom and threw up. “It just hit me that I had a massive crush on her,” Gephardt told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

She said she kept her feelings to herself for months.

“I thought I could talk myself out of it,” Gephardt said.

She was married to a doctor, Marc Leibole, and didn’t want to hurt him.

She said she went through months of therapy, but finally woke up her husband one night and told him. She told her parents a month later.

She and her husband divorced in November 2001, and she embarked on a new life with Loder.

After they finished graduate school, the couple moved in with the congressmember and his wife in Washington while they searched for jobs.

“They took us both in, and my dog,” Loder, 31, said. “They were always very supportive of me and very welcoming and just really included me in the family.”

Now, Chrissy Gephardt and Loder, who also is a social worker, live just a few blocks away from Gephardt’s parents in an apartment near the U.S. Capitol.

But their quiet life may change, as the Gephardts campaign for the presidential race.

Loder said she was unprepared for the possibility of being in the public spotlight. Already, the pair have been featured in People magazine.

Chrissy Gephardt left her job counseling homeless and mentally ill patients on May 23.