Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

CATHY WURZER: I'm Cathy Wurzer. And this is Morning Edition on Minnesota Public Radio News. When you think of Hormel, you likely think of products like Spam. The Hormel family was one of Austin, Minnesota's best known families, owning one of the major employers in that Southern Minnesota town.

One of the Hormel heirs, James C. Hormel did not stay in the family business. Instead, he made US history by becoming the first openly gay US ambassador. Hormel writes about that in his memoir, Fit to Serve. When President Bill Clinton nominated Hormel to be ambassador to Luxembourg in 1998, the Minnesota native faced many conservative critics, including Steve Schwab, a senior analyst at the time at the Family Research Council in Washington.

STEVE SCHWAB: Mr. Hormel doesn't represent America.

CATHY WURZER: The fight to become US ambassador for the openly gay Hormel was a long and arduous process, but he says it was worth it.

JAMES C. HORMEL: Every time I was at the State Department in Washington, somebody would know that I was in the building, and they would find me. And they'd come up to me and say, I just want you to know how important it is what you're doing. That was enough to inspire me.

CATHY WURZER: You wrote, "I won, we won, but it didn't come exactly the way I hoped." You wanted every Senator on the record.

JAMES C. HORMEL: Yes.

CATHY WURZER: Why?

JAMES C. HORMEL: I truly did because at that time, we knew that we had sufficient votes that I would be confirmed. We wanted senators to have to go on record to take a position so that their constituents would know where they stood. And obviously, senators did not want to do that.

CATHY WURZER: Your book chronicles a very interesting life, of course, being the first openly gay ambassador in US history and then also looking at your early life in Austin and how your life has gone on since that time. You were married. You have several children and a lot of grandkids. And you were married even while maintaining a double life.

And you write, "There was something safe about being a straight married man in a straight married world. I didn't want to give up the security of a family that I had created or the respectability that went with it. It terrified me to think of losing that." Have you ever had a heart-to-heart talk with your ex-wife about the pain that hiding your true self caused to both of you?

JAMES C. HORMEL: Well, we have talked about it. We have. It took us a very long time to get to the point where we could talk freely again because there was animosity that was generated by the whole process. And I felt extremely guilty. Another part of the challenge was to maintain relationships with the children so that we weren't causing them to feel that one or the other of us was bad and wrong.

CATHY WURZER: You also write in the book that you don't see change happening unless every gay, bisexual, transgender person, lesbian person comes out.

JAMES C. HORMEL: Well, I have spanned several eras in my life. In an earlier time, practically nobody was out, and it was very frightening to be out. And when I was living in Chicago, the police would raid the bars. And the next morning, the Chicago Tribune would publish names of people who were detained in those raids.

So I guess that there are a couple of things that I feel people really need to acknowledge. One is themselves, and the coming out process is a way of doing that. And by coming out, we let other people see who we really are. We really are a part of them.

CATHY WURZER: See, I have to ask this. This is a frivolous question. I'm almost embarrassed to ask this of a US ambassador.

But I've long pronounced your family's name, Hormel. And I think the entire country for decades has pronounced Hormel. But after reading your book, I find that we all have been terribly wrong all these years.

[LAUGHTER]

Tell me about that story.

JAMES C. HORMEL: Well, it really is kind of amusing. And it occurred when I was three or four years old, and the company started advertising nationally on radio. Our advertising consultants suggested that the name be pronounced Hormel rather than Hormel.

It had always been pronounced Hormel since the family had come from Germany in the early 1800s. There was great resistance. And I think my grandfather was horrified.

But my father said, "Well, we hired these people to advise us. We'd better take their advice." But there was such confusion because the name was fairly common by then that finally one of the advertisements on the radio said, whether you call it Hormel or Hormel, you just know you're right.

[LAUGHTER]

CATHY WURZER: Ambassador, thank you. Thank you for being here.

JAMES C. HORMEL: Thank you very much for having me. It's a great pleasure.