Conservative pundit and frequent Republican candidate Alan Keyes had called Vice President Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter a sinner and had said homosexuality is “selfish hedonism”. Little did he know that his own daughter Maya Jeane Marcel-Keyes, more commonly known as Maya Keyes, would emerge as a gay activist.

An online journal attributed to Marcel-Keyes put pressure on her to come out of the closet. At the end of her high school her parents found out about her gay orientation and told her to leave the house. They also stopped speaking to her and refused to pay her college fees because she was a homosexual. Talking then about her situation Maya had said, “Technically speaking, I don’t have anywhere to go. I have lots of friends and I could probably go crash with them. I’m going back to Chicago and I’m not really sure what I’m going to do when I get there. I have no place to live there, but there have been people offering to help me find housing, offering to let me stay with them for a little while until I figure things out. I don’t have an official place to live but I really doubt that I will be spending much time wandering the sidewalks.”

She is now involved with a number of social activism organizations. She had worked voluntarily for Food Not Bombs, as a street medic during protest rallies and is on the Board for the National Youth Advocacy Coalition, which speaks on behalf of LGBT families and youth across America. She as also worked in India with tribal people with the ACCORD group.