Cindy Abel loves politics and politicians.
“I am cheese ball enough to believe in the promise of America. That sounds very naïve but I’m in love with the promise of America,” she says.
But it wasn’t always that way. She cast her first presidential ballot for Bill Clinton in 1992 when she was 31, at a time when she was coming to grips with her own sexual orientation as bisexual.
“I had never voted until 1992 when I was 31. I didn’t feel we, regular people, had any impact, any voice, any say in the process. But as I sat watching the inauguration I cried — tears streaming down my face in my room in Orlando, Fla. I was recently out. I had reached a point a few weeks earlier that I was not going to lie about who I am,” she says. “I had decided I would rather pump gas for a living than live in the closet.”