Think different: Teresa Heinz Kerry, who speaks her mind (and can do so in five languages), is not your typical politician's wife. That ought to be a good thing.(Dispatches)

ON A STEAMY WASHINGTON NIGHT IN early June, a moneyed crowd of gay men and lesbians gathered in the vaulted hall at the National Museum of Women in the Arts for a John Kerry fund raiser. The big draw that night was not actress Sharon Gless (Queer As Folk, Cagney and Lacey) but the arguably more entertaining, and certainly more outspoken, Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of the candidate.

The audience embraced Heinz Kerry, who compared her bewilderment and alienation as an immigrant in the 1960s to the ongoing alienation of the gay community in America today. She even spoke of relying ...