Biden picks gay former ambassador Rufus Gifford as Chief of Protocol
President-elect Joe Biden has chosen America’s former ambassador to Denmark to fill a prestigious role in the State Department.
The out “celebrity” diplomat previously served as one of Barack Obama’s top election campaign advisers before being nominated as an ambassador.
Gifford, 46, was Deputy Campaign Manager for Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, a former United States Ambassador, a television star in the docu-series I Am the Ambassador, and a former candidate for U.S. Congress in Massachusetts’s 3rd congressional district. He was the Finance Director for Barack Obama’s presidential re-election campaign in 2012.
Obama nominated him to be the United States Ambassador to Denmark, a position he held from 2013 to 2017. He was immensely popular in that role and he married his husband Stephen DeVincent in Copenhagen
On November 13, 2017, Gifford announced on Twitter that he was running for Congress in Massachusetts’s 3rd congressional district in the 2018 United States House of Representatives elections in Massachusetts, which he didn’t win.
Gifford’s husband, Dr. Stephen DeVincent, is a veterinarian, and they live in Concord, Massachusetts. In 2016, Gifford co-wrote a cookbook with his husband, called The Ambassador’s Kitchen.
Gifford is openly gay, and journalists previously referred to him as Barack Obama’s informal “ambassador to the gay community.” He is a Federal Club Member of the Human Rights Campaign.
