Dean's Big Fat Gay Army

Before he caught fire among those opposed to the Iraq war, Howard Dean owed much of his campaign strength to big gay homo queers:

When [Dean] announced his candidacy for the presidency, he immediately tapped into the gay community. It was no accident that the Dean campaign's first presidential fundraiser, on June 22, 2002, was on New York's [very gay] Fire Island.  

With just one exception, every fundraiser Dean attended outside Vermont in 2002 was organized by the LGBT community, as were more than half the events in the first quarter of 2003.

Queers were essentially carrying the guy till the Iraq war came along.  Dean joked once that he couldn't get a dollor from a single straight guy.

In fact, the first time I visited his site was back in March when he had a banner ad on The Advocate's web site.  I remembered thinking one of the reasons why Dean was so hot on the Internet while others just didn't seem able to capture the energy was because Dean had this whole army of Web-connected queers.  (I don't know why queers embrace the Internet so much, but they do.  They're so much more likely to do banking online or book flights online, that you'll see gay sections on many sites, some even advertised on the home page (see "Gay Travel" listed under "See Deals For" on the Orbitz home page).)

So, if Dean's early fundraising and organization was largely from LGBTs, do you think it may very well be that the big secret to Dean's early online following, the big secret every other campaign tried to figure out, was Howard Dean's "big gay army?"