DATELINE – Washington D.C.

Two prominent lesbians and a Congress that couldn’t care less.

When two top-ranking officials in the Clinton administration outed themselves last month in a national magazine, they expected a response. Perhaps some hate mail, a few calls for resignation from the Christian right, a Congressional hearing or two.

At the very least they figured the announcement would make its way into the opening monologues of Jay Leno and Bill Maher. Who knows, they might even find themselves on the receiving end of a wink from Arianna Huffington.

Instead, there was no response. None at all.

Ironically, these same two officials are notorious on Capitol Hill for their strong personalities and controversial initiatives.

One of them, Janet Reno, the U.S. Attorney General, is currently under fire for refusing to name a special prosecutor to investigate the business dealings of Harold Ickes. Reno is both the “Wicked Witch of Waco” and the woman who approved Ken Starr’s sordid sortie into Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes.

The other, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, has come under fire for championing needle exchange programs, appearing in print ads for the National Dairy Council, and advocating aggressive sex education in public schools.

Certainly neither of these two highly influential women are strangers to the harsh, and some say, politically motivated attacks of the media. Yet they’ve emerged unscathed from a profile in the November issue of Vanity Fair magazine. In the article, the pair revealed their plans “to rent a truck and put a bed in the back and just drive” when the current administration leaves office in 2000.

The stunning news is framed by a lyrical, black and white photograph of the couple taken in an plush conference room at the Department of Justice. The portrait which features Reno gazing wistfully from afar at a seated and contemplative Shalala was taken by famed celebrity photographer, Annie Leibovitz.

It is the first public outing of a Cabinet-level official since historians exhumed the tale of Alexander Hamilton’s ill-fated love affair with James Reynolds.

But unlike the Hamilton fiasco which is still a hotly debated historical puzzle, the Reno-Shalala bombshell has been met without gossip, vilification, or even shades of doubt.

“It’s because they’re women,” speculates Lilith Tomlinsen, a media analyst with the Lesbian and Gay Anti-Defamation League, “so no one can make the connection. It’s as if being ‘gay’ and being a ‘woman’ cancel each other out.”

Washington’s gay rumor mill reports that Reno and Shalala first hit it off when the two, along with former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders, attended an National Gay and Lesbian Task Force dinner in 1994 to accept the “Honoring Our Allies” award. As the story goes, the two celebrated their fourth anniversary in the company of a few friends earlier this year.

To Tomlinsen and others, this media “nonevent” speaks volumes about the disingenuous nature of homophobia in mainstream politics. She cites Senator John McCain’s well-publicized joke about Chelsea Clinton having been “fathered” by Janet Reno to prove her point.

“The politicians and pundits have been calling Reno everything but a dyke to her face,” Tomlinsen opines, “but they don’t have the balls to utter a word now that the cat is out of the bag.”