Mary Cheney surfaces: the veep's notoriously silent gay daughter takes a job at AOL.

She's helped a beer behemoth repair its image, directed operations in her Republican father's reelection campaign office, inked a million-dollar book deal, and remained steadfastly invisible during a national tempest over same-sex marriage. Now Mary Cheney will be working for America Online, a company with as controversial a history on gay rights as her own [see sidebar].

The gay daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney has joined AOL's Audience Business, a marketing division that promotes Web offerings such as MapQuest.com and MovieFone.com. She will assist in managing advertising, e-commerce, and search engines.

"AOL is thrilled that Mary Cheney is joining us in a position where she'll be reporting to [Vice Chairman] Ted Leonsis," spokes man Nicholas Graham told The Advocate. Cheney herself, who has been turning away the magazine's interview requests for years, was not available for comment.

Bob Witeck, CEO of Witeck-Combs Communications, a public relations and marketing company specializing in corporate issues, said Cheney is certainly qualified for the position and doubts her family connections had anything to do with her hiring. "I think it's very risky to hire a family member and assume you'll get access [to the family]," Witeck said.

AOL's hiring of the 36-year-old Cheney comes as rumors swirl that corporate parent Time Warner is looking to unload the company, which plans to lay off more than 700 employees.

But working for an employer under a cloud is familiar territory for Cheney. During much of the 1990s she was a gay and lesbian outreach coordinator for Coors Brewing Co., once boycotted by gays because of the Coors family's multimillion-dollar support for conservative, often antigay, activism. Much of the family continues to support such causes, but the company has distanced itself from the family, adopting gay-friendly policies and sponsoring gay events and groups. Cheney helped woo LGBT beer drinkers back by visiting gay clubs and events and talking about Coors's domestic-partner benefits.

Graham wouldn't elaborate on whether Cheney will be helping AOL with the same kind of gay and lesbian promotion, but Witeck, who met Cheney when his company was hired by Coors for public relations purposes, speculated, "I don't think that's in the cards."

Having left Coors in 2000, Cheney in 2002 joined the board of the newly formed Republican Unity Coalition, a group that, in its own words, attempts to make "homosexuality a 'nonissue' for the Republican Party." Cheney left the group in 2004, and the RUC has hardly been heard from since, as the Bush-Cheney reelection machine utilized opposition to gay equality as a campaign tool in winning another term in the White House. Mary Cheney was absent from the stage of the Republican National Convention (although occasionally visible on the sidelines with her longtime partner, Heather Poe) but found herself mentioned in two of the three candidate debates during the campaign.

Her invisibility--and her refusal to grant interviews--is likely to end next spring: Having given her a $1 million advance, publisher Simon & Schuster will no doubt expect her to publicize her as-yet-untitled memoir, scheduled for May publication.

"In a book, once you say things, you can't unsay them," Witeck warns. "Those things could be problematic [for AOL]."