Pete Buttigieg Chose to be Gay
politics ·Pete Buttigieg Chose to be Gay
Barack Obama was our first black president. A number of black critics, ranging from Ben Carson to Cornel West, decried President Obama as “not black enough” – he spent the majority of his early life bouncing between elite universities and successful private firms —as consequence, he didn’t have many of the experiences attached to the political identity of blackness he wielded.
He was, regardless of what experiences he had in his life, black. When you see Obama, you know he is black. It‘s how he is legible to others in a country where race is steeped in both meaning and prejudice. It was, then, unavoidable that his blackness be reflected in his campaign. Barack Obama would be America’s first black president whether he liked it or not. Barack Obama did not choose to be Black.
Pete Buttigieg chose to be gay. I did, too. Gay desires cannot be chosen; we don’t have much of a say in our sexual desire. We do, however, choose and refine our public image.
I didn’t choose to want in the way I do, but I did choose, in many ways, to be the way I am. Gay desire and being gay are distinct. Unless “being” gay pertains exclusively to sexual desire, I choose to be gay daily. I speak with gay mannerisms, something, that although natural to me now, was not when I first came out at 15; I rave fervently and openly about bottoming; I bleach my hair seasonally; I complain loudly about the tribulations of douching; I refer to inanimate objects with gendered pronouns; I drink iced coffee in 28 degree Medford weather.
David Halpern, a gay scholar who wrote a 500-page book on the process of gay acculturation (How to be Gay) would agree with me when I say that having anal sex with other men is among the least gay things I do. In fact, for me, it seems among the straightest: sex is one of the spheres of my life where I behave most masculine; that’s how I have come to desire sexually – a choice I don’t actively make. According to Halperin, “Gayness is not a state or condition. It’s a mode of perception, an attitude, an ethos: in short, it is a practice.”
In my self-description above, I depicted a number of my relatively faggy traits. Those, I’d argue, are discernably gayer than my actual sex habits, which render me clinically homosexual, but only privately so. The more observable qualities of being gay relate to quotidian gender non-conforming behaviors and attitudes—my fagginess has little to do with gay sex in isolation. At its core, my public gayness is a collection of behaviors, not desires; I could alter these behaviors if I wanted to.
Say, for argument’s sake, I deleted Grindr and consulted a voice coach. I stop having sex with men and exorcise all fagginess from my voice. I cut my frosted tips and remove my piercings. I could quite easily labor to pass as straight. I imagine that would be a fairly pleasureless life – something many seem to attain without any structural forces working against them at all. Say I followed through with this and became straight: you might suggest, with a well-intentioned liberal paternalism, that my commitment to straightness, alongside my evident commitment to being miserable, would be a result of some tragic realization of internalized homophobia. I would hesitate to agree. Perhaps there is something I want more than anything else, and to get it, I believe that I must repress another desire. That seems pretty logical.
In the first breath of Pete Buttigieg’s interview with The Daily, a New York Times podcast, he admits that as early as the 6th grade, he wanted to be president. He then remarks, “but, in a very simple sense, especially coming from Indiana, it seemed to be a choice: you could be in elected office, or you could be an out gay person. Not both.” I don’t disagree with Pete here. Only as recently as 1970 have we had openly gay politicians in the United States (California), and Indiana elected its first openly gay representative at the local level in 2018.
Pete Buttigieg did not come out until the age of 33, in 2015. By that point, he’d spent four years at Harvard, one at Oxford, three at McKinsey and Company, several with the US Navy, and most recently, several years as Mayor of his hometown, South Bend, Indiana. Buttigieg’s seemingly perfect résumé as a presidential hopeful has drawn as much ire as it has praise: there’s something grotesquely perfect about it; it manifests the dream of a 6th grader consumed by presidential aspiration.
This is discussed in his interview with The Daily, in which Buttigieg suggests a hypothetical example of a mid-career politician being sworn into office as an assistant secretary to the Middle East. “Imagine if that person got there in one of two ways – in universe A, it’s the person who woke up in high school one day … and did everything in order to occupy that title. The other person is someone who woke up in high school, and said I want the United States to be a force towards peace.”
He concludes that the latter would be a better fit for the role. His example draws a distinction between politicians who want to be something, and those who want to do something, a distinction made similarly in Michael Harriot’s article, “Pete Buttigieg is a Motherf***ing Liar” published in The Root. Buttigieg would like us to believe that he’s among the doers. As Harriot rightly points out, his true motivations are something we can never genuinely know. Reflecting on some of Buttigieg’s regressive comments on education in the past, Harriot concludes, “Pete Buttigieg doesn’t want to change anything. He just wants to be something.”
In order to make this analysis more interesting, let’s assume he’s truly a doer. The question, then, is what exactly does he want to do? In the beginning of his interview with The Daily, Buttigieg describes an initial frustration with politics he felt during his freshman year at Harvard in 2000, which galvanized his interest in career politics. “You had this kindof center right, and center left, both of them very committed to growth and business – but it seemed not very committed at all to … how we take care of vulnerable people around the country.”
This interview exemplifies much of the behavior I’ve noticed from Buttigieg, what I’ll describe as “feigning progressive.”
For one, the “center left … very committed to growth and business” seems eerily familiar. The campaign Buttigieg is running, with policies amenable to swaths of Silicon Valley’s technocratic elites, is backed of several thousand undisclosed high-dollar donors.
Secondly, there are many ways to serve vulnerable people in the United States, but neither McKinsey and Company nor the US Navy rank particularly high on that list. If this is the ambition he claims as a politician, his résumé does not back it up – and nor does his track record as Mayor of South Bend, where he’s notoriously unpopular with black and low-income communities.
When Pete Buttigieg attempted to endear himself to minority voters he hopes to court, spoke of his experience as a gay man during the most recent democratic debate. “I care about this because while I do not have the experience of ever having been discriminated against because of the color of my skin, I do have the experience of sometimes feeling like a stranger in my own country,” He rightfully acknowledges that the prejudices against these identities appear in vastly different ways.
Key differences between racism and homophobia are well observed by Oliver Davis, a black council member in South Bend, IN, where Buttigieg is standing Mayor. “When you see me, you would know that I’m African American from day one. When someone is gay or a lesbian, unless they tell or they are seen in certain situations, then no one is going to know that. They are able to build their résumés and build their career.”
Her analysis isn’t perfect – many of us can hardly speak or walk without exposing our queerness—but I think Davis’ thoughts extend particularly well to Buttigieg. Without his husband, a now central fixture on his campaign with a cult following of middle-aged white women, or his coming out editorial in 2015, we’d never know that he is gay. For many other queer people, we are out of the closet long before we decide to be, simply because we are read as such.
Buttigieg reaped the benefits of straightness until he was 33, at which point, he chose to be gay. He has chosen to be gay in particular ways. He proudly pronounced that he and Chasten did not meet on “that app” (referring to Grindr, a gay sex app which displays users by geolocation) and has also said that he “doesn’t consume gay media”. He posed for a thirst-trap in front of Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, captioned flirtatiously, “this guy.”, on his husband’s Instagram. Flattering tourist photos like this, in front of this Berlin Holocaust memorial, have already been critically reported as a Berlin staple among a generally wealthy, white, and uncritical class of world-traveler gays.
It’s clear that Mayor Pete is that kind of gay – a white, careerist dog-dad who views gay rights as a result of a “coalition of people like me and people not at all like me … making it possible for me to be standing here wearing this wedding ring”, while simultaneously rejecting and belittling the central role of activists in achieving the same social and political progress which has elevated him to power.
See, for example, his comments on student activism during his time at Harvard: in his interview with the Daily, he disparaged student activists as petulant and small-minded, claiming that the work he and his political junkie friends have done has undoubtedly been more important. Harvard students between 2000 and 2004 were protesting for higher wages for service workers employed by the university and for greater accountability in cases of sexual assault. Do these issues sound familiar? Naturally, Buttigieg did not mention the issues they were protesting in his interview, but proudly reflected on scurrying by picket lines en route to the library.
Buttigieg clearly doesn’t see himself as an activist working in solidarity for small victories, which can materially change lives, and he doesn’t think of himself as a member of the acculturated gay troops described by David Halperin in How to be Gay. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but this is why I am frustrated when he “feigns progressive”.
Central to Buttigieg’s progressive imaginary is his political identity as a gay man. I don’t take issue with the gay centrist-assimilationist lifestyle which Buttigieg represents per se, but I do take issue with Buttigieg’s claim to gayness as a political identity. For candidates in the Democratic Party, which has prided itself on wrangling minority votes since it fled from class issues after FDR, having a marginalized identity is undoubtedly a source of authority when connecting to voters of other marginalized groups.
Buttigieg claims that he has been surprised by the response to his coming out, which he announced only months before his reelection in South Bend in 2015. He won with 80 percent of the vote. I do not believe that he was surprised. I believe this aspect of his candidate profile has benefitted him on the national stage, and I believe this was a calculated move. Buttigieg is a politician who focus-groups his positions aggressively; on twitter, it’s even been reported that he focus-grouped the pronunciation of his last name.
If Buttigieg waited until it was politically safe to come out, his claim to gayness as a marginalized political identity – a tool for connecting to other marginalized groups – is invalid. For Buttigieg, coming out was a decision; another step in his road to the presidency – and should be met the same skepticism facing the other lines of his résumé. My skepticism is validated by the cult of Chasten, Pete’s husband who has been fervently hurled on the public, a key campaign prop to mitigate the progressivism absent from Buttigieg’s generally centrist politics.
In the same way that this identity benefits Buttigieg, I am concerned about the ways such an identity serves his voters and harms his dissenters. A problem with identity politics is that it can embolden the deflection of valid critique. Through a moralized lens of structural oppression, political identity can cloud political beliefs, shrouding conservativism in optical progressivism. Such a confounding façade often produces a conflation of fair criticism with a character flaw in the critic.
Take, for example, the complete absence of Black voters in Buttigieg’s polls in South Carolina. Pundits immediately chalked this up to homophobia within the Black community. In doing so, they suggested that it is impossible for Buttigieg to be so unlikeable, unless, say, a group of voters had a prejudicial character flaw (homophobia). This was shown to be false within a week; Black voters had never heard of him, and according to polls (the source of all truth in American politics), would have no problem electing a gay President.
This was a failure of the Buttigieg campaign, not a character flaw of the South Carolinian Black voter. This situation is also an illustrative failure of identity politics; the actions of the media created and maintained racism by alleging homophobia instead of fostering solidarity between marginalized identities, or suggesting that perhaps, Black voters simply dislike Buttigieg on political grounds.
My intention in this piece is not to decry Pete Buttigieg as a poor political candidate, although I admittedly have no intention to vote for him. You will notice that I didn’t speak directly to his policies, instead, I characterized his political identity. I am interested in Buttigieg’s candidacy as a peculiar moment in gay history and a deeply unsatisfying one in queer history. Somehow, it feels like a personal shortcoming to watch neoliberalism animate a gay man on a national stage. Perhaps my own similarities to Buttigieg drive this frustration.
Pete would not be our first gay president. There have certainly been others before him. He would be our first president who chose to be gay. Behind choices lie reasons; do not be afraid to consider those – it won’t make you a homophobe.