And so that’s what we turn to.ģ) Keep in mind, any kind of open, gay sexuality is spitting in the face of Nazis. Or perhaps, for some of us, sex and sexuality is our god. Transgressive and strangely alluring in a dark and destructive way. It’s like barebacking with strangers at the height of the AIDS crisis.
Or ignore it, deny it, bury it, make it another transgression, another joke. In the face of the Holocaust, what do you do? Turn to G-d? Ridiculous. We are not deeply rooted because how could we be? That can manifest in a sort of flippancy like this. We completely remake ourselves, we ignore our history (personal and as a people) because it’s often painful and easier to hide from. It used to bother me, especially as a gay man who is deeply interested in history. But then he’s not my type so maybe I’m missing something.Ģ) There’s is a strain of gay culture that is completely incurious about history and exists solely for the now. “Pete,” the Devil hissed into a microphone.Īs Pete Buttigieg addressed supporters off a back porch in Marshalltown, Iowa, the Devil was whispering his name.1) I find nothing erotic about Buttigieg’s photo. “You’re sooo smart, Pete.”īuttigieg ignored the heckler, plowing forward with his stump speech about American decency as his husband Chasten looked on. The man in the devil costume was Randall Terry, an antiabortion activist. He had traveled to Iowa to torment the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., the early breakout star of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. “There’s never been a poster boy for homosexuals” before, Terry says. “There’s never been a homosexual that you’d go, ‘Wow, I’d be proud of him.’ He’s the guy. That’s why he’s such a threat.”įour years after the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed his right to marry, Buttigieg has become the first openly gay person to make a serious bid for the presidency. And Terry is hardly the only right-winger worried about the rise of “Mayor Pete.” Buttigieg’s saying that “God doesn’t have a political party” prompted evangelical leader Franklin Graham to tweet that being gay is “something to be repentant of, not something to be flaunted, praised or politicized.” Concerned by the campaign’s rise, right-wing provocateur Jacob Wohl was recently caught trying to fabricate sexual-assault allegations against Buttigieg to slow him down.īut Buttigieg’s greatest political asset may be his ear for languages. Most people who are aware of his candidacy probably know he’s gay, but his every appearance doesn’t.
Buttigieg, for instance, would register on only the most finely tuned gaydar. He speaks eight, including Norwegian and Arabic, but he’s particularly fluent in the dialect of the neglected industrial Midwest. A gay man who conforms to a critical mass of gendered expectations can move through life without his sexuality attending every interaction, even after he comes out. Buttigieg is a master of redefinition, a translator for a party that has found it increasingly difficult to speak to the voters who elected President Donald Trump. The son of an English professor and a scholar of linguistics, he roots his campaign in an effort to reframe progressive ideas in conservative language. What is happening around Pete Buttigieg a white gay man running for America’s highest office and, arguably, the most powerful in the world is more than a story about a presidential campaign. “If the substance of your ideas is progressive but there’s mistrust about them among conservatives, you have three choices,” Buttigieg tells TIME, sitting on his living-room couch in South Bend.