What a Gay Candidate Could Have Been
Pete Buttigieg with supporters in Des Moines, Iowa. Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore.
I have a running joke that I like to tell my friends, which goes something like this:
“If I could ask any presidential candidate a question at a town hall, I would ask Pete Buttigieg to name a gay person he knows besides his husband, Chasten Buttigieg.”
This quip isn’t a dig at Buttigieg for not being “gay enough.” Rather, I am critiquing his campaign as one which stands divorced from the central goals of American LGBTQ political work. Buttigieg occupies the same demographic mold as almost every other president in U.S. history, save his sexuality. He’s a married, gender-conforming, Ivy League-educated, Christian, pro-capitalist, white, middle-class male. This set of “presidential” traits has not resonated with the political grievances and experiences of many LGBTQ Americans. A large part of the queer liberation movement has been a continuous interrogation of do we want what straight Americans have? Do we perhaps want something completely different?
Lesbian lawyer Paula L. Ettelbrick addresses this point of contention in her 1989 essay in opposition to the legalization of gay marriage. Ettelbrick argues that the legalization of gay marriage would continue to enshrine certain relationships over others, rather than offering universal rights and privileges to every individual. She fears that by focusing the gay liberation movement on marriage equality, LGBTQ people may miss an opportunity to fight for policies that value nonromantic partnerships, single-parent households, nonmonogamy, and a fulfilling life beyond coupledom. Of course, LGBTQ people legally deserve the right to marry, but conforming to heterosexual societal roles and expectations may not be the best strategy to acquire broader political goals for equality.
The debate over adopting heterosexual normative institutions is one example of the plethora of questions that LGBTQ Americans have grappled with historically. A gay presidential candidate fluent in this history would speak to these concerns. Recognizing that LGBTQ youth have a 120 percent higher risk of homelessness than their straight peers, a gay presidential candidate might have created a healthcare plan that supports the eligibility of 18-year-olds for coverage independent from their parents.
However, Buttigieg has not espoused this intersectional approach to policy. His talking points are couched in the rhetoric of his competitors: he often endeavors to co-opt and reinterpret the religious ethos of Republicans. When Buttigieg elects to criticize Vice President Mike Pence’s anti-gay policies with lines like “your problem is not with me—your quarrel, sir, is with my creator,” he is attempting to win acceptance from a traditionally anti-gay institution rather than seeking support from long-standing LGBTQ institutions.
Buttigieg’s current strategy reveals a missed opportunity for his candidacy. Ideally, diverse candidates provide diverse perspectives, leading to diverse policy proposals. From an electoral level, diverse candidates may also find more built-in support from those previously overlooked constituencies—but Buttigieg is not actually performing particularly well among gay voters.
According to a recent Morning Consult poll, the majority of LGBTQ primary voters support Senator Bernie Sanders for president, with Buttigieg also trailing both Senator Elizabeth Warren and former Vice President Joe Biden. Similarly, the executive editors of two major mainstream LGBTQ publications—Out and The Advocate—both recently endorsed Warren over Buttigieg for president. On February 14th, during a private campaign fundraiser in San Francisco, a group of LGBTQ activists protested Buttigieg’s policy platform for being insufficiently progressive. As of today, over 3,800 LGBTQ people have signed a letter objecting to his candidacy under the name “Queers Against Pete.” They argue that Buttigieg’s stances on public housing, student loan forgiveness, education, and defense spending fail to speak to the intersectional needs of LGBTQ voters.
As Buttigieg completes his early primary state victory lap, he cedes his “home field” LGBTQ advantage—arguably his one real token of diversity—to other candidates. Does the first top-tier gay presidential candidate need the support of gay voters to win? Probably not, which concerns me. However, it also doesn’t surprise me, because Buttigieg has spent most of his life isolated from other gay people.
The last 38 years of history, which happen to constitute Buttigieg’s exact lifetime, represent an unparalleled increase in tolerance toward LGBTQ people. Buttigieg was not out of the closet for most of it: he came out while mayor of South Bend, Indiana in a 2015 op-ed for the local paper entitled “Why coming out matters.” He was 33 years old at the time.
Most of Buttigieg’s very impressive biographical bullet points—Harvard graduate, Rhodes Scholar, veteran, small-town mayor—were effectively completed while he was closeted. This doesn’t invalidate these achievements, which were still accomplished by a gay man. Nevertheless, they were accomplished by a gay man who was passing as straight and thereby immune to the kind of public harassment LGBTQ people may face in these formal, high-achieving spaces.
I think about this aspect of his candidacy a lot. On some level, coming out remains the ultimate taboo of queer life. If there is an equivalent to the Golden Rule in the LGBT community, it is to respect every individual’s own coming-out process.
We believe in this principle for good reason. Coming out is both unfathomably intimate and inescapably political. There is no universal measuring stick. I bring up Buttigieg’s timeline not to question his journey of self-acceptance, a journey that he says “took years of struggle and growth.” In fact, I believe that this struggle and growth probably itself has become a kind of political strength for him.
On a certain level, the national political stage is a venue uniquely unqualified to deal with issues as sensitive and nuanced as identity. Still, I do not think we do Buttigieg—or ourselves in the LGBTQ community—a service when we protect his sexuality from any kind of critique. For better or worse, an interrogation of a candidate’s most intimate life is an established part of the presidential election process.
That routine interrogation usually reveals more about the electorate than the White House hopeful. I worry that Buttigieg’s success reflects a kind of national appetite for queerness severed from the lived queer experience. It is curious that in a year where more Americans are “out” than ever, our first gay presidential candidate accomplished most of his resume as an ostensibly straight man. Buttigieg’s success speaks to what level of sexual difference our nation is ready to accept in a president—evidently, that is very little.
Caitlin McCormick is a staff writer at CPR and a junior at Barnard College studying history with a concentration in labor history. She has strong opinions about cold brew, the M11 bus route, and the fact that the Lewinsky affair should really be called “the Clinton affair.” She is from Tucson, Arizona.