P E R S P E C T I V E : T h e S t a k e s f o r P e t e B u t t i g i e g
Mayor Normal
BY STEVE ERICKSON
Being the only minority
in any public space
isn’t a pleasant position.
As president, Barack
Obama put forth a relaxed
public persona probably grounded,
in part, on a fear that white
voters would otherwise take him
for a stereotypical “angry black
man.” Pete Buttigieg goes out of
his way to be inoffensive. The fi rst
out gay candidate for president to
achieve traction on the campaign
trail constantly emphasizes his
military service, Christianity, and
marriage. Buttigieg’s popularity
says something about the progress
we’ve made, but the fact that he
relies so heavily on this carefully
constructed image also shows its
limits.
Early in his campaign, Buttigieg
put himself on the map in part by
targeting the homophobia of Vice
President Mike Pence, a fellow
Hoosier. One wonders how many
heterosexuals, especially if they
didn’t follow politics, knew just
how extreme Pence’s beliefs are. In
April, Buttigieg said, “If me being
gay was a choice, it was a choice
that was made far, far above my
pay grade… And that’s the thing I
wish the Mike Pences of the world
would understand. That if you got
a problem with who I am, your
problem is not with me — your
quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”
Buttigieg couched a welcome
public challenge to the Christian
right’s homophobia and Trumpist
hypocrisy in Christianity itself.
It’s likely that his critique of Pence
and Trump’s homophobia and
sexual immorality has reached
religious people who never would
have listened to the same sentiments
from an agnostic or atheist
or a democratic socialist politician
like Ilhan Omar or Alexandria Ocasio
Cortez.
Running for president, as much
as becoming an actor or musician,
means commodifying and objectifying
oneself. (When he said he
disapproved of Chick-fi l-A’s politics
but liked their chicken, was
he expressing an honest opinion
or shoring up his “one of the guys”
credentials? As a stranger observing
his campaign, it’s impossible to
tell.) Buttigieg’s memoir “Shortest
Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge
and a Model for America’s Future”
reads like a marketing exercise.
The upbeat, charming persona
he conveys in interviews comes
through, as well. But it’s evasive in
damning ways. Although he went
to work for the consulting fi rm
McKinsey after graduating from
Harvard, “Shortest Way Home”
only conveys the vaguest sense of
McKinsey’s business or his role
there. The fi rm is actually quite
scummy, having helped Purdue
Pharma get America hooked on
opioids and whitewash the reputation
of countries like Saudi Arabia
and China. His military service is
treated in such a cursory manner
that one could suspect he really
joined because he thought it would
help his political career. Buttigieg
barely mentions being gay until
the last quarter of the book. And
he downplays the pain of staying
in the closet until 33, telling an
uplifting tale of his romance and
marriage to his husband Chasten
instead.
Nathan J. Robinson wrote an
epic-length, very cogent critique of
Buttigieg’s politics and life path for
Current Affairs . His point can be
summed up, as “This man is the
story of the American elite.” Buttigieg
has talked in vague platitudes
for most of his campaign and
avoided putting any policy proposals
on his website for months.
When he has stated concrete positions,
they’re as centrist as Joe
Biden’s. His website now states
that he only favors free public college
for lower-income students and
“Medicare for All for those who
want it,” rather than expanding
the system to offer truly universal
coverage. He thinks Chelsea Manning
belongs in jail: so much for
LGBTQ solidarity. His reputation
for intelligence is based on speaking
seven languages, playing indie
rock songs on piano, and reading
“Ulysses,” not his political ideas.
You would think that an essay
that declares, “The offi ce of the
presidency is so totally bankrupt
of positive political potential that
in many ways it doesn’t actually
make a difference who captures
the democratic nomination,” would
engage in a concrete way with
Buttigieg as a politician the way
Robinson did. But Greta LaFleur’s
“Heterosexuality Without Women,”
published by the Los Angeles Review
of Books’ blog, offers a queer
critique of Buttigieg and his husband
that casually wipes out their
actual experience. She starts out
analyzing Time magazine’s cover
of the couple, pointing out its resemblance
to Norman Rockwell
paintings and assumption that
they have a right to a place in the
White House (which she links to
their white privilege).
LaFleur is on target when she
mentions that “there’s actually
no sex at center stage here. And
that is part of the point.” But the
heteronormativity she describes
isn’t the same as heterosexuality,
though LaFleur uses various
rhetorical dodges about the difference
between criticizing a photo
and dissing the people in it. She
claims “this little essay is not a
critique… this is not a campaign
against Pete Buttigieg.” But forget
about Buttigieg and think about
his less powerful husband — a
man whose brother still rejects the
legitimacy of his gayness somehow
isn’t gay enough for her, either,
and his marriage to the mayor is
essentially masturbatory “doppelbanging.”
Jacob Bacharach’s essay for
the Outline , sporting the clickbait
headline “Why Pete Buttigieg is
bad for gays,” also criticizes Buttigieg’s
presentation of his sexuality
from a leftist perspective. If I
agree with his fi nal point that “it is
hard to escape the way that American
capitalism and American democracy
have worked in tandem
both to dissipate and to assimilate
the radical democratic energies of
queer liberation by giving a very
circumscribed sort of gay a conditional
membership to the club,”
the fact that Bacharach defi nes
contemporary gayness by Grindr
usage is troubling. Gay men are
hypersexualized by heterosexuals.
It doesn’t help when we join
in. No one would expect a photo of
Beto O’Rourke and his wife to put
sex at center stage.
LaFleur and Bacharach, however,
look like very insightful social
critics next to Dale Peck, whose
attempt at sounding like the bitterest
and pissiest queen from “The
Boys in the Band” before making
the dubious claim that Buttigieg is
bound to screw around if he gets
elected president because he came
out in his 30s got “canceled” from
the New Republic’s website within
a day of its publication.
Buttigieg is trying to win a
game set by rules that heterosexuals
wrote. (In an interview quoted
in J eremy W. Peters’ article, “Pete
Buttigieg’s Life in the Closet,” for
the New York Times , he links the
closet to his political ambition; his
assumption that being openly gay
in the 2000s would’ve prevented
him from getting elected mayor of
a Midwestern town is probably correct.)
Could a gay socialist get very
far in the presidential race? Could
someone who says, “I’m proud of
being queer,” while openly polyamorous?
These are two different issues,
but they’ve been confl ated by
many of Buttigieg’s critics. America
sees gayness as a form of cultural
and political rebellion — or
thinks it should be — rather than
a simple way of existing. Buttigieg
challenges that narrative, but as
privileged as he is, a man who
didn’t feel that it was possible to be
open about his sexuality until his
30s and lives in a state where it’s
legal to fi re someone for being gay
is still part of a real minority.
In a different piece for The New
Republic, Charles Dunst suggests
that “Queerness will never
hinge on one’s presentation, political
opinions, or the level to which
one embraces or rejects the mainstream…
the Buttigiegs have the
right to be traditionally married
and conventionally masculine
without facing the forfeiture of
their queerness.” Without defending
Buttigieg as a politician, it’s
obvious that his vanilla image is a
defense against the sexual stereotypes
gay men face. Queer liberation
should lead to a world that destroys
such stereotypes while also
making it perfectly acceptable not
to be married or monogamous —
yet some liberationist arguments
risk setting up a new, equally exclusionary
set of rules for queer
people to follow. Buttigieg’s sudden
rise as one of the most famous
gay men in the US — and one of
the few such celebrities outside the
arts — raises question about the
meaning of LGBTQ identity that
resonate far beyond one man and
his campaign.
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