Why Pete Buttigieg’s Campaign was a BFD

I hope there are plenty of gay boys out there right now saying, “Wow, look at that. I think I’ll stay alive another day and maybe, just maybe, I can get through this.”

I like Pete Buttigieg. I first heard about him when I learned that South Bend, Indiana, had a gay mayor. I grew up two towns over, in Elkhart, and I’d gone to school in South Bend for a few years. My parents had a music store there, and, of course, Notre Dame is located nearby. As someone who’d been an out gay teen in high school, I never thought I’d live to see a gay mayor in a place I might call my hometown, if I ever thought I had one. That’s how alien I felt as a kid: I had no hometown, and I fled the state three days after my high school graduation.

Now let’s talk about ‘Mayor Pete’ and why his candidacy was a Big F-king Deal.

I know the trend for the last several years has been to denigrate things like a gender binary, privilege, whiteness, maleness, and the very idea of gayness, which, to many of a younger generation, now leaves a sour taste in their mouths. What can be more passé than being a cisgender, white, gay man, right? Well, let me tell you …

I was one of those kids who knew I was attracted to my own sex at a very young age. I didn’t call it ‘gay’ because I didn’t know what that meant. I just knew I liked my friend Randy in a way the society around me did not approve of. You see, my conflict was never with my sexuality, but with knowing how at odds it was with the world I lived in. A world in Indiana, a world on television, a world filled with people who told me God hated me and I was destined for an eternal fiery pit. I knew this was not true. I knew there was nothing wrong with me, but knowing that didn’t lessen my isolation or the pain of being ridiculed and humiliated. I felt, as so many gay kids did and still do, completely alone, with only books I ordered from the Psychology Today Book Club to help me figure out what was going on with me and that I was not the only gay kid on the planet.

Many years have passed since then. I’ll be 62 this year. I’m married to my husband, something I never imagined possible, just like I never imagined South Bend would have a gay mayor or that he would run for president and stand, with no hint of apology or shame, with his husband on national television.

He’s cisgender. He’s white. He’s privileged. And he’s me. He’s every gay kid out there who thinks of killing himself or herself because the world they live in won’t accept them. He’s a man who lived through the struggle to internalize his rightness, his goodness, his place on this earth as nothing more and nothing less than every other human being. He’s hope for a future at a time when the future seems bleak, or at least as bleak as it ever did. He’s the promise of a day less hurtful.

So yes, having a passé, cis, white, privileged gay man achieve what Pete Buttigieg has achieved and will continue to achieve, is a Big F-king Deal. To anyone who wants to downplay it or ridicule his cisness, whiteness, gayness, maleness, or privilege, go ahead. It will always be a Big F-king Deal, and I hope there are plenty of gay boys out there right now saying, “Wow, look at that. I think I’ll stay alive another day and maybe, just maybe, I can get through this.”