The Intensely Personal Struggle of "Coming Out"

The New York Times is running a lengthy piece entitled "Pete Buttigieg’s Life in the Closet- 

And Why It Took Him Until He Was 33 to Come Out" that looks at the presidential candidates struggles with who he was and, at least based on the title, suggests he should perhaps have come out earlier.  As the title of this blog notes, I did not come out until mid-life - age 49 in fact - after basically 37 years of struggling with accepting I was really gay. Recently, the husband and I have met two nice, highly successful men who, like me did not make the decision to come out until around the age 50 mark. Like myself, both had married women and father children and it took decades for them to realize that their efforts at conforming to the heterosexual norm simply had not and was not working.  While "coming out" is supposedly easier nowadays, the reality is that there are still huge societal, religious, and family pressures to conform and be straight.  The result is that many of us engage in incredible - and self-delusional - mental and psychological gymnastics and contortions to avoid admitting the reality that we are gay and will always be gay no matter what we try to do about that reality.  In my case, it ultimately was a choice of coming out and dealing with it or suicide.  I ultimately did come to terms with it and found a comfort in my own skin that had eluded me most of my life, but I did have two suicide attempts along the way.  As long as there is not rank hypocrisy involved - think closeted anti-gay Republicans and closeted anti-gay religious charlatans - no one has the right to tell someone to come out or to criticize them for when they decide to come out.  Here are article highlights:

The closet that Pete Buttigieg built for himself in the late 1990s and 2000s was a lot like the ones that other gay men of his age and ambition hid inside. He dated women, deepened his voice and furtively looked at MySpace and Friendster profiles of guys who had come out — all while wondering when it might be safe for him to do so too.

Chris Pappas, who was two years ahead of Mr. Buttigieg at Harvard and is now a Democratic congressman from New Hampshire, said he arrived at college “pretty much convinced that I couldn’t have a career or pursue politics as an L.G.B.T. individual.” Jonathan Darman, who was one class ahead of Mr. Buttigieg, remembered how people often reacted to a politician’s coming out then: “It wasn’t a story of love but of acknowledging illicit desire.” And Amit Paley, who graduated in Mr. Buttigieg’s class, recalled that “it was still a time where vocalizing anti-gay sentiments was not only common, but I think pretty accepted.”

The thought that 15 years later someone they might have shared a dorm or sat in a lecture hall with would become the first serious openly gay candidate for president of the United States never crossed their minds. But no one would have found the possibility more implausible than the young man everyone on campus knew as Peter.

Mr. Buttigieg, now the mayor of South Bend, Ind., struggled for a decade after leaving Harvard to overcome the fear that being gay was “a career death sentence,” as he put it in his memoir.

Mr. Buttigieg spent those years trying to reconcile his private life with his aspirations for a high-profile career in public service.

Attitudes toward gay rights changed immensely during that period, though he acknowledges that he was not always able or willing to see what broader social and legal shifts meant for him personally.

“Because I was wrestling with this, I’m not sure I fully processed the idea that it related to me,” he said in an interview.

More than most people his age — even more than most of the ambitious young men and women he competed against at Harvard — he possessed a remarkably strong drive for perfection. He went on to become a Rhodes scholar, work on a presidential campaign, join the military and be elected mayor all before he turned 30. After being deployed with the Navy to Afghanistan in 2014, he said he realized he could die having never been in love, and he resolved to change that. He finally came out in 2015, when he was 33.

Few experiences in his young adulthood were as formative in shaping his identity as the hypercompetitive environment he encountered at Harvard. Even liberal Cambridge, where meeting a gay student or professor would have been fairly unremarkable, did not always nurture the sense of confidence that he and many of his gay classmates felt they needed to be themselves. At times their surroundings seemed to do just the opposite. Mr. Buttigieg took a long and fraught path from life as an undergraduate who once had a girlfriend to a presidential candidate who travels the country with his husband in tow. While he was still in the closet, the country became a different place very quickly. And to understand Mr. Buttigieg’s journey is to understand the microgeneration in which he came of age. When members of the Harvard class of 2004 were juniors in high school, Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man from Wyoming, was bludgeoned, tied to a fence post and left to die in a murder that shocked the nation’s conscience. By the time they shipped off to Cambridge, few would have any gay friends — at least ones who were open about it. And the idea of a man marrying another man, or a woman marrying another woman, seemed almost absurd. The closest thing gay men and lesbians had to marriage was a civil union, which in 2000 was legal in exactly one state: Vermont. 

One thing no one seemed to peg him for was someone wrestling with being gay. He was so discreet that many of his friends and classmates said in interviews that they never would have guessed he was hiding anything until he told them. He left the testosterone-fueled campus sex banter to others. Hegel and de Tocqueville were more to his conversational tastes.

There was a small, close-knit social circle of L.G.B.T.Q. students. But they existed a world apart from Mr. Buttigieg’s Harvard.

“We were definitely on opposite ends of the gay spectrum — he was closeted and I was literally the campus drag queen, Miss Harvard 2002,” said William Lee Adams, who graduated in Mr. Buttigieg’s class and is now a broadcaster at the BBC World Service in London.

At the time, Mr. Adams said he was somewhat resentful of his peers who kept their identities hidden, having been bullied at school while he was growing up. Now, however, he is far more sympathetic because he better understands how personal it is to come out. “I felt a great sense of freedom at Harvard that I had never felt before because I could be out and not have food thrown at me,” he said. “Whereas Pete must have felt trapped, like he was in a straitjacket.” Mr. Flood, who wrote for The Crimson and knew Mr. Buttigieg as a friend, said that someone who worked so hard and thought so intensely about his future had to feel frustrated as he realized there was this immutable aspect of his life he was helpless to change.  “It’s like the one thing he couldn’t control about who he was and how he was going to present and how he was going to do all these things,” he said.

But when Mr. Buttigieg and his peers left college and started embarking on their professional lives, the country was changing in significant ways, jolting their sense of what it could mean to be openly gay and have a high-profile career. Many closeted people found their plight more difficult during the early years of social and legal change, as they wrestled with whether to finally open up after years of trying to maintain an impression of themselves that was false.

Mr. Paley, who was Mr. Buttigieg’s college classmate, remembers sitting in his dorm room in 2003 as a closeted junior and crying as he read Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s opinion in the landmark case Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down bans on intimacy between homosexuals on grounds that such laws were an affront to their dignity. “That helped me realize I can’t live my life this way,” he said of hiding his sexual orientation. It took Mr. Paley until the end of his senior year to fully come out, and he now serves as chief executive of the Trevor Project, an organization that works to advance the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. youth.

Once he [Buttigieg] came out, she said that being gay was never the first thing he wanted people to see when they met him — a veteran, Rhodes scholar, polyglot who was first elected mayor of South Bend when he was 29. “While it’s an important part of who he is, it’s not the only part,” she said. When he first ran for mayor in 2011 and won, he was closeted. A local gay rights group did not initially endorse him in that race, opting instead for a candidate with a more established track record on the issues. Mr. Buttigieg endured some awkward moments, like signing a city law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in 2012. To not think about how the law directly affected him, he acknowledged, “took a little compartmentalization.”

His employees and constituents saw an eligible bachelor in their young mayor and wanted to set him up with their daughters. Some on his staff even joked about his old light green Ford Taurus as a “chick magnet.” He did not bother to correct them.

When he did come out in the summer of 2015, the forum he chose was an op-ed for The South Bend Tribune. “It took years of struggle and growth for me to recognize that it’s just a fact of life, like having brown hair, and part of who I am,” he wrote.

He may have waited far longer than most young gay men today. But ever the overachiever, he made record time in setting a new bar. In less than four years he went from being single and closeted to being married and out as a gay candidate for president.

Anyone who has endured the coming out journey is, in my view, likely to have engaged in more introspection and thoughtful analysis of religion and societal issues than most straights will ever experience. For me, that is precisely the type of individual that we need in the White House - especially when contrasted  with the malignant narcissist who currently occupies that hallowed residence.