Yes, It Matters That Pete Buttigieg Is Gay

Democrat candidate Pete Buttigrieg isn't at the top of the polls and hasn't raised the most money, but to many in the LGBT community he has caught people's attention. Why? In part, because many of us never thought a gay man could be viewed by so many as a plausible candidate for the highest office in the land. Polls have shown that 68% of Americans - true some may be lying - say that Buttigrieg's sexual orientation is not a problem to them. Growing up gay can be traumatic, not because there is anything inherently wrong with being gay, but because the bigotry and cruelty that has been heaped on gays for so long by society.  Indeed, the Christofascists and the Trump/Pence regime continue to wage a war against LGBT equality. Two recent pieces look at Buttigrieg's candidacy, one in The Atlantic and the other by Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine.  The first examines why Buttigrieg's gayness matters and the latter ponders whether Buttigrieg could prove to be a transformation candidate.  Here are excerpts from The Atlantic:

In my lifetime, it has been illegal for me to serve in the military, illegal for me to marry, illegal for me to adopt children, and even illegal for me to have sex. Society barred me from the first three; until 2003, the fourth meant risk of a fine or a prison sentence in some states. This discrimination did not just happen in a history book—it happened to me, and it happened to Buttigieg, too.

I am two years older than Buttigieg. We could have grown up with the same cartoons, listened to the same music, felt the same fear when we heard that Matthew Shepard had been murdered. We’ve lived through discrimination, and the fact that laws have changed doesn’t alleviate the trauma of our past. Ask our gay elders whether they’ve recovered from losing their friends and colleagues who died by the tens of thousands during the AIDS crisis. That pain is fresh.

During an interview with an LGBTQ magazine, Buttigieg described himself as “somebody whose marriage exists as a function of a single vote on the U.S. Supreme Court.” Our position in society is hardly secure. The fight for equality isn’t won. It still matters that I am gay, so it matters to me that Buttigieg is gay.

In many states, it remains legal to fire gay people for being gay. And if you’re tired of hearing about that fact, imagine how tired I am of living it. There is no public-accommodations law at the federal level that stops landlords from refusing to rent me an apartment if I show up for the home tour while holding my husband’s hand.

Buttigieg was mayor of South Bend when the Indiana governor signed a law in 2015 allowing businesses to turn away gay customers. That law didn’t stick, but the governor is now our vice president, Mike Pence. He stuck. Forgive me if I like the idea of having someone in the White House who understands what I’ve been through, and who would protect me from the people who would turn me away.

For the first time in my life, I’m now represented in government by another gay man, Brian Sims, the outspoken Pennsylvania lawmaker who went viral for flipping off Mike Pence. (He represents my corner of Philadelphia in Harrisburg.)

Sims told me that being gay put Buttigieg in “learning situations” that give the candidate “heightened insight into issues far beyond human sexuality.” Sims believes that a “multidimensional identity can help educate, enlighten, and ultimately solve many of our most pressing cultural problems.”

Identity matters. Like most Democrats, I have not yet decided who to vote for in a primary that is still months away. But I believe it matters that Cory Booker is a black man, that Kamala Harris is the daughter of an Indian mom and a Jamaican dad, and that Buttigieg is gay. These facets of their identities mean that they can understand the powerless, as victims of power, and that they can understand the alienated, having been marginalized.

Beyond questions of empathy, Buttigieg being out is germane because he’s a role model to those who want to come out.

Gay men are largely missing from positions of power. An out gay man has never served on the U.S Supreme Court. Not a single out gay man served on the federal bench until President Barack Obama took office. There is not and has never been an out gay man in the U.S. Senate. Buttigieg came out in 2015 on his own terms, but that counts as progress only in an unfair system.

“When you are a member of a marginalized or often invisible community, there is something especially powerful about seeing someone like you that isn’t actually you,” said Erin Uritus, the head of Out & Equal, a group for LGBTQ business people, when I asked her about Buttigieg. “When LGBTQ young people wonder what is in store for their future and they can look to Tim Cook or Rachel Maddow or Pete Buttigieg, their entire world opens up.”

The movement for equal rights has made tremendous strides. But we are not immune from persecution, especially not young people. Researchers at the Williams Institute estimate that 4.5 percent of the American population is LGBTQ. They also estimate that 40 percent of youth in homeless shelters are LGBTQ.

You can be sure that LGBTQ people are paying attention to how society treats Buttigieg as a candidate. The questions on their mind: Is it safe out there? Is this really possible?

“For young members of the LGBTQ community, many of whom may be suffering discrimination or bullying or even being ostracized from their own family, seeing a member of our community run for president helps them know it’s going to be okay.”

Sullivan's piece looks at a wider perspective.  He questions Buttigrieg's relative youth - forgetting that many of the Founding Fathers were even younger at the time of the American Revolution - and inexperience, forgetting that Trump had/has even less experience.  Here are highlights:

One of the reasons I thought Donald Trump would win in 2016 was not just that he was focusing on the core issues roiling the middle classes (immigration and globalization). It was because he had the perfect foil for his persona in Hillary Clinton. Trump was fresh to politics, anti-Establishment, an outsider, populist, alpha male, and nationalist, with a base primed to despise Clinton. Clinton had been in power forever, was pure Establishment, a total insider, globalist, alpha female, predictable, with a base stunned by Trump. It was the kind of contrast Trump longed for, and it was a central element in his success. And these matchups matter. Trump is widely unpopular by himself. He will need a good foil to win in a binary race.

So, leaving policy aside for a second, who would be the best Democratic foil from the anti-Trump perspective? By which I mean, which set of qualities is most likely to contrast with Trump in a way that makes the Democratic contender seem fresh, and the president appear old, clueless, and malevolent? I suspect it is this question that is behind the budding candidacy of one Pete Buttigieg. When you think of him in a debate with Trump, one-on-one, everything gets scrambled. I don’t know what that dynamic would be like exactly, but it feels a lot less predictable than, say, Elizabeth Warren or Beto O’Rourke.

Trump would be the oldest president in history at 74; Buttigieg would be the youngest at 39. Trump landed in politics via his money and celebrity after years in the limelight; Buttigieg is the mayor of a midsize midwestern town, unknown until a few weeks ago. Trump is a pathological, malevolent narcissist from New York, breaking all sorts of norms. Buttigieg is a modest, reasonable pragmatist, and a near parody of normality. Trump thrives on a retro heterosexual persona; Buttigieg appears to be a rather conservative, married homosexual. Trump is a coward and draft dodger; Buttigieg served his country. Trump does not read; Buttigieg does. Trump’s genius is demonic demagoguery. Buttigieg’s gig is careful reasoning. Trump is a pagan; Buttigieg is a Christian. Trump vandalizes government; Buttigieg nurtures it.

To put it simply, Mayor Pete seems almost designed to expose everything that makes the country tired of Trump. . . . . David Brooks rightly notes Buttigieg’s Obama-like combination of somewhat banal leftism with personal rectitude and calm. After the fever of the culture wars of the high-temperature Trump era, this might come across as a welcome balm. Voters tend to go for a contrast with the current president, a correction of sorts. . . . Buttigieg is a near-perfect way to put a drop shadow behind all of Trump’s grandiosity, age, temperament, and privilege.

More importantly, he would mitigate our current polarizing patterns. He’s not sanctimoniously woke, but woke enough to have the “social justice” left potentially buy in (if its members can get over their fear of white cis gay men as oppressors). He’s a left-liberal, but relatively unformed on policy, and has carved out a moderate place in a field careening leftward. Even his most daring ideas — expanding the Supreme Court to 15 — are designed to reduce polarization.

There’s something both very new and yet very traditional about the mayor — and that’s appealing to moderate conservatives.

Too gay? They said Barack Obama was too black. Bad name? Sure, but again: Barack Hussein Obama. (My gay hack for pronouncing his name is to think of him as a “booty judge.”) Too young? That’s possible. He’d be approaching 40 at his inauguration, but his affect is younger. There remains something boyish about him, which is something Trump would immediately fasten onto as rendering him a lightweight. But Buttigieg can rebut that in a simple and powerful way: He can say he was man enough to serve his country in uniform, which should be man enough for any president. (The contrast with the aged, spoiled draft-dodger brat could be deadly.)

But it’s also important to say that 39 is not that young for high office. Emmanuel Macron was the same age when he became president of France. Jacinda Ardern became prime minister of New Zealand at the age of 37. Sebastian Kurz became chancellor of Austria at the age of 31. Leo Varadkar became prime minister of Ireland at the age of 38, and came out as gay (like Buttigieg) in his 30s. In an age when nothing seems to be able to get done nationally, a serious pragmatist with an actual record of governing has an opening. And he has a good line when confronted with lack of experience: He will have had more experience actually governing than Trump.

He has some obvious vulnerabilities. The Democrats have to rally the black vote to counteract Trump’s rural strength. Mayor Pete hasn’t proved he can do that, even though his city is over 26 percent African-American.

Buttigieg’s immigration policies are very vague — he favors a “path to citizenship.” My own view is that the only Democrat who will beat Trump next year will campaign for control of immigration, legal and undocumented, in a sane and humane way. . . . We could, in other words, be in the mother of all immigration scares as the first primaries take place. We could have a million more migrants to grapple with. Currently, no Democrat has any response to this. . . . . If Buttigieg counters with a campaign for a path to citizenship for most here, but also in favor of mandatory e-verify (a completely humane way to enforce immigration law in the interior of the country via employment), he’d break out of the pack. Just actively treating the fears about immigration as legitimate — and seeking to assuage them — would mark him as a different kind of Democrat. And, of course, Buttigieg’s emergence has a personal salience for me. He is, quite simply, what many of us in my generation of gays fought for and rarely believed could happen: He is proud to be gay but not defined by it, happily married, a veteran, wickedly smart, and completely integrated. When I read some LGBTQ activists push back on him for not being gay or “intersectional” enough, it depresses me beyond measure. His candidacy is as historic as Obama’s. His potential presidency even more so. That so many see him as a credible, formidable candidate is a reminder that in America, we can still unite in a more humane consensus. Trump has eclipsed that possibility in a welter of poison. Buttigieg quite simply rescues it again.

Mayor Pete Buttigrieg Is Plenty Gay

As regular readers know, I find the current Democrat "purity test" that leaves no allowances for past mistakes, present personal quirks, and the differences in the conversation/culture now versus 10 or even 40 years ago to be totally maddening.  Here in Virginia, we have seen the damage done by this self-defeating standard as the Democrat party attacked its own and seemingly was bent on a suicide pact.  Thankfully, so far none of Virginia's statewide leadership has given in to the demands of those who would destroy the party from within - much to the delight of Republicans. Now, we are seeing similar idiocy and personal destruction being waged as a huge field of candidates chases after the Democrat 2020 presidential nomination.  A column in the New York Times by Frank Bruni (who is gay) which looks at the insane argument that somehow Pete Buttigrieg is not "gay enough" as its launch point looks at what could be a key part of handing Donald Trump a second term.  Distressingly, to the self-anointed purity police, winning elections is less important than satisfying all of their unrealistic sensibilities. Here are column excerpts:

How do Democrats properly vet their candidates for president without cannibalizing them? How do they rightly insist on sensitive and inclusive leaders while making allowances for past mistakes, present quirks, human messiness and the differences in the conversation and the culture now versus 10 or 20 or 40 years ago?

That’s emerging as a central challenge of the Democratic presidential primary. And it’s worrying me.

I’m worried because there was an actual mini-debate on the left recently over whether Pete Buttigieg is gay enough. Do his whiteness, upper-middle-class background and Harvard and Oxford degrees nullify his experience as a minority and undercut his status as a trailblazer? This question is out there, in both senses of that phrase.

I’m worried because it in some ways echoes an earlier question about whether Kamala Harris — whose father came from Jamaica, whose mother came from India and whose husband is white — is black enough.

And I’m worried because of what Joe Biden is going through — because of the intensity of the censure that he faced after the Nevada politician Lucy Flores’s allegation and because of the fixation on precisely what kind of apology he must issue.

I’ve written that I don’t think Biden, 76, should run, for many reasons, including that someone in politics as long as he has been carries too much baggage; that Democratic voters have generally preferred candidates significantly younger than he is; and that he mismanaged and failed miserably in his two prior presidential campaigns.

But I feel just as strongly that Democrats need to show some proportion, realism and reason as they assess and react to candidates (or, in Biden’s case, probable candidates). With Biden especially but with others as well, too many Democrats aren’t doing that.

It’s nonnegotiable that Democrats hold their presidential aspirants to high standards on issues of racial justice, gender equality and more. It’s crucial that the party nominate someone who can credibly represent its proudly diverse ranks. But it’s also important that the party not demand a degree of purity that nobody attains.

I’m not recommending the Republicans’ course in accepting and protecting Donald Trump, which was to bury principles so deep that they may never be exhumed. I’m saying that to turn the Democratic primary into a nonstop apology tour when the nominee will be going up against a president never expected to apologize for anything is a risky strategy. It obsesses over the flaws in candidates who have many strengths, defining them in terms of what they seek forgiveness for. It blurs the line between job interview and inquisition. Taken too far, it rips contenders to shreds before Trump even takes out his scissors.

As for the mini-debate about Buttigieg’s gayness, it arose principally from this column in Slate, which included the following paragraph:

“A marginalized sexual orientation can remain unspoken and unnoticed for as long as a queer person desires. 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, for instance, would register on only the most finely tuned gaydar. Most people who are aware of his candidacy probably know he’s gay, but his every appearance doesn’t activate the ‘Hey, that’s that homosexual gentleman’ response in the average brain. That doesn’t mean he’s not gay enough — there’s really no such measure. It just means that he might not be up against quite the same hurdles that a gay candidate without such sturdy ties to straight culture would be.”

The author is asserting that Buttigieg, 37, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., doesn’t come across as particularly gay, meaning . . . what? That he lacks stereotypical mannerisms? That his voice isn’t high-pitched? I’m kind of floored, because I and other gay people around my age (54) or older spent most of our lives educating people about the bigotry and inaccuracy of those very stereotypes and trumpeting the message — the truth! — that gay people can be every bit as buttoned-down and strait-laced as, well, Pete Buttigieg! Now his divergence from those stereotypes is deemed remarkable and in need of dissection? Strange days indeed.

[T]his is how he {Buttigrieg] argued that Democrats should reclaim the word “freedom” from Republicans, who have tried to reserve it for their brand:

“You’re not free if you have crushing medical debt. You’re not free if you’re being treated differently because of who you are. What has really affected my personal freedom more: the fact that I don’t have the freedom to pollute a certain river, or the fact that for part of my adult life, I didn’t have the freedom to marry somebody I was in love with? We’re talking about deep, personal freedom.”

He sounds sufficiently gay to me. His powers of empathy seem plenty informed by his sexual orientation. And we need to stop making assumptions about how well someone can understand and address what minorities go through based on his or her looks or vocal inflections or anything of the sort. That’s the quintessence of prejudice. And it’s the antithesis of enlightenment.

Very well said. And I'd also note that under the Slate column standard,  with me being white, having enjoyed a fairly privileged childhood and youth, and having attended a top university and law school, I'm not gay enough.  It's utter idiocy and it needs to stop.

Buttigieg’s $7 Million Fundraising Haul Puts Democrats on Notice

Openly gay South Bend (Ind.) Mayor Pete Buttigieg continues to surprise Democrats and pundits alike.  First, one poll showed that 68% of respondents said that they were comfortable with a gay candidate (while seniors are more likely to voice reservations about gay candidates, a majority (56 percent) now say they have no objections).  Second, Buttigieg announced that he had raised over $7 million during his first months on the campaign trail.  Neither of these things were expected and, indeed, on fundraising, Buttigieg is doing better than a number of candidates thought to be more formidable.  A piece in Politico looks at Buttigieg's continued ability to surprise.  Here are excerpts:

Pete Buttigieg’s Monday fundraising announcement carried an unmistakable message to his 2020 rivals: He’s here to stay.

The South Bend (Ind.) mayor has jolted the 2020 presidential campaign with growing media attention and rising public polling, and he did it again Monday by saying he raised over $7 million during his first months on the trail, seeding his campaign with the resources to take advantage of the early burst of national attention.

Buttigieg’s fundraising haul is the clearest sign yet that he’s emerging as a serious contender for the Democratic nomination in an unorthodox way. The 37-year-old, openly gay candidate is raising millions online and capturing the attention of national Democrats in a string of viral moments in recent weeks, while also leaning on a network of fellow mayors to build roots on the ground.

“He’s disrupting the entire 2020 race,” said Jon Soltz, president of VoteVets, a progressive group that hasn’t endorsed a 2020 candidate. Soltz added: “The more and more people hear from him, the more they think he’s the fresh face that they’ve been waiting for.”

Buttigieg is the first presidential candidate to offer a glimpse at his fundraising totals from the first quarter of 2019 — garnering significant cable news coverage all day Monday.

Sanders and O’Rourke’s total first-quarter numbers will also likely dwarf Buttigieg’s. But the mayor is likely to surpass several senators and governors also running for the Democratic presidential nomination, which “is quite extraordinary for a mayor,” said Mark Longabaugh, a Democratic consultant who worked on Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid.

Unlike some of his 2020 primary opponents, Buttigieg didn’t start with a ready-made digital fundraising program to tap into. In an email to supporters, Buttigieg said he “started with just about 20,000 people on our email list, and not many people even knew who I was.” In contrast, Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand sunk millions into their programs during their Senate bids, while O’Rourke built an enormous list of supporters during his Texas Senate bid last cycle.

Buttigieg dropped only $15,000 on Facebook ads in the past three months, near the bottom of the 2020 field.

“Buttigieg’s first-quarter numbers are the stuff of a very real organic phenomenon that establishes him as a surging candidate who has achieved real liftoff.” . . . . It’s also a network that Buttigieg can return to, quarter after quarter, so the small-dollar component of Buttigieg’s early fundraising “is worth so much more than that over the next year,” said Soltz, who also warned that Buttigieg’s newfound status will also likely “start drawing attacks from other candidates.”

[F]or Buttigieg, this fundraising haul “means he’s viable, and at the very least, he’s going to be around for a while,” said Julianna Smoot, a Democratic strategist who served as the national finance director on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

“That’s the kind of money that means you can actually start building a strategy for the early states,” Smoot added.

Buttigieg’s viability is also showing up in the polls, where he’s jumped to 4 percent nationally, according to a Quinnipiac University survey released last week. An Iowa-based poll released by another progressive group, Focus On Rural America, also showed Buttigieg moving from 0 to 6 percent support among Democrats in the state.

Former Ambassador David Jacobson, a Democratic donor who donated to the mayor during his failed bid for Democratic National Committee chairman in 2017, said the fundraising haul will help bring more donors to Buttigieg.

“What it does is it [provides] evidence — not just to me and my fundraising friends but to people in general — that, you know what? This guy's got something and I need to look more closely at it,” Jacobson said. “Like everything else, success breeds success. I do think that his number that he released today is going to encourage people to look his way.”

Buttigieg is also surging at a time when another Democrat with deep roots in the industrial Midwest is stumbling.  . . . . “The thing about Mayor Pete is he doesn’t have baggage,” said Democratic activist Molly Jong-Fast, who’s planning to host a fundraiser for Buttigieg.

America Already Had a Gay President

Gay Democrat presidential nominee candidate Pete Buttigieg.

With South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a gay man married to a man, showing himself to be surprisingly popular among 2020 Democrat nomination contenders, the chatter classes are talking up a storm about Buttigieg and what his candidacy might mean.  The chatter overlooks the reality that were he to be elected, Buttigieg would not be the first gay president of the United States. All that's needed to understand this truth is  to look at history that has not been re-written to make individuals conform to the heterosexual normative.  Over the years I have written several pieces on the fact that Abraham Lincoln was likely gay.  One such piece can be found here.  

William Rufus King.

But Lincoln was not the only possibly gay president.  A college and law school classmate originally from Alabama cross posted a piece from AL.com on Facebook that looks at President James Buchanan - America's only "bachelor president" - and his relationship with William Rufus King (who also served as U.S. vice president and, maybe more surprisingly, was a gay senator from Alabama).  Here are article excerpts:

“If elected, you would be the first openly gay president of the United States,” Stephen Colbert said to Pete Buttigieg after the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, declared his candidacy. While the characterization of being openly gay or “out” is relatively new, the fact is the United States has already had a gay president whose contemporaries knew it: James Buchanan. Indeed, the United States has also had a gay vice president and, maybe more surprisingly, a gay senator from Alabama.

If students taking U.S. history classes are taught anything about Buchanan, they learn that he was "our only bachelor president." How quaint. But, by using euphemisms, we falsely educate students - indeed all Americans - about the realities of this country's history. We also distort how and why Buttigieg's sexual identity matters today.

Before becoming president in 1857, Buchanan openly lived with William Rufus King, who at various times served as senator from Alabama, ambassador to France and, finally, Franklin Pierce's vice president. They met in Washington as young politicians, and lived together on and off for more than 16 years until King's death from tuberculosis in 1853.

Buchanan’s biographer, Jean H. Baker, believes that his relationship with the Southerner King partially explains why this Pennsylvanian was a “doughface,” a Northerner who did not oppose slavery. Indeed, Buchanan explicitly urged the Supreme Court to deliver an expansive ruling in the Dred Scott case - which denied freed slaves American citizenship and forbade Congress from regulating slavery in U.S. territories - and lobbied Congress to admit Kansas as a slave state.

How do we know Buchanan and King were a couple? In 1844, after King assumed his posting in Paris, Buchanan wrote a letter to a friend, complaining about being alone and not being able to find the right gentleman partner:

"I am now 'solitary and alone,' having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection."

Maybe he was only looking for a roommate, but who "woos" a roommate? And he admits he would not deliver "ardent or romantic affection" to a woman.

Similarly, King wrote Buchanan from Paris:

"I am selfish enough to hope you will not be able to procure an associate who will cause you to feel no regret at our separation. For myself, I shall feel lonely in the midst of Paris, for here I shall have no Friend with whom I shall commune as with my own thoughts."

Their peers knew about their relationship, which Buchanan and King made no real effort to hide. Andrew Jackson referred to King as "Miss Nancy" - a euphemism for a homosexual.

Other contemporaries called King Buchanan's "better half," and one congressman referred to him as "Mrs. B." All this would be quite peculiar if Buchanan was not gay. And we are not likely to get more explicit acknowledgment because both Buchanan and King had their personal papers burned after death. By not openly discussing this moment, we forget that being gay in the mid-19th century did not automatically exclude a man from national leadership. The idea that some people, including politicians and social leaders, are gay was not news or shocking to our forefathers. Americans generally considered it a private matter, and irrelevant to holding or performing public office. We obscure or even deny all this history, and, consequently, we miseducated our children and misdirect our attention. Moreover, we obfuscate perhaps the one positive step we took as a country in electing James Buchanan, who makes almost every list of the worst U.S. presidents. Let's stop pretending Buchanan was a bachelor, and take a lesson from our forebears. Instead of focusing on a candidate's sexuality, let's spend our time assessing their aptitude to lead our country in this perilous moment in history.

South Bend Mayor: Why Coming Out Matters

Pete Buttigieg (pictured above), who is the mayor of South Bend Indiana - not a particularly gay friendly state -  is the youngest mayor of a city with more than 100,000 residents in America.  Yesterday, Buttigieg, age 33, came out as gay in a powerful essay published by the city's local newspaper on Tuesday.  In the op-ed, Buttigrieg made the case as to why coming out is so important, both for one's own well being, but also for the larger LGBT community.   It is easy to hold prejudices against those that one does not know - or thinks one doesn't know.  When suddenly the class despised and condemned by religious extremists and bigots is discovered to include friends, neighbors and family members, it is much more difficult to continue to hang on to the hate and bigotry peddled primarily by the "godly folk."  If EVERY gay were to come out of the closet completely and cease living a furtive, closeted or semi-closeted life, we would have secured full equality long before now.  Here are excerpts from Buttigrieg's column:

Any day now, the Supreme Court will issue a decision on same-sex marriage that will directly affect millions of Americans. It comes at a time of growing public acceptance and support for equal rights. But no matter what the Court does, issues of equality are hardly settled across the country. Today it remains legal in most parts of Indiana (though not South Bend) to fire someone simply for being gay, and bullying still contributes to tragically high suicide rates among LGBT teens.

Experiences with friends or family members coming out have helped millions of Americans to see past stereotypes and better understand what being gay is — and is not. Being gay isn’t something you choose, but you do face choices about whether and how to discuss it. For most of our history, most Americans had no idea how many people they knew and cared about were gay.

My high school in South Bend had nearly a thousand students. Statistically, that means that several dozen were gay or lesbian. Yet when I graduated in 2000, I had yet to encounter a single openly LGBT student there. That’s far less likely to be the case now, as more students come to feel that their families and community will support and care for them no matter what.

I was well into adulthood before I was prepared to acknowledge the simple fact that I am gay. 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.

Putting something this personal on the pages of a newspaper does not come easy. We Midwesterners are instinctively private to begin with, and I’m not used to viewing this as anyone else’s business.

But it’s clear to me that at a moment like this, being more open about it could do some good. For a local student struggling with her sexuality, it might be helpful for an openly gay mayor to send the message that her community will always have a place for her. And for a conservative resident from a different generation, whose unease with social change is partly rooted in the impression that he doesn’t know anyone gay, perhaps a familiar face can be a reminder that we’re all in this together as a community.

Whenever I’ve come out to friends and family, they’ve made clear that they view this as just a part of who I am. Their response makes it possible to feel judged not by sexual orientation but by the things that we ought to care about most, like the content of our character and the value of our contributions.

Being gay has had no bearing on my job performance in business, in the military, or in my current role as mayor.

We’re moving closer to a world in which acceptance is the norm. This kind of social change, considered old news in some parts of the country, is still often divisive around here. But it doesn’t have to be. We’re all finding our way forward, and things will go better if we can manage to do it together. In the wake of the disastrous “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” episode here in Indiana earlier this year, we have an opportunity to demonstrate how a traditional, religious state like ours can move forward.

Like most people, I would like to get married one day and eventually raise a family. I hope that when my children are old enough to understand politics, they will be puzzled that someone like me revealing he is gay was ever considered to be newsworthy. By then, all the relevant laws and court decisions will be seen as steps along the path to equality. But the true compass that will have guided us there will be the basic regard and concern that we have for one another as fellow human beings — based not on categories of politics, orientation, background, status or creed, but on our shared knowledge that the greatest thing any of us has to offer is love.

Towleroad notes these other things about Buttigrieg:

According to his Facebook page, Buttigieg is a reserve officer in the Navy, and a graduate of both Harvard and Oxford universities.

IndyStar.com reports that Buttigieg, a Democrat, is in his first term and faces re-election this year.

Response to Buttigieg's essay on social media has been overwhelmingly positive .

Yes, coming out is terrifying, especially for us older gays, and can be fraught with upheaval.  My divorce was a nightmare and I was wiped out financially for a time.  But I cannot stress how wonderful it is to just be who I am.  No more hiding, no more self-loathing, no more secrets and feeling like an actor on a stage.  If people cannot accept you for who you are, then you are better off not having them in your life be they family members or those you thought were friends.  And remember, if they cannot accept you, it ultimately is because of their selfishness and their refusal to rethink matters and/or let go of ridiculous myths and fairy tales.  Kudos to Buttigrieg.