In Politics, Some Gays Are Their Own Worse Enemy

I grew up in a politically involved family where politics were discussed at the dinner table and sometimes quite vocally at family reunions and other extended family gatherings. Despite sometimes strenuous disagreements (one might think a fight was ensuing at times), my relatives fortunately stayed focus on the bigger picture and did not believe in circular firing squads in politics.  The same cannot be said for many in the LGBT community. Most idiotic, of course are the gay Republicans who increasingly suffer from a blindness that a 1930's German Jew would have had if they had joined and actively supported the Nazi Party. Only a fool - or someone with significant self-loathing - supports a party that opposes ones rights and embraces extreme elements that say gays are "worthy of death" as one Christofascists recently said about Pete Buttigieg.  

Next in line for the idiocy award are those in the LGBT community who oppose Pete Buttigieg because he is not "gay enough."  It's not his policy proposals that are the problem. No, Buttigieg's big sin is that he, like myself and so many others I know, stayed in the closet for years and blended in with the straight world rather than being flamboyant and marching in a pride parade in only a speedo.  Meanwhile, through his presidential campaign, Buttigieg is engaging in an amazing level of default gay rights activism and is changing many minds along the way.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at the idiocy, resentment and perhaps hidden jealousy - in my view - of those in the LGBT community who seemingly think they have the exclusive right to be the arbiters of and to define what it is to be gay.  

What most disturbs me is that what one might call the radical gays continue to miss the reality that without the rest of us gays - the ones who live in straight residential neighborhoods, have joined once exclusively straight social institutions and to an extent blended, if you will - have been a major reason gays rights have progressed so much over the last two decades.  They also forget that when one doesn't live in San Francisco, Chicago, New York or other ultra-liberal cities, being a radical revolutionary can be downright dangerous. Here are article excerpts that try to make excuses for those who once again prove to see themselves as superior and in the process are their own worse enemies, show that they cannot see the forest for the trees, and make the rest of us gays look ridiculous:

By now, you may have heard that some queer people think that Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a current contender for the Democratic Presidential nomination, is not gay enough. Unless you are immersed in this conversation with other queer people, you may have thought, “That’s ridiculous.”

The notion that some of us think Buttigieg is not gay enough has an identifiable relationship to the facts, which are that, for the purposes of this discussion, people who grew up queer in this country fall into two distinct categories of experience. One is the experience of never fitting in, being bullied by classmates for the way you walk, the way you look in clothes, the way you hit or fail to hit—all the things that set you apart before you have language to describe them. . . . . Millions of people have had a version of that experience.

And then there is the other experience, the life of blending in, only to surprise your classmates—or, more likely, former classmates who follow you on social media—with the revelation that you are gay. I am not arguing that one category of experience is worse or more difficult or painful than the other. [But, of course, she is doing so]. There are people who revel in their specialness from an early age, and there are people who fit in but feel tormented by their deep secret. I am saying only that these two kinds of experience are very different. . . . . Recently, a friend mentioned that, after thirty years of teaching, she had mentioned her wife in class for the first time, surprising her students with the revelation that she was gay—and I found myself momentarily marvelling at having the option to come out to one’s students or not.

As part of his campaign, and in developing his political persona, Buttigieg has repeatedly told a compelling story about his coming out. His is the story of someone who blended in and was therefore able—or, one might say, forced—to choose the circumstances and timing of his coming out. He chose to wait a long time: until after he graduated from college, after he had served in the military, after he had been elected mayor. He has made it clear that he feared that, if he had come out sooner, his political career might have suffered.

He also waited until after attitudes toward homosexuality had changed and same-sex marriage had become legal in more than half the states and was recognized by the federal government—all thanks to the courage and work of people who came out before Buttigieg did. Then, in 2015, he had the chutzpah to write an op-ed titled “Why Coming Out Matters,” in which he praised himself for “putting something this personal on the pages of a newspaper.” Many a reader might have wondered, as I did when my friend mentioned her relationship with her students, what it must be like to have the option of not being exposed.

Again, I am not saying that L.G.B.T. people who don’t pass are somehow morally superior to L.G.B.T. people who do [But, of course, she is doing so]. But these two distinct experiences are in some ways correlated with two divergent tracks in L.G.B.T. politics. One kind of queer politics is rooted in ideas of liberation, revolutionary change, and solidarity. . . . . The strategy of this brand of politics is to work across differences to bring about change.

The other, more mainstream, and often more visible kind of L.G.B.T. politics aims to erase difference. Its message to straight people is “We are just like you, and all we want is the right to have what you have: marriage, children, a house with a picket fence, and the right to serve in the military.” The vision of this politics is a society in all respects indistinguishable from the one in which we live now, except queer people have successfully and permanently blended in. To be sure, all kinds of queer people have been involved in both kinds of queer politics. But the politics of being “just like you” leaves out the people who cannot or do not want to be just like conventional straight people, whether in appearance or in the way we construct our lives and families.

Buttigieg embodies the second kind of gay experience and the second kind of gay politics. In a beautiful essay published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Greta LaFleur, a professor of American studies at Yale, analyzed a photograph of Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, that appeared on the cover of Time magazine in May of last year. “This photo is about a lot of things,” LaFleur wrote. “But one of its defining features is its heterosexuality. It’s offering us the promise that our first gay first family might actually be a straight one.

Buttigieg is the ultimate candidate of the country’s post-2016 trauma. He is not a woman. He is not a socialist. He is decidedly not a revolutionary. He does not make big, sweeping promises, except one: that nothing much will change, only Donald Trump won’t be President. “What I like about Mayor Pete is that he is not a strong ideologue,” Tod Sedgwick, a [straight] volunteer who had gone to New Hampshire to canvass for Buttigieg, told me.

What makes Buttigieg an easy and reassuring choice for these older, white, straight people, and a disturbing possibility for the queer people who seem to be criticizing him for not being gay enough? It is that he is profoundly, essentially conservative. He is an old politician in a young man’s body, a straight politician in a gay man’s body.

In truth, Buttigieg is proposing big changes should he be elected and just by his success to date  in the primary contest has raised gay acceptance to a level most of us would not have believed possible not many years ago.  As for the gays who attack Buttigieg, whether they know it or not, they are attacking the rest of us gays who according to the radicals suffer from the cardinal sin of having blended and wanted some of the same rights as the straight community enjoys. Sadly, they are blind to the reality that they need us more than we need them. 

The LGBT Community Is Often Its Own Worse Enemy

Like the Democrat Party as a whole, the far left of the LGBT community is often the community's worse enemy since it continually wanders off into the political weeds, utterly clueless to the need of (i) pushing candidates with a realistic chance of winning, and (ii) stop pushing radical agendas that a majority of Americans simply either do not want or find outright fearful. Worse yet, these elements have embraced the Democrat circular firing squad model of demanding total perfection in politicians from birth with no forgiveness ever for past mistakes even if they occurred decades ago. A case in point here in Virginia is Equality Virginia which has burned its bridges with Governor Northam, Lt. Governor Fairfax and Attorney General Herring, all of whom were dis-invited from the Commonwealth Dinner last month and told they were unwelcome. Lost in what I can only view as delusion, members of the EV board think they still have a "great relationship" with these powerful Democrats who they have insulted and scorned. With this type of clueless leadership, it's no wonder EV has managed to pass so little legislatively. 

On the national level, similar cluelessness is coming from far left elements in the LGBT community who are attacking Pete Buttigieg for being a white male rather than being ecstatic that a gay candidate for the first time ever has been deemed credible at the presidential level. Even if Buttigieg doesn't win the Democrat nomination, he is opening minds and generating much needed conversations, but for the circular firing squad crowd, they cannot forgive him for being white and male.   A piece in Huffington Post looks at this self-destructive phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

Pete Buttigieg has a shot at becoming the first openly gay president in American history. But his candidacy is already exposing tensions in the LGBTQ community between gay white men, who benefit from the economic and social privileges of being white men, and all the other queer people who don’t.

“Is Buttigieg a run-of-the-mill white male candidate, or does his sexuality set him apart? That mammoth question can be broken down into smaller ones that get at why diversity matters,” Slate’s Christina Cauterucci wrote in March. “Has Buttigieg faced setbacks or barriers to success because he’s gay? … Would a win for Buttigieg be as historically significant and culturally meaningful as a win for a member of an underrepresented race or gender?”  “In a primary for the overwhelmingly pro-gay Democratic Party, Buttigieg can be more accurately lumped in with his white male peers than with anyone else,” she concluded.

Cauterucci’s piece drew immediate criticism, primarily by white men, for dismissing Buttigieg as not being gay enough. “Ludicrous,” wrote Drew Goins, assistant editor of The Washington Post opinions section. “It’s the Oppression Olympics at its worst: In a battle to prove that one community is more discriminated against than another, we tear each other apart rather than unite in common cause,” wrote John Aravosis, editor of AMERICABlog.

The LGBTQ community is obviously not monolithic. It has the same fault lines of race, gender, class and economics that persist in the rest of American culture. But some of these disparities may have been obscured under President Barack Obama, who helped unite queer people around his pro-LGBTQ agenda. And President Donald Trump has certainly given queer people a common purpose in fighting his assault on LGBTQ rights.

At a time of historic diversity among Democratic presidential candidates, Buttigieg ― a white, upper-class, Ivy League-educated, Midwestern man of faith ― is exciting LGBTQ rights groups as much as making them confront more complicated questions about the best person to represent the interests of someone who is, say, transgender, black and female.

“As a black, same-gender-loving man, hearing a white, gay, Democrat political leader introduce new ways of having conversations about political identity and religion and intersections is exciting,” said David Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition. “But we need to pause to think about not only how gayness exists as a political identity for gay white men, but how LGBTQ gains have worked over the last few years.”

Johns said the priorities of prominent LGBTQ rights groups have largely been driven by gay white men, from fights to allow domestic partnerships in various states, to ensuring that financially comfortable gay and lesbian couples can adopt children, to fights over banning gay conversion therapy. . . . . “Not only is the world set up to benefit them, but shifts in political and social environments have allowed them to enjoy additional privileges. While those gains have been made, there hasn’t been parallel progress or investment in black communities or black LGBTQ communities.”

Some LGBTQ rights groups didn’t seem to want to talk about Buttigieg’s candidacy exposing these fractures. The National Center for Transgender Equality declined to comment for this story. The National LGBTQ Task Force did not respond to a request for comment.

Human Rights Campaign spokeswoman Sarah McBride said LGBTQ people all over the country are inspired by Buttigieg’s candidacy.

“Throughout his campaign for president, Mayor Pete has made a point of emphasizing LGBTQ equality, including the urgent need to fight for the rights and dignity of transgender people,” said McBride. “The unprecedented field of pro-equality candidates running for president will ensure that LGBTQ rights are a central part of the 2020 debate, and it’s clear that LGBTQ voters will play a decisive role in both the primary and the general election.”

“No single candidate can represent the diversity of the LGBTQ community, and Buttigieg undoubtedly enjoys advantages because of his gender and race,” added Shannon Minter of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “But he is also a compelling candidate who has shown tremendous courage, including by challenging the harms inflicted on LGBTQ people by officials and leaders who misuse religion to justify discrimination and bigotry. We can acknowledge the impact of sexism and racism on our national politics without diminishing Buttigieg’s importance or well-deserved success.”

To be clear, all of the LGBTQ rights advocates HuffPost talked to ― some spoke on the record, some spoke privately ― said they are thrilled that Buttigieg is a candidate. But some felt torn about yet another white man getting so much attention in a race full of women and people of color, particularly after Hillary Clinton came so close to winning in 2016.

“Do we think it will end up causing some fault lines within our community? I’m sure it will. Mostly among women, from our corner,” said Stephanie Sandberg, the executive director of LPAC, which helps elect LGBTQ women. “But we now have more than 20 people in the race. We have plenty of time. I hope [Buttigieg] does as well as he can and continues to pave the way. It’s fantastic.”

For his part, Buttigeg seems fully aware that he can’t speak for the entire LGBTQ community. But he’s made efforts to embrace the causes of it.

The reality for Buttigieg, though, is that his most enthusiastic LGBTQ supporters so far are affluent gay white men. He “rarely goes more than a few days” between private events hosted by prominent gay donors, The New York Times reported Wednesday, including gatherings in New York City and Beverly Hills hosted by composer Stephen Sondheim, Bravo host Andy Cohen and former R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe.

Johns said he’s waiting to see who Buttigieg surrounds himself with and the diversity of perspectives he’s willing to consider before deciding if he can get behind him.

Sadly, individuals like Johns seemingly would rather by default re-elect Trump than recognize that politics is about what is possible and will get the support of a majority of voters. That is objective reality - something lost on too many in the far left of the LGBT community. As for complaints about the issues pushed by many LGBT rights organizations, another reality is that most are disproportionately funded by white gay males who, by default set priorities.