THE HISTORY BOY
When US Democrat Pete Buttigieg — the openly gay former mayor of South Bend, Indiana — ran his campaign to become the President of the United States, the odds, naturally, were against him. But before he stepped back from the race to the White House to back Biden, Buttigieg’s campaign was making the right headlines, and now, as Biden’s nominee for US Transport Secretary, he is set to make history as the first out and proud member of the US cabinet. Chris Bryant MP profiles a man determined to bring LGBTQ+ visibility to the forefront of a divided USA — and our Person of the Year
“His sexuality is not the be-all and end-all of his candidacy”
There have been remarkably few reasons to be cheerful this year, but Pete Buttigieg, the openly gay former mayor of the 100,000-strong city of South Bend in Indiana, has been a ray of light all year.
For me it started with his campaign for the presidency. Let’s pause for a moment at that thought. An openly gay candidate standing for President in a country led (I use the term reluctantly) by a President who has deliberately appointed conservatives to the Supreme Court in the hope that policies such as abortion and gay marriage would be overturned.
An openly gay candidate in a country where thousands claimed that attending a Trump rally without any social distancing was perfectly safe because they would be protected by God — or, as one woman put it, “I’ll be drenched in the blood of Christ.”
An openly gay candidate in a country where millions (including lots of gay men) voted for Trump and more than four out of ten citizens believe that the second coming of Christ is imminent. Maybe it helps that Pete’s a church-going Christian of a liberal bent — but maybe that incenses the fundamentalists even more, as they bow to a far more vengeful God and view Pete’s (and Biden’s) faith as worse than heresy.
Simply standing for President took courage – and although we would expect bravery from a man who served in the military in Afghanistan for seven months in 2014, I hate to think what social media attacks he suffered during his 11-month campaign for the Democratic nomination, what abuse anonymous cowards hurled at him, what fake news they concocted, what names they called him, and what threats were made, often by devout but militant right-wing, born-again Christians invoking the Almighty.
He won’t have been a solitary target, either. His husband, family, friends and anyone he’s ever worked with or met — as a customer, a client, a passenger or a patient — will have also been spied on, investigated, bribed or ritually abused.
But, I hear you say, abuse is just part of the reality of modern politics. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” I disagree. Not all candidates are treated equally. Two thirds of Americans now support gay marriage, but for some visceral, primeval reason, vociferous conservatives see an openly gay candidate as the arrival of the devil incarnate. It’s a perversion of the natural order and evidence that ‘socialists’ or ‘communists’ are determined to destroy Christian (aka ‘American’) civilisation.
Not only did Pete stand, but he ran a great campaign. In town hall after town hall, he built momentum and – shock, horror – surprised people by being thoroughly ‘normal’. It seemed he didn’t want to be the gay candidate, but the Democrat candidate who happened to be gay. Not because he was ashamed of his sexuality — far from it: he actively supports anti-discrimination protections for LGBT Americans, he often cracks self-deprecatory jokes and hugs and kisses his husband on stage. But however important his sexuality, it just isn’t the beall and end-all of his candidacy or how he understands himself and the fight for justice and a better world. Hallelujah, Hallelujah, and so say all of us.
Voters tuned in — and liked his commonsense approach. Perhaps some were amazed (or even slightly disappointed) that he didn’t turn up to the television debates in stilettos and a feather boa. Perhaps they were relieved that he had no plans to turn the White
House pink (with apologies to Argentine friends, whose presidential palace is the Pink House), and that he showed more interest in healthcare, education and foreign affairs than in Broadway musicals.
Whatever it was that started to attract mainstream voters to his cause, he narrowly pipped Bernie Sanders to the post in the Iowa caucuses – meaning that the first-ever out gay candidate for president was also the first-ever out gay candidate to win a state primary and to secure delegates at a national convention. Then he came second in New Hampshire. It was only when he came fourth in South Carolina, following the phenomenal resurrection of Joe Biden, that he stepped aside and immediately threw himself behind a Biden victory, raising millions of dollars and delivering one of the best speeches at the unconventional Democratic Convention.
Now Biden has nominated him for Transportation Secretary, and my heart fills with pride at the downright ordinariness of the appointment. He’s not going to be Secretary for Culture or Chief Envoy to Hollywood or Ambassador to Sitges, or any of the other posts to which gay politicians often get appointed out of some misplaced belief that all we want in life is to quaff champagne with luvvies. He’s going to be dealing with
trains and planes and automobiles, tackling major infrastructure issues that are vital to US economic success.
And now he’ll be the first openly gay member of a US Cabinet. Of course, some of his CV is just irritatingly perfect – he’s a Rhodes scholar, a veteran, he speaks Norwegian, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and French, he plays the guitar and piano, and he’s just 38.
But I defy anyone not to be moved by his cabinet nomination acceptance speech, in which he tells how he was infuriated as a young gay teenager by the Republicans’ vicious opposition to Bill Clinton’s appointment of an openly gay ambassador in 1998 (to Luxembourg of all places). It seemed that people like him were not allowed to belong in America. He decided 20 years ago that he wanted to change that and now he hopes that his appointment will send teenagers a different message.
That nomination speech made further sense of something he had said at the Democratic Convention, when he claimed that the USA is at its best when it embraces its diversity and “we make the circle wider”.
So, he’s right to celebrate his own appointment as a milestone. That’s not narcissism. It’s not arrogance. It’s a simple fact. His appointment is an iconic moment. It proves that bad people don’t always triumph, that justice does sometimes favour the brave and that glass ceilings are there to be broken.
Allow me to blow a warning trumpet, though. There’s a temptation to say that we’ve arrived, we can relax now, we’re accepted. But such complacency will undo us. The most liberal place for gay men in the 20th century was Berlin in 1930. But by 1936 Hitler was carting gay men off to concentration camps where thousands were killed. Homosexuals are still beaten down in Russia, Nigeria, Indonesia and Poland — and homophobic attacks are on the increase on our own streets and in our schools.
Pete Buttigieg is absolutely right to shout out loud and proud about what his appointment represents, because we must never ever take these newly won freedoms for granted.