Op-ed: Pete's choice

Editor's note: This article has been updated for clarity and to include portions that were left out in the print edition.

Barack Obama was our first black president. A number of black critics, ranging from Ben Carson to Cornel West, believed that President Obama wasn’t black enough — he spent the majority of his early professional life bouncing between elite universities and successful law firms — and thus didn’t have many of the experiences attached to the political identity of blackness he wielded.

He was, regardless of what experiences he had in his life, black. When you see Obama, you know he is black. It’s how he is legible to others in a country where race is steeped in meaning and prejudice. It was, then, unavoidable that his blackness be reflected in his campaign. Barack Obama would be America’s first black president whether he liked it or not. Barack Obama did not choose to be black.

Pete Buttigieg chose to be gay. I did, too. Gay desires cannot be chosen; we don't have much of a say in our sexual desire. We do, however, choose to refine our public image. Choice, unlike identities, can be criticized.

I didn’t choose to "want" in the way I do, but I did "choose," in many ways, to be the way I am. Gay desire and being gay are distinct – unless “being” gay pertains exclusively to sexual desire, I choose to be gay daily. I speak with gay mannerisms, something, that although natural to me now, was not when I first came out at 15; I rave fervently and openly about bottoming; I bleach my hair seasonally; I complain loudly about the tribulations of douching; I refer to inanimate objects with gendered pronouns; I drink iced coffee in 28 degree Medford weather.

I don’t intend to imply, by any stretch, that my handful of gay behaviors are a political form of queerness — they aren’t. But they are, at the very least, visibly gay. These behaviors, I’d argue, are discernably gayer than my actual sex habits, which render me clinically homosexual, but only privately so. In short: the fact that I’m read as gay has very little to do with gay sex. At its core, my public gayness is a collection of behaviors, not desires; I could alter these behaviors if I wanted to.

David Halpern, a professor of the history and theory of sexuality who wrote a 500-page book on the process of gay acculturation, "How to be Gay" (2012), would agree with me when I say that having anal sex with other men is among the least gay things I do on a regular basis. In fact, for me, it seems among the straightest: Sex is one of the spheres of my life where I behave most masculine; that’s how I have learned to desire sexually — a choice I don’t actively make and sometimes resent. According to Halperin, “Gayness is not a state or condition. It’s a mode of perception, an attitude, an ethos: in short, it is a practice.”

If I spent a few less nights on Grindr every month and consulted a voice coach, I could work to pass as straight. I imagine that would be a fairly pleasureless life — something many manage to attain without any structural forces working against them at all.

Say I followed through with this and "became" straight: You might suggest that my commitment to straightness, alongside my evident commitment to being miserable, would be a result of some deeply illogical concoction of internalized homophobia. I would be hesitant to agree. Perhaps there is something I want more than anything else, and to get it, I believe that I must repress my desire. That seems pretty logical.

In the first breath of Pete Buttigieg’s interview with The Daily, a New York Times podcast, he admits that as early as the 11thgrade, he openly wanted to be president. He then remarks, “but, in a very simple sense, especially coming from Indiana, it seemed to be a choice: you could be in elected office, or you could be an out gay person. Not both.” I don’t disagree with Pete here. Only as recently as 1974 have we had openly gay politicians in the United States; Indiana elected its first openly gay representative at the local level in 2015.

Pete Buttigieg did not come out until the age of 33, in 2015. By that point, he’d spent four years at Harvard, one at Oxford, three at McKinsey & Company, several with the U.S. Navy and most recently, several years as mayor of his hometown, South Bend, Ind. Buttigieg’s seemingly perfect résumé as a presidential hopeful has drawn as much ire as it has praise: There’s something grotesquely perfect about it.

This is discussed in his interview with The Daily, in which Buttigieg suggests a hypothetical example of a mid-career politician being sworn into office as an assistant secretary to the Middle East. “Imagine if that person got there in one of two ways — in universe A, it’s the person who woke up one day in high school … and did everything in order to occupy that title. The other person is someone who woke up in high school and said I want to be the person who makes the United States a force towards peace.”

He concludes that the latter would be a better fit for the role. His example draws a distinction between politicians who want to "be" something, and those who want to "do" something, a distinction made similarly in Michael Harriot’s article, “Pete Buttigieg is a lying motherf***er” published in The Root. Buttigieg would like us to believe that he’s among the doers. As Harriot rightly points out, his true motivations are something we can never genuinely know. Reflecting on some of Buttigieg’s regressive comments on education in the past, Harriot concludes, “Pete Buttigieg doesn’t want to change anything. He just wants to be something.”

In order to make this analysis more interesting, let’s assume he’s truly a doer. The question, then, is what exactly does he want to do? In the beginning of his interview with The Daily, Buttigieg describes an initial frustration with politics he felt during his first year at Harvard in 2000, which galvanized his interest in career politics. “You had this kind of center right, and center left, both of them very committed to growth and business — but it seemed not very committed at all to … how we take care of vulnerable people around the country.”

For one, the “center left … very committed to growth and business” seems eerily familiar. The campaign Buttigieg is running, with policies amenable to swaths of Silicon Valley’s technocratic elites, is backed by several thousand undisclosed high-dollar donors.

Secondly, there are many ways to serve vulnerable people in the United States, but McKinsey & Company does not rank particularly high on that list. If this is the primary ambition he claims as a politician, his résumé does not back it up — and neither does his track record as mayor of South Bend, where he’s notoriously unpopular with its black community.

When Pete Buttigieg attempted to endear himself to minority voters he hopes to court, he spoke of his experience as a gay man during the Democratic debate in early December. “I care about this because while I do not have the experience of ever having been discriminated against because of the color of my skin, I do have the experience of sometimes feeling like a stranger in my own country,” he said, rightfully acknowledging  that the prejudices against these identities appear in vastly different ways.

Key differences between racism and homophobia are well observed by Oliver Davis, a black council member in South Bend, Ind., where Buttigieg held office. “When you see me, you would know that I’m African-American from day one. When someone is gay or a lesbian, unless they tell or they are seen in certain situations, then no one is going to know that. They are able to build their résumés and build their career.”

His analysis isn’t perfect — many of us can hardly speak or walk without exposing our queerness — but I think Davis’ thoughts extend particularly well to Buttigieg. Without his husband, a now central fixture on his campaign with a cult following of middle-aged white women, or his coming out op-ed in 2015, we’d never know that he is gay. For many other queer people, we are out of the closet long before we decide to be, simply because we are read as such.

Buttigieg reaped the benefits of straightness until he was 33, at which point, he chose to be gay. He has chosen to be gay in particular ways. He proudly pronounced that he and Chasten did not meet on “the app you’re thinking of” (referring to Grindr, a gay sex app which displays users by geolocation) and has also said that he "can't even read LGBT media anymore."

Despite his open disaffiliations with the gay community, Buttigieg’s identity as a gay man is central to his progressive imagery. He claims that the positive response to his coming out has been a surprise; he won his following reelection in South Bend with 80% of the vote. I genuinely doubt that he was surprised, and I believe this aspect of his candidate profile has benefitted him on the national stage; this does not strike me as coincidence.

If Buttigieg waited until it was politically safe to come out, his claim to gayness as a political identity — a tool for connecting to other marginalized groups — is at best gauche.  For Buttigieg, coming out was a decision; another step in his road to the presidency — and should be met with the same skepticism facing the other lines of his résumé.

In all likelihood, Buttigieg would not be our first gay president, but he would be our first president who chose to be gay. Behind choices lie reasons; do not be afraid to consider those — it won’t make you a homophobe.