The Right Kind
Once again, we’ve fallen into a vicious and toxic discussion surrounding the gayness of a member of our LGBTQ community. And once again, I feel like I have to speak up.
I am a gay man. My saying that should be enough. I should not have to check boxes in order to meet some threshold of “queer liberation” or whatever bull someone wants to apply towards me. I am a gay man.
I have been in love. I have had my heart broken. I have had memories that make me blush to this day. I have been raped by someone I trusted, and possess other memories that make me saddened or, God help me, shameful. I have enjoyed the small, yet also not so small, pleasure of kissing a man on the street, in public, without a care in the world. I have experienced the fear of being assaulted or killed because a stranger yelled at me to “Cut that fag shit out”. How many of my lived experiences must I recount to validate my existence within queer liberation? Must I hold a panel, with representatives from our broad alphabetical community, to determine whether my gayness is valid within the movement?
Pete Buttigieg, the Mayor of South Bend, IN and a Democratic presidential candidate, is a gay man. His saying so should be enough. He should not have to check boxes in order to meet some threshold of “queer liberation” that some random “journalist” wants to apply towards him. He is a gay man.
Pete Buttigieg has been, and is, in love. For all we know, he might have had his heart broken before, or maybe he got incredibly lucky (Chasten is quite a catch). Aside from what he touches on in his memoir, Shortest Way Home, and interviews and speeches he gives, I can’t know what other personal memories or experiences he has had. And Pete shouldn’t be made by us to go into detail about his lived experiences. His experiences as a gay man are as valid as Chasten Buttigieg’s experiences are, as valid as mine are, as valid as Shannon Keating’s are as an LGBTQ woman, as valid as Shea Diamond’s are as a transgender woman. All of our experiences as LGBTQ folks are valid. Period.
I have seen pieces and comments from the right that suggest that because Pete is gay, he is unfit to govern our country. Not because of his policies, though they’ll harp about how “socialist” he is of course, but because he is gay, and we are a “Christian nation”. And I have seen pieces from the left that suggest that Pete is harmful to our movement because of factors well outside of his control, but because he is a white, cisgender gay man, he and his picket fence marriage are the doom to our queer liberation and LGBTQ equality movements. And, of course, there are the trolls, from the right and the left. They ask who is the wife in his marriage. They call him Mayor Buttplug. They call him a socialist fag. They call him a gay Uncle Tom. But no, Pete Buttigieg, to some, is the wrong kind of gay.
There is no right or wrong way to be gay, to be queer, to be trans, and I hope that our own community, even as we struggle to define what our identity means, defines it in a way that lets everybody know that they belong among us. — Pete Buttigieg, Oct 10th, 2019
I don’t care where you fall in the political spectrum: right, center, left. I don’t care who you plan on supporting in this 2020 Democratic primary. But this needs to stop. The litigating of his gayness, the weird blaming of him for the normalization of LGBTQ people (and perceived attacks on queer liberation), the scrutinization of his gay experience has to stop.
We can talk about where the LGBTQ community is at, absolutely. We are under threat every day from an Administration that seeks to undo every bit of progress we’ve fought tooth and nail for, and then some. While we can be married in all 50 states, we could be fired or evicted or denied basic human decency in about half of these states. We can and should acknowledge that marriage equality is not and was not the end-all solution for the issues LGBTQ Americans face. We can and should acknowledge the privilege that white gay men have compared to other members of our community. But what we’re not going to do is litigate someone’s gayness or their experience and suggest that his success is a blow to everything we’ve fought for. Or, to better summarize:
To whomever is reading this, please take it from me: you matter. Your lived experience matters. No, there is no wrong way to be you — dance the night away, play board games, be monogamous, be polygamous, be introverted, be extroverted. You’re the right kind of queer. So am I. And so is Pete Buttigieg.