Excerpt: The problem with Pete Buttigieg is not that he is homonormative or assimilationist, but that he represents a new will to forgetfulness on the part of the United States, a will embedded in a desire to recreate not just this country but the world in the cast of a new, gayer imperialism.
I. A Gay New World
It is, it seems, a brave new world in America. A country that has been reluctant to entertain even the very idea of an unmarried president is now giving serious thought to electing Pete Buttigieg, a married, out, gay man with the word “butt” embedded in his name. He is currently among the top six Democratic candidates, jostling for space with others like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who have decades more experience, in a field of over twenty (more may have joined the fray since I finished typing those words, so the count is a guess). This is an astounding feat for a 37-year-old mayor of a midsize Indiana city (South Bend, population 102,245) who has never held a larger political office.
Few candidates look and sound more like the opposite of Trump, and Buttigieg allows liberals and many on the left in a country still marked by homophobia to smugly imagine themselves as supremely advanced, both politically and personally, for supporting him. Not only is he very young (if elected, he will be the youngest president in U.S. history), but he’s gay and married (to Chasten Buttigieg), a veteran of Afghanistan (none of the past four presidents, all much older, could claim any kind of war experience), speaks seven languages including Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Arabic, Farsi, and French; he taught himself Norwegian. There are the necessary peripheral details, like the couple’s two adorable dogs, both rescues and one, with a faint resemblance to Winston Churchill, lacking an eye, thus becoming both adorable and the worthy subject of much sympathy. As pooches must these days, the dogs have their own twitter account. Buttigieg speaks in full sentences, and is the only child of two professors. His father Joseph Buttigieg translated Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, a fact which causes many leftist hearts to flutter and will no doubt incite at least one article titled “A Gramscian Take on Pete Buttigieg,” soon to appear somewhere in the thicket of the New New New Left magazine world.
American politics and public life are defined by opposition: what makes for a successful cause in the United States is not that it presents itself as an excellent and preemptive solution to a problem but that it can be easily identified in opposition to A Force Against Whom We Must Amass Ourselves. Let us call this the Voldemort Syndrome, the idea that the very existence of the world depends on the defeat of one, singular villain. Trump is our Voldemort, and American news media and the public refuse to acknowledge that, as awful as he is, he is not the sign of a drastic new set of events in America but the symptom of decades of rot finally welling up to the surface. Pete Buttigieg is, in this context, the anti-Trump and, the sentiment goes, therefore the candidate of America’s Future, someone who will take us out of the darkness of the present, as many see it, into the rainbow-soaked light of a better tomorrow.
American politics is also characterised by forgetting and reinvention. The great American myth is that everyone is allowed to reinvent himself (the power to do is has historically been gendered as masculine) but politicians routinely reinvent “America” as well, turning its bloated, turgid history of centuries of genocide and slavery into a fable of opportunity and freedom. In this, Pete Buttigieg re-enacts and reinforces the vision of America as a land that has merely seen a few hiccups in its journey into Greatness; he allows us to reinvent American history, now refracted through gay millennial eyes.
For all his fresh-faced, youthful demeanour and personality, Pete Buttigieg is not a candidate of the future. He is, rather, a candidate whose singular function is to allow Americans across a broad spectrum, from kinda-sorta conservatives to the progressive left, to forget the reality of American brutality, in both its present and its past. Buttigieg evokes a nostalgia for an earlier America that never existed, a vision unclouded by its brutal present of never-ending wars, massive inequality, racial and racist disenfranchisement, healthcare crises for millions, sexual and gender imbalances, and the gutting of public services and even educational systems to the extent that entire cities and towns are decimated and evacuated and then reworked mostly for the pleasure of the few who can (sometimes literally) helicopter in and out. The America of today teeters on the brink of disaster as the havoc it has so far wrought in distant lands crashes and breaks in waves ever closer to the shoreline; greater numbers of its residents already live in disastrous conditions. Buttigieg serves as a bulwark and a source of comfort, an antidote to too much remembering, a guarantee that we can forget where we are in time and place and instead enter an idyllic Ye Olde America, an America we can pretend to still live in.
Consider, for instance, his use of South Bend, a city that had once been an industrial centre and home to the Studebaker plant. When that closed in 1964, much of the city shuttered along with it. South Bend’s supposed recent revival is credited to Buttigieg who has refashioned it as a hub for the tech industry. He made his announcement of running for the presidency from within the refurbished Studebaker facility, the high steel ceilings framing him literally and metaphorically as the man who could take our memories of a wishfully imagined prosperous past into the future. Asked at a CNN town hall why he thought he could run for president despite his lack of experience, he responded, “Think about it. One thing you’ve never heard of is a city shutting down because they couldn’t agree on a policy. Right? It’s literally unthinkable. We would never do it. We couldn’t do it, because we deliver water, and you need water to live. So we just figure things out. And that’s the kind of attitude that I think we need more of in Washington today.”
It’s a lovely answer, evoking “America” as merely a larger version of small-town/small-city America. Here Pete Buttigieg is both Andy Taylor, the sheriff of sleepy Mayberry and Mr. Smith storming into “Washington today” to tell them how to run things. The answer is also complete bullshit, when we consider reality. Outside the major metropolitan areas, most American cities and towns, of all sizes, are suffering. And even in large cities like Chicago, where I live, economic deprivation and the disenfranchisement of middle class and lower income residents mean massive shortfalls in basics like education, transportation, and even fresh food and groceries. As for water: Flint, Michigan is still without drinking water for all.
Buttigieg’s genius is in his ability to reduce complex issues into simple homilies, though that may not serve him too well as the presidential campaign becomes more serious. In recent weeks, the gloss around his candidacy has begun to fade somewhat as more journalists and analysts probe into the details of his political record: Matt Simonette’s report in the Windy City Times reveals that Buttigieg’s attempts to resurrect his city by demolishing hundreds of homes left the city’s most vulnerable residents, nearly all African American, homeless and desperate. And as the weeks drag on, more commentators will feel emboldened to publicly doubt his abilities. Still, his star continues to rise. Buttigieg is unlikely to be the presidential candidate this year (all signs are that the DNC will choose Joe Biden, no matter who else does better in the polls) but he has already parlayed his current celebrity into a prominent place in the Democrat party: a Biden ticket may well include him as the vice presidential candidate.
In all this, Buttigieg’s gay identity is not incidental or simply a biographical detail but absolutely necessary to the erasure of historical memory and the establishment of an American nostalgia refashioned with all the elements of a quirky sitcom: Modern Family with a political backdrop. Pete Buttigieg represents the efflorescence of a contemporary, mainstream gay movement and reveals it to actually be a political movement, rather than what many allies to gay people and even many gay people imagine it to be, the attainment of love and inclusion. This is not to imply that there is a Gay Cabal at work behind the scenes, secretly controlling the world (for that, we already have the Vatican). The point here is much more simple and far more devastating for those who nurture the idea of today’s gay movement being all about personal relationships and an integration into everyday life: the gay movement that has on the surface appeared, for the last few decades, to be about “love” and “inclusion” is, in reality, about a small set of elite gays and lesbians gradually and inexorably gaining not just recognition in the mainstream but real political power and money. Today’s mainstream gay movement is so entrenched in the logic of commerce and profit (situated not so ironically in the massive, bloated nonprofit industrial complex that boosts its agendas) that its critics refer to it as Gay Inc. Gay politics has long been conceived as a matter of feelings and the righting of wrongs. Now, in Pete Buttigieg, Gay Inc. finally sees a chance to enact a different kind of coming out, a chance to finally and publicly flex its political muscles and be open about its pursuit or raw power.
Buttigieg’s gay legibility is intertwined with a history of normative gay politics having gained ascendancy over the last many decades (although he is not the first openly gay candidate: Fred Karger was that in 2012). And his popularity is supported by a vast and powerful gay nonprofit world, dominated by the Human Rights Campaign and the National LGBTQ Task Force (formerly the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and now referred to simply as the Task Force) which has gone unnoticed as it accrued power and prestige for a gay elite while seeming to serve the needs of the most marginalised among LGBTQ people. To understand the rise of Pete Buttigieg, it’s necessary to first understand how gay became Gay, and the role that groups like HRC and the Task Force have played in the rise of Gay Power.
II. FROM GAY TO GAY: THE RISE OF THE NONPROFITS AND THE MAKING OF GAY WEALTH
In May, Pete Buttigieg gave the keynote speech at the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Las Vegas Dinner. The powerful and wealthy gay rights organisation, the largest such in the world, hosts annual dinners in major cities and each provides an opportunity for the richest gays and lesbians to have political figures and celebrities kiss their elegantly clothed asses. Buttigieg began by thanking HRC for “the incredible work you’ve done to advance the cause of equality, whether advocating for those living with HIV/AIDS, or spearheading the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, or fighting to make sure that love is taken seriously.” Buttigieg’s remarks were aimed at both gay and straight audiences and evoked what are widely assumed to be the main issues facing LGBTQ people: HIV/AIDS, inclusion in the military, and gay marriage; many also assume that HRC has indeed been working on all these issues for as long as it has existed since 1980, when it was founded as the Human Rights Campaign Fund.
HRC, a political lobbying group, has never taken on a leading role in the activism around HIV/AIDS. It’s likely that most of its members cringed at Buttigieg’s words because they hate being associated with something so icky as a disease, especially one still associated with stigma and criminalisation. HRC’s primary goal has been to acquire political and social cachet for influential gays and lesbians; disease rarely goes beyond ribbons and sympathy. Activism around HIV/AIDS, the kind that finally forced the state and Big Pharma to pay attention to the millions dying, happened in the mid-1980s and early 1990s and has been taken up by radical groups like ACT UP, Gay Shame, and Queer Nation. As for DADT: HRC was long conspicuously silent on the issue, as Nathaniel Frank points out in his 2009 book Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America. When I asked him during an interview why the organisation had not initiated activism on DADT, Frank responded, “All I can guess is that they prioritize those laws and policies they think are most likely to move first or easiest and/or reflect their constituents.”
HRC’s mostly white constituents are among the wealthiest gays and lesbians in the world; serving in the military is not among their goals or needs. Its executive director Chad Griffin makes over $500,000 and the organisation’s net assets in 2018 amounted to nearly $40 million. A “general” ticket for the annual HRC dinner in September will cost $500. Such numbers are likely to surprise those whose scant familiarity with the world of gay nonprofits might persuade them to think of such as tiny, patchouli-soaked enterprises staffed by brave and impecunious volunteers scraping together bowls of homemade hummus for fundraisers.
What do gay organisations like HRC stand for and what are their histories? And what do they have to do with Pete Buttigieg, other than the fact that he’s a gay candidate who addressed a set of wealthy gay donors?
There are hundreds of LGBTQ organisations but very few have the massive financial clout of HRC which, along with The Task Force (formerly the National Gay and Lesbian Fund) has dominated the gay nonprofit scene for several decades. Together, these two organisations have not only accrued massive amounts of money and political power, mostly unseen in the mainstream, they have steadfastly determined the very causes that the “gay community” should pursue and, in the process, pressured smaller organisations into either pursuing those causes or, through a relentless pursuit of the status quo, indirectly caused their demise. It is therefore only natural that someone like Pete Buttigieg should feel obliged to pay homage to HRC.
Why did gay/LGBTQ nonprofits come about in the first place? Because, for the longest time, no one gave a damn about our deaths, our illnesses, or our mental or physical health. Even today, without stories of desperation and murders, as with the large numbers of trans deaths, no one really cares unless we show up to cry about our dead and beg for mercy and pity. Gay nonprofits, particularly those concerned with health, had to come about because LGBTQ needs were not being met and the community had to create its own resources. In recent years, as LGBTQ people with or without AIDS survive and age with without the disease, geriatric concerns have become an issue for larger numbers of people; aging LGBTQ people are vulnerable to discrimination and ill treatment from caregivers and the medical system. Issues like homelessness and poverty are exacerbated when people are also discriminated against on account of their sexuality and/or gender identity. For all these reasons, LGBTQ nonprofits can serve as vital resources.
Over the last few decades, however, the gay nonprofit industrial complex has, with rare exceptions, become a largely incompetent and corrupt behemoth, existing to fatten the coffers of top executives who make massive salaries (recall Chad Griffin’s salary) while providing few actual services to those off whose backs it gains ever larger dollar amounts in terms of funding. Mid to low level employees, meanwhile, struggle mightily to survive on pittances, putting in vast amount of overtime and energy because they genuinely believe in working for “the community,” and end up either melting down or leaving after too many years of exploitation and burnout. Most of these nonprofits provide essential and cheap or free services like healthcare and social work, the sort that wealthy gays and lesbians are able to access without assistance. Their only reason to stay attached to the nonprofits is to gain social legibility and legitimacy by serving on boards—mirroring how social cachet and networks are created in the straight world through foundations and galas.
Because these are gay organisations, outsiders might believe that they’re also progressive but: HRC has repeatedly endorsed deeply conservative politicians over progressive ones. In 2007, it refused to endorse trans inclusion in the ENDA (it has since apologised, but only because public opinion now swings more often in favour of trans people). The Task Force is not that much better, despite its appearance of being the radical cousin to HRC: In 2016, it invited both the Isarel lobby group A Wider Bridge and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to its national gathering, Creating Change.
Both HRC and the Task Force have worked on the causes identified by Buttigieg in his remarks, and few have resonated as much with the public as gay marriage. If you believed the popular narratives, gay marriage would appear to be a triumph of grassroots organising by millions of everyday gays and lesbians. But even a brief and closer look reveals the machinations of a gay elite working behind the scenes to make gay marriage seem like the issue everyone needed to get behind.
In one of the very few essays about the reality of how marriage became a cause, Ryan Conrad details how the issue was forced onto the residents of Maine by HRC and the Task Force and other gay marriage organisations, despite the fact that the majority of LGBTQ Mainers polled had, in 2007 and 2009, made it clear that gay marriage was not a priority for them. Maine is one of the poorest states, and the artificial emphasis placed on gay marriage, falsely constructed as a crisis issue, meant that massive donations and political energy were diverted to the cause, eventually causing funding shortfalls for essential services elsewhere: the Maine Speak Out Project in Portland closed, and the Department of Education announced it would no longer fund HIV Prevention Outreach Educators, to give just two examples. All over the country, issues more pertinent to the everyday lives of LGBTQ people, like healthcare and housing, were shunted aside as HRC et al began their relentless drumbeat about marriage as the cause that would magically bring about “full equality” and somehow resolve everything else.
For the most part, even vaguely left analyses have so far failed to grasp and convey the real power and deep pockets behind the gay movement and have refused to acknowledge, even when reminded by groups like Against Equality, that this “movement” is about the attainment of political and economic power, with “equality” functioning as a smokescreen. The problem is not just that money and powerful gay organisations are driving the conversation, but that the causes themselves are only designed to help the elites in the LGBTQ commnunity.
Consider, for instance, the case of Edith Windsor, whose lawsuit United States v. Windsor nbecame a landmark case in the fight to make gay marriage legal everywhere. Windsor married Thea Spyer, her partner of several decades, in Canada in 2007. Both women were of substantial means, and owned homes in New York City and The Hamptons. Spyer’s death in 2009 left an estate of over 6 million, and Windsor had to pay less than ten percent of that in estate taxes because she was not legally recognised as Spyer’s wife. But the facts of her wealth (though small by NYC standards, 6 million is a substantial estate) were cleverly kept hidden from the public by various press outlets like the New York Times and the New Yorker. The public was led to believe that Windsor was a penurious widow who somehow dipped into her savings (in a country where 40% of Americans can’t even scrape together $400 for an emergency) to pay up over $300,000 in taxes. Even in this, the press colluded or did not do the math, only reporting on half the sum she had to pay (the larger sum would certainly have provoked questions). Was it unfair to tax Windsor simply because she was not a straight widow? Certainly. But Windsor was not fighting for love, she was fighting to not pay a miniscule amount of taxes on a substantial estate. What the government wanted her to pay was what many call the “death tax,” and it’s simply an estate tax, the sort that only a tiny percentage of Americans have to pay and which is only fair to demand of them so as to not pool the wealth of the few even more—even Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have supported it. Today, with an increase in the exemption, only 2000 estates are liable for the tax every year.
The truth of the Edith Windsor case is that it was never about a sad, cold widow lighting matches in a garrett somewhere to stay warm while the big, evil government knocked on her doors demanding its pound of flesh. As in the case of Maine and elsewhere, the gay marriage issue here was falsely amplified as a problem affecting everyone when in fact the benefits of the actual lawsuit would only reach very few. Edith Windsor was not fighting for love, she was fighting to not pay taxes.
In this and many other ways, the extent of the existence of a gay elite, and the enormous wealth and power behind today’s gay movement(s) have been occluded. On a political and cultural level: what leftist feminists of all genders have long pointed to as the nightmare of patriarchal and economic domination—marriage—was now widely translated as the achievement of the Big Gay Dream.
Pete Buttigieg’s popularity has a lot to do with being funded and promoted by this gay elite, which sees him as the best gay candidate in terms of its own political aspirations. At the same time, Buttigieg and his gay supporters know too well that he cannot afford to simply coast along on his gay uniqueness, the novelty of which will dim over time. They face a peculiar conundrum in 2019, a result of the success of the mainstream gay agenda: Being gay is no longer that big a deal, and yet as the first gay candidate, his gayness has to matter. Consider that in 2008, Obama as the Black candidate had to both play up being the first such and simultaneously prove that his blackness did not define him. Obama’s strategy of being an exceptional black man was to define himself through his complicated racial history, with white grandparents who raised him and a largely absent Kenyan father.
As a gay man, Buttigieg is where Obama was as the first black candidate. But he faces a different dilemma—where racists were happy to dismiss the basic humanity of a black man (and still are) even homophobes don’t necessarily think that a white gay man is likely to not be smart or competent (if anything, the stereotype runs the other way). It’s not that Americans everywhere have given up their revulsion and horror at the very thought of gay sex, or that homophobia has somehow faded away. But as a political issue, gayness is nothing like what it was in 2008, when entire elections were oriented around incendiary matters like Prop 8. In 2016, even Republicans hedged away from gay matters, having experienced the backlash for their homophobia at the polls in the previous election, and focused instead on issues like immigration and the economy (successfully conjoined by Trump).
Gay Inc. now has to contend with having to justify itself in a political playing field where it has no more heartstrings to tug at. Candidates need drama: they need to be festooned with tales of adversity or at least of having fought furiously on the side of justice. Obama’s story of his father and wrestling with his biracial identity was part of his drama, Bernie Sanders speaks often of his early history with anti-war and civil rights activism, and Elizabeth Warren’s feminist struggles and of fighting corporate power are part of her story (we are not concerned in this piece with dissecting the veracity of any politicians’ claims). Buttigieg has had an untroubled life even as he grew up in the midwest, protected by his whiteness and class status. Given his overall blandness, there needed to be evidence of some kind of resistance to him to make him look more interesting, and there needed to be a clearly defined enemy oppossing him. Enter…other gay people.
III. INVENTING DISSENT
In March, Christina Cauturecci published “How Is Pete Buttigieg’s Sexuality Factoring Into His Appeal?” in Slate. She pointed out that there were, understandably, some people who wondered about the implications of a gay, white, cis man being seen as representative of a large and deeply diverse LGBTQ community:
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. There’s nothing objectively wrong with such an assimilationist perspective, especially for a newly out man who seems ready to lead on trans rights and other LGBTQ political issues. But it does makes him less exciting as the supposed gay trailblazer some on the left desperately want him to be.
Cauterucci’s was a relatively mild-mannered essay yet her point that Buttigieg was “less exciting” (lacking in drama, in other words) was instantly slammed by several commentators including John Aravosis, long a henchman of sorts for the gay community who jumped at the opportunity to attach himself to the Pete Buttigieg bandwagon, with all the ferocity of a Don Quixote swinging at windmills. In a piece titled, “The Insanity of Democrats Attacking Buttigieg—for Not Being Gay Enough,” Aravosis held up Cauturecci’s essay as an example of, well, his title says it all. He quoted her words, “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…. he might not be up against quite the same hurdles that a gay candidate without such sturdy ties to straight culture would be.” Astute readers will have noticed, of course, that he deliberately omitted her words, “That doesn’t mean he’s not gay enough.”
To bolster an already weak story, Aravosis quoted others he said were making similar claims, but all of them were—what shall we call them, voices?—on Twitter, people shooting words into the wind. This was a twitterstorm in a teacup.
Aravosis was not alone in his insistence of some left-Democrat criticism of Buttigieg as not gay enough. Nate Silver, the out gay pollster weighed in as well, with these fiery words on…Twitter:
Just want to get this out of the way so I only have to say it once:
It’s a big deal that an openly gay man is a serious contender for a major party’s presidential nomination, and if you’re liberal who wants to equivocate about that too much, you can pretty much fuck right off.
Fighting words, those. But Silver was making this statement with even less evidence than Aravosis, perhaps relying on his demi-god like status as the King of Political Prophecies to get away with such insubstantial claims. Other commentators across the political spectrum would go on to attack Cauterucci and make it seem like hordes of leftist gays were tearing Buttigieg apart for not being gay enough. Hell, it seemed, was other gay people.
Eventually, the controversy that never existed died down (if a non-controversy blows up on Twitter, can it really be said to have existed?). In the end, all the huffing and puffing on the part of his gay proponents (who also latch on to every anti-gay statement by Mike Pence, as if it were a novelty), all their made-up kerfuffles, only reveal that Buttigieg is still to prove that he is more than the sum of the resistance against him. What successful candidates like Obama and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have shown is that dwelling purely on the opposition to them gets candidates nowhere. Recall Hillary Clinton’s grandiose statement, so fawningly reported by the New York Times just before the 2016 election: “I’m the Last Thing Standing Between You and the Apocalypse”, as if that was all that mattered, not what she actually stood for.
Which begs the question: Who is Pete Buttigieg, and what does he stand for, if anything, exactly?
IV. HOW TO MAKE A GAY CANDIDATE
Buttigieg and his husband were recently featured on the cover of Time magazine, a literally picture-perfect Ken and Ken, both almost identically dressed, arms encircling (but not, you know, with any hint of sex, just good, wholesome not-sex-but-love). At a brunch fundraiser for The Victory Fund in April, the mayor revealed that he’d met his now-husband on an app, joking, “possibly not the app you’re thinking of.” The app they met on is Hinge, which advertises itself as one “for people who want to get off dating apps too,” implying that it is for people who are looking for relationships (some of us might contend that dating, code here for numerous sexual encounters, is, after all, about engaging in relationships, sometimes consecutively and sometimes simultaneously). A deeply unscientific survey conducted among my gay friends (possible number of respondents: 2, average comment: “What the hell is Hinge??”) confirmed that most gays have not heard of it (although it has apparently become 30% gayer since the reference), but Buttigieg’s joke was a way of reassuring his audiences, straight and gay, that he isn’t one of those glory hole seeking and sucking hypersexual gay men looking for sex. Grindr, the most popular gay app, is in fact the one most people think of in relation to gay men looking for sex (we shall not go into weary detail about the stigmatisation of sex for sex’s sake or even point out that many gay men also use Grindr to meet people, with or without sex).
Like a finely concocted artisanal cocktail, every one of Buttigieg’s biographical details is carefully pruned and presented and put together for maximum effect. With his clear blue eyes, lush but tamed thick brown hair, and his just-right physique and manner (sensitive but not, um, too…gay), Pete Buttigieg is straight out of Central Casting, a man who will be The Perfect Gay Millennial Presidential Candidate. Several homophobic and xenophobic responses might be expected but they have been cleverly anticipated and dealt with by Buttigieg’s public relations machine.
Consider Afghanistan, where Buttigieg served for seven months, tucking it into his first term as mayor at 29, leaving his deputy mayor to run the city while he gave interviews about his experience (the man is nothing if not a master of efficiency). But war? Death and mayhem, and the United States’ longest inflicted military invasion on record? Could it not possibly lead to disillusionment on the part of a young man, a millennial who might now harbour anti-war sentiments? No fear! Buttigieg’s only memories of his time there have to do with how welcoming his comrades were to him. Thankfully, he showed no real interest in Afghans!
Two academic parents, one of whom translated some dangerous-sounding Marxist theorist (what kind of a name is Antonio Gramsci, anyway? Or, hell, Buttigieg?) who wrote from prison? Might Buttigieg be some kind of radical, a Manchurian candidate planted by nefarious foreign agencies to wreak havoc upon our carceral ways? No fear! Buttigieg maintains a sunny disposition and doesn’t think prisoners should be allowed to vote because, come on, they’re prisoners for a reason!
What of his dangerous propensity to learn foreign languages, when even speaking English well must be regarded with hostile suspicion? Ah, but all seven, and any others he might pick up in the future, have their uses. Arabic, for example, could be whispered quietly to little Iraqi children to get them closer to the guns that blow their heads off. As for his heritage: some might ask, what is this Malta his father came from? To everyone’s collective relief, it turns out that the Maltese people are a white people (well, mostly, and perhaps not really, but we turn away quickly before that conversation gets too heated and focus on Buttigieg’s gleaming white skin and calm blue eyes).
What, we might ask, does Pete Buttigieg plan to do as president of the United States, arguably the most powerful political position in the world? Even after months on the campaign trail, this is difficult to discern. Wander over to his website, and you find a very professional and beautifully styled…well, you find a website, but not much more. Buttigieg is short on details, but is filled to the brim with talk of values. A recently released document titled “Rules of the Road” claims to lay out…well, something, it’s unclear, what exactly. There are ten (such a nice, round number, carefully chosen no doubt for its harmonious appeal to the senses) sections with titles like Respect, Discipline, Excellence and, even, bafflingly, Joy. Under the last, the site declares, “The American presidential election is the world’s greatest civic and democratic ritual. It will shape us but we can shape it too. Let us shape it, partly, by spreading the joy of working for our beliefs.”
Even putting aside the fact that Buttigieg is crafting messages for a major American campaign and must therefore be filled with Joy and such, it’s unclear why he would put out this list rather than, say, a set of actual policies on actual issues like, say, healthcare. His statements on such topics, found in the Issues section, are filled with nods to the safest possible possible positions, with not many details on how he intends to get there. On abortion, he declares that “A woman should have the freedom to make medical decisions on her own or with the counsel of her doctor, family, and faith leaders — those whom she chooses and she trusts. The government’s role should be to make sure all women have access to comprehensive affordable care, and that includes preventive care, contraceptive services, prenatal and postpartum care, and safe and legal abortion.”
Which sounds great, until you contrast that with Elizabeth Warren’s statement on abortion (bafflingly, found on Medium but not on her own website), which contains a detailed history of how we got here on the issue, the legislative hurdles, and how to defeat them. We could continue in this vein, comparing Buttigieg to several other candidates, but the point is this: he talks about values at the cost of detailed plans on what he might do and with no sense that he understands the histories of issues. Buttigieg has also demonstrated that he only says what he thinks might be the right thing to say to the right people at a particular moment, but quickly revises his words at the hint of the slightest backlash. He recently denounced Afghanistan as an “endless war,” but this is a sharp turn from earlier remarks about the conflict which he has so far used as a backdrop for a coming out story (on that, we have more ahead). Over and over, Buttigieg demonstrates that he has no verifiable positions, only those which might serve him well at a particular moment.
Take, for instance, his position on vaccinations: asked about exemptions, Buttigieg initially responded that he supports “personal/religious exemptions if states can maintain local herd immunity and there is no public health crisis.” Buttigieg failed to realise that, in fact, the national mood is swiftly turning against exemptions (New York state recently banned religious ones). Stunned by the backlash against his opinion (nearly every other Democratic candidate took the opposite view and the Twitterati pointed out that exemptions are in fact what caused a public health crisis in measles outbreaks), he quickly changed his mind, but in a very Buttigian way. His statesman said that “[Buttigieg] is aware that in most states the law provides for some kinds of exemptions. He believes only medical exemptions should be allowed.” Is aware. But no one asked him if he was aware of exemptions: they were horrified that he would echo any support for them. Buttigieg was trying to slide out of a position he suddenly realised is not the cool one by resorting to language, as if no one could see through his obfuscation. We might imagine him roaring into war in another nation and him saying, through a spokesperson, when confronted with his mistake, “President Buttigieg is aware that mistakes have been made in wars.” Is aware is a desperate use of snark in the hope that those at whom it is aimed will retreat in humiliation. It doesn’t work among adults, and it’s likely to get him rhetorically ripped apart in the coming months ahead as he deals with Democratic contenders who are as or more educated than him and whose experience in politics—and with smarmy overachievers, in abundance in Washington—began before he was conceived. As Nathan J. Robinson puts it in his excellent piece on the candidate and his inability to provide specifics, “If a statement can mean many things to many people, what are you sticking up for? What can we expect of you? You can always achieve unity through vapidity, but you can’t achieve anything else.”
Yet, despite such vapidity, Buttigieg rises every day in the polls. What explains his popularity? One answer lies in his bland and unthreatening whiteness, so bland that it forms a soft shield around his gayness, preventing it from being a threat. In an Atlantic piece, David Graham writes, “But maybe being a married gay man is simply less strange to Democratic voters in 2019 than being an unmarried vegan who doesn’t drink, like [Cory] Booker.”*
To fully comprehend his popularity and what Buttigieg offers to an eager public, we have to return to Afghanistan.
V. WHY BUTTIGIEG?
In March 2014, Pete Buttigieg, then the youngest mayor in South Bend history, left the city in charge of his deputy mayor to serve a seven-month stint in the US Naval reserve as a lieutenant. It was a clever and economical ploy—he didn’t waste time in a war zone before gaining public office and he managed to reap great press for the trip, as part of a very important-sounding “Afghan Threat Finance Cell, a counterterrorism unit that targeted Taliban insurgency financing.” In a piece he penned shortly upon his return in September, he wrote, “Yet amid the strangeness of war, the most profound lessons of my time there came from observing just how familiar and universal the lives and hopes of ordinary Afghans are” and, “Perhaps this is what all public service is about, be it municipal, military, or otherwise: enabling people to live their lives, whatever that means to them. That purpose—simple yet challenging—gives meaning to everything we do in South Bend government, just as it did everything we did in uniform.” The article was helpfully illustrated with a photo provided by the mayor himself, standing on a cliff and surveying the city of Kabul, shot from such a distance that it’s hard to discern the damage done to the ancient city (it’s 3500 years old) that is at the heart of the United States’ longest war. Buttigieg has his back to the camera, and is wearing camouflage trousers and carries a gun but his grey t-shirt and bare head, his military buzzcut showing, convey the casual air of a soldier-cum-tourist.
As is his wont, Buttigieg’s words render a country ravaged by an unjust invasion into a simple universal parable and parallel to South Bend, Indiana. Shorn of the potholes, which he mentions, and the human rights abuses and the massive numbers of people killed, which he does not, Kabul, the mayor would have us believe, is just like one of our cities: “I played with children who, though orphaned by the conflict, were no different than children at home in South Bend.” Though orphaned by the conflict is a quick, throwaway phrase here, but its placement in the sentence and in the context of the war tells us about Buttigieg’s ability to delve into the messiest areas of American politics and history and still come up with nothing more than a sunny retelling that leaves out all the sordid details.
Buttigieg had not yet come out at the time of this essay, but he did in a 2015 essay published in the South Bend Tribune, on the eve of the Supreme Court decision on Obergefell v. Hodges, another landmark gay marriage case (the man is always economical and timely). Four years later, announcing his run for the presidency, he appeared on nearly every major and minor television and would bring up his time in Afghanistan, this time with a gay twist, talking about how his gayness never mattered when it came time to get out into dangerous areas. Asked about Israel and Iran on The View, he said, “People like me get strung up in Iran.” Elsewhere, he has supported Israel much more strongly than any other Democratic candidate so far (and this will doubtless be a point in his favour when the DNC, which strongly and fully supports Israel, chooses Joe Biden).
In all this, Buttigieg performs the standard narrative about gayness, America, and the Middle East, reciting the usual stereotypes. The Eastern Other is literally a landscape against which a Gay American might shine, honing his powers of statecraft and warmongering amongst a cadre of supportive comrades while Israel, which continues its brutal and genocidal campaign against Palestinians with the support of the United States, implicitly or explicitly gets kudos for its supposed support for gay rights (part of a larger project of pinkwashing), especially by contrasting it with Iran.
In March of this year, Buttigieg scored a major coup as a relatively junior level presidential candidate: a feature story in Vogue magazine. The writer notes that the candidate is seated under “a huge resource-and-mineral map of Afghanistan.” Afghanistan, invaded in the wake of 9/11, was once a proud, independent country, with a long, rich history. It is today among the most devastated economies in the world, bombed “back to the Stone Age,” its natural resources swiftly and surely and literally stripped away by a coalition of powers, leaving its people and culture shot to bits. As The Intercept points out, a 2016 (pre-Trump) International Criminal Court “makes allegations of serious crimes committed by U.S. military forces and the CIA, including ‘torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, and rape.’” But Pete Buttigieg brings back nothing but his strong, clear blue eyes, and turns Afghanistan into the backdrop of a coming out movie. As Andrew Bacevich points out in The L.A. Times,
A legitimate Afghan economy barely exists. The nation’s total merchandise exports in 2018 fell well short of a billion dollars. At present, foreign grants account for approximately 70% of all public outlays, making the government in Kabul essentially a ward of the international community. Afghan democracy is likewise on life-support, with presidential elections originally scheduled for last April twice postponed “to implement voting-system reforms.”
Meanwhile, with most Afghans facing acute food insecurity, SIGAR [Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction] reports that some households have resorted to selling their children or forcing them into childhood marriages in order to survive.
We might consider, then, other and far more damning images of Afghanistan, in contrast to the one of Pete Buttigieg looking upon a seemingly tranquil city. These are of an unarmed young farmer boy, Gul Mudin, murdered in 2010 by a group of American soldiers who referred to themselves as “The Kill Team.” It’s one among many that the Pentagon tried to suppress, including one of Private Andrew Holmes, who killed the boy, crouching next to the body and lifting up Mudin’s head, like a hunter posing with a trophy animal. The boy’s red shirt is pulled high on his chest as he lies face down, his body splayed in the posture of death. Mudin is otherwise naked (supposedly stripped to note identifying tattoos) and an unidentifiable garment, perhaps a t-shirt, has been thrown over his naked buttocks. There is blood everywhere on his body. The image is of death but its details remind us of the rapes by occupying forces that have been widely reported in Afghanistan. Mudin’s pinky finger, missing in the photo, was sheared off and presented to Holmes, who carried it around in a ziplock bag as a memento of his first kill.
There’s been no evidence presented that Mudin was raped, but the posing of his body, and its subsequent mutilation and the utter disrespect shown towards it remind us that, despite what many have claimed, such instances are not signs of a few “bad apples” or random psychopaths who somehow managed to enlist in wars abroad. Rather, as My Lai and Abu Ghraib have proven, psychopathology is the norm among invaders and the US military in particular. The images of Mudin’s posed body also remind us that rape is a perennial staple of war and invasion: even in death, bodies are laid to exhibit a sexual and racialised dominance.
This is the spectre of death and domination that Pete Buttigieg’s narrative erases from the brutal reality of Afghanistan, a reality constantly being removed from public sight as the US continues to pretend that its bombing of Afghanistan was about anything to do with justice or even revenge for 9/11. Pete Buttigieg, seated in his comfortable South Bend home under a map that shows where the country’s most valuable resources are, allows us to think of Afghanistan as a coming out movie, a landscape against which a young, idealistic 29-year-old mayor of a midwestern city might come to a deep understanding of civil life back home, ignoring the signs of utter devastation wreaked on the country through which he motors most days while building up a resumé for the presidency.
Pete Buttigieg is the gay candidate we have manifested, and that has both a lot to say about the gay movement we have ended up with, and everything about the desire for forgetfullness on the part of a broadly construed left, liberals progressives, and leftists. There are by now several queer theory inflected critiques of Buttigeg, but these still remain hopelessly mired in the usual parroting of themes of homonormativity and assimilation. The problem with Pete Buttigieg is not that he is homonormative or assimilationist, but that he represents a new will to forgetfulness on the part of the United States, a will embedded in a desire to recreate not just this country but the world in the cast of a new, gayer imperialism.
Looked at one way, through the lens of what many dismissively refer to as “identity politics,” Buttigieg’s position as a gay white male candidate is emblematic of the many problems with gay politics in general: that it is still dominated by the interests of extremely privileged cis white men with little understanding of the needs of anyone unlike them (the vast majority of the country). Looked at another way, the presence of Buttigieg at the HRC dinner and his mish-mash version of its history points to a much larger set of problems: most people, both straight and LGBTQ have little comprehension of the power held by a section of the gay community and its myriad connections to actual political power. Even fewer have any understanding of how the most prominent gay causes (gay marriage, hate crime legislation, and inclusion in the military) are not simply about identity and inclusion and that dubious entity called love but about the furthering of economic and political inequality for millions of people, gay and straight. But every US president is going to be a problem on the global scale; this one is a unique failure exposing the darkness of an entire so-called social justice movement.**
In October 2016, Zoe Leonard’s famous 1992 poem “I Want a President” was turned into an art installation. It begins with the words, “I want a dyke for president. I want a president with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president…” and so on. The poem exploded all over social media and the internet and gathered steam as left-liberal shock at the election of Trump set in. On the face of it, “I Want a President” looks like a radical manifesto, lifting up the disenfranchised into the seat of power.
But we might ask: what is radical about wanting inclusion in the structures of power instead of working to destroy them? And how does including different bodies even guarantee different outcomes? Because, after all, Pete Buttigieg could well be our next vice president or, given his ambition, president in 2024. And we might then continue to ask: what does having a gay man for president, especially a gay man like Pete Buttigieg, the candidate we have manifested with all our desires and wants, do for us?
Pete Buttigieg is a do-over candidate: he allows us to continue to pretend that the American Dream, as represented by a gay, white, millennial candidate is alive and well, not something that should be ended. Buttigieg is the hairball that neoliberalism threw up on that Afghani rug bought for nothing by your nephew who went there for seven months.
But he is also a literal embodiment of the future of forgetting: of forgetting tortuous, blood-soaked American history and reinventing it as a somewhat gay history that includes a steady climb upwards into marriage, the military, and prison; he allows us to forget about the United States’ perennial, never-ending project of war, death, and devastation. Pete Buttigieg allows us to imagine a world where gay and American history are finally conjoined and fused as one, each enabling an amnesia about the past as we march relentlessly into a future where “America” is finally rescued from the grasp of the likes of Trump and returned to the hands of polite imperialists, new Gay imperialists whose new Gay Dreams, vividly illustrated on the cover of Time, the chronicler of middle and everyday America, can now be the world’s new nightmares. It’s a new, gay world, and what America wants most of all is to forget and remember anew.
My sincere thanks to Liz Baudler, Ryan Conrad, Gautham Reddy, Richard Hoffman Reinhardt, Kate Sosin, and Matt Simonette for reading and discussing this with me (sometimes endlessly), and for their gracious donation of time. All mistakes and problems are my own.
*Many thanks to Richard Hoffman Reinhardt for leading me to this piece.
**Many thanks to Liz Baudler for letting me filch these words directly from her.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
You’re welcome to cite and reference this piece in ethical ways; please note that if you use my words or points without attribution (I’ve recently endured several instances of people plagiarising my work), I will hound and shame you so viciously that your great grandchildren will rue the day.
For more resources on queer radical history, see:
Images:
Charles Demuth, Self-Portrait, 1907
Charles Demuth, Incense of a New Church, 1921
Charles Demuth, In Vaudeville (Dancer with Chorus), 1918
Charles Demuth, Three Sailors, 1930
Charles Demuth, Sail: In Two Movements, 1919