South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg answers questions during a sold-out fundraising event at Bar Lubitsch in West Hollywood, Calif., last month. (Allison Zaucha/For The Washington Post)
Chelsea Janes reports for the Washington Post
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Pete Buttigieg was sitting in the back of a black SUV with a couple of staffers, sipping a still-steeping cup of tea to ease the fatigue from his suddenly frenetic schedule, when he looked out the window and interrupted himself.
“Man,” said Buttigieg, taking in the rainbow-hued signs and colorfully dressed passersby that signaled he had entered West Hollywood, Los Angeles’s de facto gay neighborhood. “It got real gay real quick out there.”
Few Democratic presidential candidates could assess their surroundings so bluntly without seeming painfully out of line. But Buttigieg is not like any other Democratic presidential candidate — in part, if not exclusively, because he is gay.
He was also a Rhodes scholar, a McKinsey & Co. consultant who pored over grocery prices and a military officer in Afghanistan. He was a mayor at 29 and reelected at 33. All of those experiences, he says, have chiseled him into the surprising presidential candidate he is at 37, barely beyond the constitutional age requirement for the job.
So has the fact, Buttigieg says, that he needed the Supreme Court to give him the freedom to marry his partner, Chasten Glezman. Same-sex marriage was illegal in Indiana until 2014, and he cites that to illustrate how government alters lives; his marriage exists, he tells voters at every stop, “by the grace of one vote on the Supreme Court.”
Buttigieg’s emergence gives Americans their second openly gay presidential candidate — activist Fred Karger sought the GOP nomination in 2012 — but the first, by far, to earn so much attention. Many gay Americans are celebrating Buttigieg’s quick climb as a sign of tangible progress. Others, mainly outside that community, wonder whether talking about Buttigieg’s candidacy as historic means undermining the notion that sexuality doesn’t matter.
“I don’t know which response I like more — the response that talks about how much it means to people or the response that people don’t care,” Buttigieg said. “I think it’s most significant for people who have a problem with it, or for people who are in the same boat and are struggling with it.”
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