Pete Buttigieg Claims His Right to Run for President—and Defends His Right to Exist

Masha Gessen wrote for the New Yorker about presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg's defense of his sexuality.

Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a Presidential candidate, gave a most extraordinary speech on Sunday. Buttigieg is a gifted orator, and his speech was good by all conventional measures: well written, well paced, well delivered. But that’s not what made the talk unlike most political speeches. In the course of twenty minutes, Buttigieg both defended his right to exist and claimed his right to run for President of the United States, and this made his talk a document of a strange political moment.

Speaking at an annual event of the L.G.B.T.Q. pac Victory Fund, Buttigieg recounted his coming-out story. “When I was younger, I would have done anything to not be gay,” he said. When he was as old as twenty-five, he said, “If you had offered me a pill to make me straight, I would have swallowed it before you had time to give me a sip of water. . . . There were times in my life that, if you had shown me exactly what it was inside me that made me gay, I would have cut it out with a knife.”

Eventually, Buttigieg came to terms with his sexuality. In 2015, while running for reëlection as mayor, Buttigieg came out publicly and won his campaign. Earlier that year, Vice-President Mike Pence, then the governor of Indiana, invited prominent anti-gay campaigners to a private ceremony, during which he signed a “religious-freedom law” that effectively legalized anti-gay discrimination. That same year, Buttigieg met his future husband; the speech made it sound like the first man he dated became his husband. They had a June wedding. “My marriage to Chasten has made me a better man,” Buttigieg said. “And, yes, Mr. Vice-President, it has moved me closer to God.” After a long ovation, Buttigieg acknowledged that part of his audience is not religious, which mattered little to the point he was making—that he didn’t have a choice about being gay. He made this point as eloquently as it can be made. “If me being gay was a choice,” he said, “it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade. And that’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand—that if you’ve got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my Creator.”