Yichuan Cao/Sipa USA via AP Images
Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg’s campaign sign ‘Pete 2020’ is seen in the Castro District of San Francisco, December 8, 2019.
“By the time it’s all said and done: Iowa, you have shocked the nation. Because, by all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious!”
Victorious? Maybe, maybe not; still, Pete Buttigieg made history last week. Never before has a member of the LGBTQ community been a front-runner for their party’s presidential nomination (unless you count worst-president-until-Trump James Buchanan).
“It’s a revolution,” said former Houston Mayor Annise Parker, the president and CEO of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, which endorsed Buttigieg last June on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in New York City.
“It forever changes how the media, pundits, and voters view the electability of openly LGBTQ candidates,” she said.
Major milestone though it was, however, Buttigieg achieved it without much support from Iowa’s gay Democrats. The media’s Iowa entrance poll reported that 22 percent of LGBTQ caucus-goers planned to cast their votes for Buttigieg. By contrast, 42 percent planned to vote for Bernie Sanders. Elizabeth Warren came in at 24 percent.
It’s not as if the LGBTQ community has taken a sharp turn to the left. The Advocate needn’t fear losing market share to the Revolutionary Worker, and the overwhelming majority of LGBTQ people still approve of corporations participating in Pride Week. It’s that just under half of self-identified LGBTQ voters are ages 18–34, and share the progressivism of the young.
Mayor Pete’s strongest support, by contrast, came from moderate and conservative voters, older voters, and voters whose yearly household income is $100,000 or higher. Perhaps most significant was that Buttigieg did well among those who “think the economic system is generally fair.”
It’s tempting to compare Buttigieg’s less-than-ecstatic support in the LGBTQ community to Barack Obama’s initial weakness among African American voters in 2007–2008. The theory goes that once gay people see that Buttigieg can win, they’ll back him in droves, as blacks did Obama once he won Iowa. But Mayor Pete faces a more daunting challenge than Obama ever did. While gay voters agree by big margins that America is ready to elect one of their own as president, they’re also distinctly more progressive and younger than non-LGBTQ voters. According to a January 31 Morning Consult national survey, that translates into 34 percent support among gays for Bernie Sanders and 19 percent for Elizabeth Warren. Buttigieg, the man who would be the first LGBTQ president ever, scores 12 percent—even less than Joe Biden.
Morning Consult attributed Sanders’s popularity to his “long record of support for gay rights,” though that’s never been at the top of his agenda. What has been is economic justice, as well as the climate crisis and health care—concerns that have won him the support of many non-LGBTQ voters, too. That’s not to say Mayor Pete hasn’t taken stands on issues. He has. In the case of health care, he’s taken more than one. Though candidate Buttigieg roundly condemns Medicare for All today, in 2018 Mayor Buttigieg tweeted: “I, Pete Buttigieg, politician, do henceforth and forthwith declare, most affirmatively and indubitably, unto the ages, that I do favor Medicare for All, as I do favor any measure that would help get all Americans covered. Now if you’ll excuse me, potholes await.” Some candidates pay a high political price when they change their stance, even when the change is one of degree rather than kind. Warren was criticized when it was reported she abandoned Medicare for All, when she basically tweaked her position.
Buttigieg’s lurch to the right on health care, however, didn’t rile his backers. Why would it? Long before anyone other than vintners had ever heard of a wine cave, Buttigieg was meticulously working to cultivate upscale gay donors—liberals, but not in the Sanders and Warren sense. “They’re the kind of people who gave and raised a lot of money to groups working on AIDS,” says one longtime gay activist.
Their importance to Buttigieg’s campaign can’t be overstated. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that more than half of the money that’s poured into Buttigieg’s campaign comes from big contributors—more than for any other candidate except Biden. As one of Buttigieg’s fundraisers, Alex Slater, told The New York Times last year, “L.G.B.T. money has been the equivalent of seed money or angel investment.”
Mayor Pete’s strongest support came from moderate and conservative voters, older voters, and voters whose yearly household income is $100,000 or higher.
The money Buttigieg receives from what one gay elected official described as “rich white gay guys” says a lot about the candidate and his goals for the LGBTQ community. Buttigieg says it’s inclusion—gay people being treated the same as straight people. To him, the linchpin is marriage equality. It’s something he casts in very personal terms. The preternaturally composed Buttigieg never seems more excited than when he talks about his first love and husband Chasten, but warns, “That intimate thing in our lives exists by the grace of a single vote on the U.S. Supreme Court.” The answer, Buttigieg said in an October Cosmopolitan interview, was to appoint “more justices who think for themselves …[j]ustices like Justice Kennedy or Justice Souter.”
Civil rights advocates were startled by Buttigieg’s choices. As Washington Blade reporter Chris Johnson reminded readers, Kennedy voted to allow Hobby Lobby to deny employees insurance policies covering birth control, to uphold President Trump’s travel ban on Muslim countries, and, in the case of Janus v. AFSCME, to impose “right-to-work” constraints on public-employee unions. (A Buttigieg spokesperson later tried to walk back his boss’s remarks, telling Johnson, “Pete said he would appoint justices who share our liberal values to existing seats.”)
Buttigieg’s vision of inclusion falls short of the civil rights movement’s, which didn’t battle for inclusion in an unjust society, but for a different kind of society altogether—one where no one’s trapped in poverty and health care begins with not getting shot by police. Mayor Pete’s inclusiveness doesn’t seem to offer much to people whose immediate concern isn’t the right to marry, but their daily survival. UCLA’s Williams Institute puts the poverty rate for LGBTQ people at 21.6 percent, much higher than the 15.7 percent rate for straight people. Dig deeper and you’ll find that among bisexuals (the largest segment of the community), the poverty rate for women, who make up the majority of bisexuals, is almost 30 percent. It’s roughly the same for trans people. But the numbers surge even higher among people of color. The poverty rate for black bisexual women is 39.7 percent, and for bisexual Hispanic women it’s an astounding 48.4 percent. Yet Buttigieg’s Economic Agenda for American Families says nothing about poverty in the LGBTQ community, or, for that matter, much about poverty in anyone else’s community either. The omission hasn’t gone unnoticed.
Stephanie Sandberg, executive director of LPAC, an organization dedicated to building the political power of America’s 6.4 million LGBTQ women, credits Buttigieg for breaking new ground but also points out his shortcomings in addressing the needs of LGBTQ women who aren’t feeling just squeezed by the economy but crushed.
“There’s still discrimination happening; women on average don’t earn the same wages as men, and they often have the responsibility of caring for their parents,” Sandberg says. “He doesn’t have a real dialogue with LGBTQ women about these kinds of issues. I think that’s why you don’t see an overwhelming support of him from the [LGBTQ women’s] community.”
Another factor working against Buttigieg in that community is its desire to elect a woman president. As one lesbian activist in her sixties commented, “I don’t care whether he’s gay or not, I want to elect a woman.” Her choice? Elizabeth Warren.
No less aggravating has been Buttigieg’s response to police abuses. His problems began soon after he became mayor in 2012, when he demoted South Bend’s first black police chief. Since that time, Buttigieg’s failure to close racial disparities within the police force, his contentious relationship with Black Lives Matter, and his skipping multiple meetings of a police review committee have deepened suspicions of him in the black community.
But his conduct also has raised questions of whether Buttigieg understands the abuse that LGBTQ people suffer at the hands of police. A study by Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health found that even though more than half of LGBTQ people report that they or an LGBTQ friend experienced violence, many won’t call the police for fear of the cops’ response, or non-response. That’s especially true in the trans community and among LGBTQ people of color. All told, 30 percent of LGBTQ people of color say they’ve avoided calling the police even when they had good reason to.
Buttigieg’s vision of inclusion falls short of the civil rights movement’s, which didn’t battle for inclusion in an unjust society, but for a different kind of society altogether.
One person who understands that well is 29-year-old Gabriel Acevedo, a gay member of the Maryland House of Delegates and longtime Black Lives Matter activist. “It would behoove all LGBTQ candidates, Buttigieg included, to understand the origins of the Stonewall riots and the LGBTQ movement,” he says.
“If we want to be consistent with that history, we need more LGBTQ candidates and elected officials who have the courage and political will to not only call out police genocide, but call out the lack of transparency and accountability from police departments across this country.”
Another Buttigieg critic is Gregory Cendana. Now a consultant to nonprofits, Cendana, 33, was the first openly gay and youngest-ever executive director of the AFL-CIO–affiliated Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance. He’s also a founder of Queers Against Pete, a group that disrupted a Buttigieg fundraiser last month in Chicago.
“For me it’s less about his being gay and more about how he’s addressing the needs of the broader LGBTQ community, particularly trans folks, especially black and trans women of color. How are those folks engaged in decisions? It’s not always clear for me that’s the way Mayor Pete operates.”
Today, Cendana’s group is releasing an open letter to Buttigieg with roughly 2,000 signatories lambasting the candidate for his stances on police violence, incarceration, homelessness, and other threats that have a special impact on the LGBTQ community, especially people of color.
“Some have touted former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s openly gay identity as proof of progress in our politics,” the letter reads. “However, being gay is not enough to earn the support of LGBTQIA communities.”
Indeed, what’s come to be known as Buttigieg’s “race problem” clearly crosses over into the LGBTQ community as well. Though his disconnect with some African American pastors (and a greater number of white pastors) doubtless has to do with his being gay, the straight black community is hardly a boiling cauldron of homophobia. Case in point is the pivotal role of Maryland’s black voters in passing Question 6, the state’s marriage equality law, in 2012.
One longtime gay activist, Brian Gaither of Baltimore, contends that “Pete’s fundamental flaw as an LGBTQ candidate is his inability to see the world with a perspective wider than that of a cisgender gay white man whose greatest life struggle was deciding when to come out. The intersections among racism, economic inequality, sexism, and LGBTQ identity are where the movement is at—a fact Pete would have known had he participated in it before entering the race for president.”
From the moment he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, Harvey Milk set the template for what an LGBTQ elected official should be. Thanks to his leadership, the Board of Supervisors approved gay rights legislation that protected LGBTQ people from being fired from their jobs. But he also fought to protect the city’s neighborhoods from real-estate interests, stood up for senior citizens, labor, and more.
Milk knew his life was in danger and, presciently, made a tape recording that was only to be played if he were assassinated, which happened nine days after he made the recording. Here, in part, is what he said:
I cannot prevent some people from feeling angry and frustrated and mad in response to my death, but I hope they will take the frustration and madness and instead of demonstrating or anything of that type, I would hope that they would take the power and I would hope that five, ten, one hundred, a thousand would rise. I would like to see every gay lawyer, every gay architect come out, stand up and let the world know. That would do more to end prejudice overnight than anybody could imagine. I urge them to do that, urge them to come out. Only that way will we start to achieve our rights … All I ask is for the movement to continue, and if a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.
Buttigieg stands on Harvey Milk’s shoulders, but he hasn’t shown that he’s willing to learn from his legacy.
