Personally, I don’t care if someone is gay. It doesn’t bother me and it wouldn’t make me vote against them simply for that one reason. If you are Pete Buttigieg, the Alfred E Neuman lookalike who has become the darling of the media during this primary cycle, it’s almost as if it’s a badge of honor. It doesn’t do anything for me either positively nor negatively. If you are gay, that’s cool, I just don’t care.
For some leftists though, Mayor Pete Buttigieg just doesn’t seem to be gay enough, despite appearing on the cover of Time Magazine with his “husband” with Time declaring them “America’s first family.” Still, not gay enough for some leftists. instead, the loony left thinks Buttigieg looks “too straight” to be gay and they are mad that he isn’t on gay chat app Grindr or something.
To me, Buttigieg will always be an Alfred E. Neuman clone who is a failed mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Nothing more, nothing less.
| Mayor Pete Buttigieg isn’t ‘gay enough’ for some leftists |
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Despite Buttigieg acknowledging his lack of intersectional qualifications by saying, “I have no idea what it is like personally, what it is like to be a transgender woman of color, but I know that I need to stand up for her, just as others have stood up for me,” it seems inadequate to quell the criticism. Another queer lesbian woman remarked, “I do like that he’s an openly gay man running for president. But at the same time, I’m a black queer woman and sometimes it just gets a bit discouraging that the first person to open the way always has to be white.”
Christina Cauterucci, a writer at Slate, contends that because Buttigieg looks straight, is well-dressed, well-spoken, and has no overt flamboyance, he is unable to empathize with the hurdles other LGBT community members have to face. Jacob Bacharach of The Outline went a step further and demanded that Buttigieg is actually bad for the LGBT community.
Complaining, once again, that Buttigieg is white, educated, and boring, his main argument posits Buttigieg is far too conservative to adequately represent LGBT Americans. Aside from the common list of minority statuses Buttigieg lacks, Bacharach recoils at the idea of what Buttigieg and his husband portray to America—a clean, sexually monogamous, polite, financially secure, heteronormative stereotype. He seems uneasy that Buttigieg is not actively on the gay hook-up app Grindr, which he finds suspicious and offputting.