Pete Buttigieg won’t be president in 2020, but his campaign changed the game for LGBTQ Americans

When he announced his candidacy last year, people who’d heard of the millennial mayor at all struggled to pronounce his name, recognizing him largely from a failed 2017 bid to lead the Democratic National Committee. South Bend, the fourth largest city in Indiana, was better known for the neighboring University of Notre Dame than for presidential politics.

But for LGBTQ Americans, who only nationally gained the right to marry in 2015 and still face the threat of workplace discrimination for their sexual orientation or gender identity, Buttigieg was more than a longshot candidate from a mid-level midwestern city — he was a presidential contender of their very own.

A new kind of candidate

From the start, Buttigieg’s sexual orientation and faith set him apart from the standard Democratic presidential hopeful — and especially his ability to square the two seemingly contradictory aspects of his identity.

At a CNN town hall in March 2019, he addressed both, creating a national moment largely credited with catapulting the mayor from obscurity to ubiquity.

During the town hall, Buttigieg, an Episcopalian, tore into Vice President Mike Pence for tying his conservative views on same-sex marriage to his faith.

“His interpretation of Scripture is pretty different from mine,” Buttigieg said. “His has a lot more to do with sexuality and, I don’t know, a certain view of rectitude. Even if you buy into that, how could he allow himself to become the cheerleader of the porn star presidency?”

Buttigieg then paused for a moment before going in for the kill.

“Is it that he stopped believing in Scripture when he started believing in Donald Trump?”

That answer, and the rest of his town hall performance, caught fire, earning him praise from across the political spectrum and netting him $600,000 in donations from 22,200 unique donors, a haul that expedited the campaign’s progress toward qualifying for the debates set for that summer.

But Buttigieg’s momentum surprised gay voters the most — voters like Robert Moore of Dallas, Texas.

“Remember, marriage equality came pretty recently, you know, and it’s a big jump from we can get married and be private citizens and be on our own, to being president of the United States,” Moore told CNN in February. “And this is somebody that they are wanting to embrace, and not just embrace, but put up to lead them? That’s a whole different game.”

Perhaps more significantly, it signaled a new way to counter arguments against LGBTQ equality from the religious right — with an appeal equally grounded in religion from the left.

A month later, Buttigieg would take his argument a step further, lambasting Pence at the LGBTQ Victory Fund National Champagne Brunch: “If me being gay was a choice, it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade.”

The candidate’s move to embrace religion baffled the religious right, who’d never seen a Democratic presidential candidate lay claim to the language of faith in such terms, much less a gay one, and the subject would grow to become central to his stump speech, deployed before audiences with a wide array of religious beliefs or lack thereof.

Backlash from the LGBTQ community

But Buttigieg’s appeal to moderates on religion would prove representative of a larger theme throughout his campaign.

In attempting to expand the Democratic Party tent to independents and Republicans fleeing Trump, Buttigieg enraged a vocal, progressive wing of the Democratic base, who accused the mayor of compromising party ideals for votes in purple states.

“Some have touted former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s openly gay identity as proof of progress in our politics. However, being gay is not enough to earn the support of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual (LGBTQ2IA) communities.”

Even an essay from The New Republic titled “My Mayor Pete Problem,” which the publication ultimately removed following widespread outcry, centered on the same idea: While Buttigieg may have been a pioneer in his success as a gay candidate for president, when it came to the question of if he represented the gay community writ large, a corner of the community found him wanting. It’s something they would repeatedly make clear, interrupting private fundraisers and releasing a statement within minutes of reports of the end of his campaign, “#QueersAgainstPete welcomes the news that former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is suspending his campaign.”

If such criticisms got to Buttigieg, though, he showed little sign of it.

“That’s why I can’t even read the LGBT media anymore, because it’s all, ‘he’s too gay,’ ‘not gay enough,’ ‘wrong kind of gay,’ like, oh jeez.” Buttigieg said. “All I know is life became a lot easier when I just started allowing myself to be myself, and I’ll let other people write up whether I’m ‘too this’ or ‘too that.'”

The anti-Buttigieg sentiment in the LGBTQ community also rankled Buttigieg’s gay supporters.

“They’re demanding too much,” said Jerry Birdwell, a Texas voter who traveled to New Hampshire to observe the primary process there last month. “I personally think that if they make a comment like that, he’s not gay enough, so to speak — that’s absurd…we’re looking for a man that’s going to represent the country, and he is the type of person who, his sexuality has nothing to do with his ability to run a campaign and to serve.”

A sense of belonging

While detractors would continue to paint him as too centrist or inadequately queer, by the time the Democratic primary reached November 2019, Buttigieg had begun to talk more about the issue he’d come to see as central to his campaign: The need to restore a sense of belonging.

“If talking about hope and belonging sounds optimistic for a time like this, fine, then call it optimistic, but do not call it naïve, because I believe in these things not based on my age, but based on my experience,” Buttigieg told an audience gathered in Des Moines for Iowa’s premiere Democratic political event of the year.

Before thousands of Iowa Democrats, he drew a direct line between the case for a Buttigieg presidency and his own LGBTQ experience.

“I have seen what America can do, and so have you. After all, you’re looking at someone who, as a young man growing up, wondered if something deep inside of him meant that he would forever be an outsider, would never wear the uniform, never be accepted, never know love,” Buttigieg said. “And now you are looking at that same young man, a veteran, a mayor, happily married, asking for you to vote for president of the United States.”

On the trail, Buttigieg took care to always note that while the LGBTQ community has made strides, there remained a great deal of work left to do. And he didn’t gloss over that truth either, especially in Iowa, where, a week before the caucuses, he confessed that while he was “obviously thrilled by the progress that brought me the right to marry,” the idea that marriage equality “meant the struggle for equality was, you know, done” is “just not true.”

Former US Rep Barney Frank, the first member of Congress in a same-sex marriage, agrees with Buttigieg’s view, but thinks history will view Buttigieg’s unsuccessful bid for president as historic in its own right.

“It’s one of the most important moments in American history, not just of the LGBT issues,” Frank told CNN in an interview after Buttigieg ended his campaign. “It is a sign that the prejudice against sexual minorities has diminished even more than we had thought. … It further advances the fight against prejudice, because he was so good at it, being so articulate and doing as well as he did.”

“He not only benefited from the diminution of prejudice, he furthered it by his own very good performance,” Frank, who’s been on the forefront of LGBTQ equality since the Stonewall riots, continued.

If Buttigieg’s run meant America saw more widespread acceptance for the LGBTQ community, it carried even more weight for those Americans who saw themselves in the presidential hopeful.

“I never thought we’d have a gay candidate for president in our lifetime, no,” said Paul King, who attended Buttigieg’s rally in Raleigh, North Carolina with his husband, J.D. Brickhouse, just one day before Buttigieg would drop out of the race. “But I never thought we’d have civil rights in our lifetime either. It means a lot. Nobody who hasn’t experienced growing up gay in America would understand how much that means.”

“What does it mean? I’m having the chance to vote for a gay man for president,” Brickhouse chimed in bluntly.

For Annise Parker of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, which seeks to elect LGBTQ candidates up and down the ballot, Buttigieg’s candidacy filled a more urgent need.

“I believe that he literally saved lives,” Parker, president and CEO of the group, told CNN Thursday.

“We still have a horrible problem with internalized homophobia and suicide, leading to suicide within our community, and by seeing Pete there doing so well and speaking directly to disenfranchised young people, I know he had an outsized impact for them. I know what all of our candidates and elected officials do for younger LGBT people and how they provide hope, how they provide inspiration. He did that on steroids.”

“Thank you for being so brave,” Ro wrote in a submitted question before a Denver rally in February. “Would you help me tell the world I’m gay too? I want to be brave like you.”

Later at the rally, as Ro approached the stage, the crowd of hundreds whipped themselves into a frenzy of cheers and encouragement, high-fiving the boy and chanting, “Love is love!”

“You will never know who’s taking their lead from you, who’s watching you and deciding that they can be a little braver, because you have been brave,” Buttigieg told the 9-year old, visibly moved. “When I was trying to figure out who I was, I was afraid that who I was might mean that I could never make a difference. And what wound up happening instead, is that it’s a huge part of the difference I get to make.”

Then, as if to set an intention, the former mayor looked the boy in the eye and shared the lesson he’d learned from over a year of criss-crossing the country as a candidate for president.

“You’ll never know whose life you might be affecting right now, just by standing here,” he said. “There’s a lot of power in that.”