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Buttigieg is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a small city best known for its proximity to the University of Notre Dame.
Grindr is a so-called hook-up app, a chat-cum-geolocation service that tells you how many head shots from five years ago and torso shots from ten years ago are close by. Buttigieg and Grindr are both gay, and both corny, but therein the similarities seem to end. There is a certain kind of gay guy. He is very likely white. Older women think he is handsome; younger men are not so sure.
He is a professional of some kind — not ostentatiously wealthy, but comfortable enough to take the occasional ski trip in Colorado or spring vacation in Spain. It says that Mayor Pete knows about Grindr, just like you. But it also lets him implicitly disapprove of the more explicitly sexual nature of Grindr. That is to say, I see a lot of my own most embarrassing qualities in Mayor Pete, as he is known.
We are almost precisely the same age, We occupy the same broad economic position, that 10 percent of the population who sit just below the fabulously rich. We grew up in similar social and economic milieus in the greater Midwest. We are both white. We are both gay. And we are both inclined to be performatively sheepish about admitting that we met our romantic partners online.
But I think it is important to talk about hook-up apps and what our panicky elders used to call hook-up culture before they began to panic that young people are no longer having enough sex , because ostentatious abhorrence of — at least, embarrassment about — hooking up is a major constitutive component of a type of unthreatening, socially acceptable, vaguely conservative gay identity that folks like Mayor Pete are aggressively selling to the squares. I have increasingly come to believe that, though perhaps not intentionally, they do so to the detriment of many other gay folk and queer folk and trans folk and folks who just do not — when you put yourself in the mind of a voter with an NPR mug and maybe even an equality sticker on the back of the Volvo — quite look the part.
Now, I give Buttigieg some credit. In joking about Grindr, he acknowledges its existence, and even acknowledging the existence of a sex app still carries some risk for a gay politician aspiring to a higher position in public life. But in defining himself against it, he sets down some very particular parameters about how he wants to be seen. He wants to define himself as a very specific kind of family man: a veteran, a Christian, and a fierce, married monogamist, in stark moral opposition to the gross, philandering current occupant of the White House.
This is probably good politics.
In a recent speech to the LGBTQ Victory Fund, a political action committee that advocates for LGBT political candidates, Buttigieg talked about growing up with the notion that to be gay was to exist in a socially defined opposition to these moral qualities:. He spoke movingly of having wished he could have been something other than what he was. I believe Buttigieg when he says he wished he could be straight. I came out in high school, in my junior year, and was always pretty comfortable with my sexuality and felt blessedly supported by my family, but adolescence is awful and adolescent difference is worse; I recognize the sleepless longing to be, for once, just like everyone else.
He wants to define himself as a very specific kind of family man: a veteran, a Christian, and a fierce, married monogamist, in stark moral opposition to the gross, philandering current occupant of the White House. Buttigieg was 29 when he was first elected as mayor of South Bend in Struggling to gain support from the African American community early in Democratic presidential primaries, Pete Buttigieg has unveiled a full-scale policy plan aimed at uplifting and supporting black Americans. Navy Reserve veteran who was deployed to Afghanistan, denounced military-style assault rifles. South Bend had a glut of abandoned homes left over from the Studebaker heyday, and Buttigieg announced a plan to either tear down or fix up 1, in 1, days. As a senior at St. Coats are piled on the bannister, and old sneakers and a pair of Crocs are lined up next to the kitchen door.
Buttigieg is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a small city best known for its proximity to the University of Notre Dame. Grindr is a so-called hook-up app, a chat-cum-geolocation service that tells you how many head shots from five years ago and torso shots from ten years ago are close by. Buttigieg and Grindr are both gay, and both corny, but therein the similarities seem to end. There is a certain kind of gay guy.
He is very likely white. Older women think he is handsome; younger men are not so sure. He is a professional of some kind — not ostentatiously wealthy, but comfortable enough to take the occasional ski trip in Colorado or spring vacation in Spain. It says that Mayor Pete knows about Grindr, just like you. But it also lets him implicitly disapprove of the more explicitly sexual nature of Grindr. That is to say, I see a lot of my own most embarrassing qualities in Mayor Pete, as he is known. We are almost precisely the same age, We occupy the same broad economic position, that 10 percent of the population who sit just below the fabulously rich.
We grew up in similar social and economic milieus in the greater Midwest. We are both white. We are both gay. And we are both inclined to be performatively sheepish about admitting that we met our romantic partners online.
But I think it is important to talk about hook-up apps and what our panicky elders used to call hook-up culture before they began to panic that young people are no longer having enough sex , because ostentatious abhorrence of — at least, embarrassment about — hooking up is a major constitutive component of a type of unthreatening, socially acceptable, vaguely conservative gay identity that folks like Mayor Pete are aggressively selling to the squares.
I have increasingly come to believe that, though perhaps not intentionally, they do so to the detriment of many other gay folk and queer folk and trans folk and folks who just do not — when you put yourself in the mind of a voter with an NPR mug and maybe even an equality sticker on the back of the Volvo — quite look the part.
Now, I give Buttigieg some credit. In joking about Grindr, he acknowledges its existence, and even acknowledging the existence of a sex app still carries some risk for a gay politician aspiring to a higher position in public life. But in defining himself against it, he sets down some very particular parameters about how he wants to be seen. He wants to define himself as a very specific kind of family man: a veteran, a Christian, and a fierce, married monogamist, in stark moral opposition to the gross, philandering current occupant of the White House.
This is probably good politics. In a recent speech to the LGBTQ Victory Fund, a political action committee that advocates for LGBT political candidates, Buttigieg talked about growing up with the notion that to be gay was to exist in a socially defined opposition to these moral qualities:.
He spoke movingly of having wished he could have been something other than what he was. I believe Buttigieg when he says he wished he could be straight. I came out in high school, in my junior year, and was always pretty comfortable with my sexuality and felt blessedly supported by my family, but adolescence is awful and adolescent difference is worse; I recognize the sleepless longing to be, for once, just like everyone else.