Our Next President & His “First Dude”
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by Chris Narloch
n April 14, 2019, Pete Buttigieg (pronounced “Boot Edge Edge”), who has been the mayor of South Bend, Indiana since 2012, formally announced that he is seeking the Democratic nomination for president of the United States in 2020. If elected, he would be the first openly gay American president as well as the youngest ever.
Like many people, I thought the “gay mayor” from Indiana running for president was a gag (or an attention grab) until I started reading about Buttigieg and caught his poised appearances with the likes of Ellen DeGeneres and Stephen Colbert on their talk shows. Evangelical Christians and secular homophobes might disagree, but Buttigieg, it turns out, is extremely presidential in every way that matters -- far more so than the current resident of the White House, who I prefer to call “The Pussy Grabber.” Pete Buttigieg is a devout Christian (take that, Mike Pence!) who was raised in Catholic schools and is now a regular church-going Episcopalian. Unlike Donald Trump, who has been known to insult the U.S. military, the “gay mayor” actually served his country. (Buttigieg is a former naval intelligence officer who was deployed to Afghanistan in 2014 for seven months.) A 37-year-old native of South Bend, Buttigieg graduated from Harvard, was also a Rhodes Scholar, and speaks half a dozen languages. He returned to his hometown and eventually became its mayor, successfully restoring the city’s parks and significantly spurring economic growth and business development in South Bend. His presidential platform is as impressive as the rest of his resume. Buttigieg supports universal healthcare and universal background checks for firearm purchases, is
Pete Buttigieg with his late father and his mother.
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Pete Buttigieg and Chasten Glezman on their wedding day.
for federal legislation that would ban job discrimination against LGBT people, and wants to preserve DACA and overturn Citizens United. It also doesn’t hurt (except, I guess, with homophobes) that Buttigieg has a super-cute husband, Chasten Glezman, a junior high school teacher, who he married in June of 2018 at the Cathedral of St. James, in downtown South Bend, where he is a congregant. Peter and Chas – as I like to call them – met on the dating app, Hinge, and Mr. Glezman can out-tweet Donald Trump. A social media master, Chas would make an ideal husband to the President, and so I have taken to calling him the “First Dude” because I believe in the power of visualizing and manifesting the future. Until I researched Pete and Chas, I thought there was no way in hell that a gay man could be elected president in the era of Donald “White Trash with Money” Trump, but I have since changed my mind. Having survived Anita Bryant’s gaybashing reign of terror in the ‘70s, I never thought I would live to see gay marriage become legal in the United States, but that April 25, 2019 - May 9, 2019 • No. 623
has come to pass. I certainly never believed that “The Terminator” would become the (former) governor of California, or that a reality TV star from “The Apprentice” could be president of the United States. Anything it seems can happen in this crazy political climate, and a recent poll out of Iowa had Pete Buttigieg in third place among Democratic contenders, behind Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden -who still hadn’t officially announced his candidacy as I wrote this piece. Just think how horrifying and humiliating it would be for Pence and Trump to lose the election to a gay guy. Wouldn’t that be divine retribution for their homophobic and transphobic policies? Buttigieg almost looks too good to be true, but I want to believe that there are no scandals or skeletons in his closet that could derail his chances. The “gay mayor” has my vote, if for no other reason than he and his husband are excellent role models for other LGBT folks and really for anyone, regardless of your sexual orientation. An apparent poster couple for civility, intelligence and class, Pete and Chas now live in the same South Bend neighborhood where Buttigieg grew up, with their two rescue dogs, Truman and Buddy. C’mon. What’s not to like? outwordmagazine.com