Shortest Way Home (2019) By Pete Buttigieg

On a Saturday morning one late summer day in 1967, I got on my bicycle and rode it to the library off the “jungle hallway” at Portage High School, in Indiana. I was 14-years old, an incoming freshman.  I chose that day because I knew next to no one would be at the library.  The purpose of the trip was to look up the term “homosexual.” I found three references, two were in psychiatric journals, the third was in a text on criminal law.  It would be another five years before I revisited this subject. When I did, I made the decision to leave Indiana.

I tell this highly personal story as my way of pointing out just how monumental is the presidential campaign of Pete Buttigieg, Mayor of South Bend, Indiana (57 miles east of Portage) and a veteran of the endless war in Afghanistan. A generation younger than me, he is a gay man who came out while Mayor and was resoundingly re-elected.  In office, he met, fell in love, and married another man. 

To take the historic nature of this campaign one step further, in the latest round of polling, Buttigieg is running ahead of the incumbent President of the United States.  Regardless of the current president’s negative job approval rating – just think about that.  Think about the amount of social and cultural change that has had to occur to make it possible for a gay person to be considered a politically viable candidate for President.  What a way to mark the 50-year anniversary of Stonewall!  The police raid on the Stonewall when the patrons fought back is considered the start of the modern-day gay rights movement, an event that occurred the summer before my junior year of high school … unbeknownst to me at the time.

More remarkable is that Buttigieg hasn’t been cast as a “fringe” candidate.  He is in fact the civil pragmatist in the room, a 37-year old who speaks passionately, yet calmly; respectfully, even when that’s not called for; and shares not only his opinions, but his thought process, how he came about forming those opinions. In an era of political volume, he speaks softly and is not a bomb-thrower.    

Like all (smart) presidential candidates, Mayor Pete kicked off this race with a compelling campaign autobiography: Shortest Way Home.  It touches me on multiple levels: as a gay man, as someone who grew up in rust belt America, and most significantly, as someone who has lived the personal, professional, and political pluses & minuses of being “openly” gay.  Life isn't always easy, but it gets better.

The Importance of Pete

The visibility of Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, regardless of its outcome, speaks to the next generations of LGBTQ youth, nationally and even internationally. Fifty years ago, a gay person could be declared “mentally ill” and branded & prosecuted criminally.  Fifty years ago, gays were hounded by the police for meeting for drinks at the Stonewall Inn. Today, we are examining a gay man’s platform planks on job creation, healthcare and the environment.  We are beginning to witness a “normality” about gay people that American history has always shoved into the shadows.  We pay taxes, we mow our lawns, go grocery shopping, root for the home team, some of us raise families ….

It is argued that today “the love that dare not speak its name” never shuts up. I will make no apologies for that. For every silence you may wish, I can give testimony – often first person -- to a slight, a snicker, bullying, an out-an-out insult, a lost job, an abandonment, a child fleeing or being kicked out of what should be a safe home, a bout of homelessness, an incident of  blackmail, police harassment and/or brutality, a queer-beating, a murder, and even genocide whether through violence or through gross negligence in addressing a health crisis, all committed in the name of “morality.”
 

Harvey Milk’s Hope Speech

Our “normality” has been denied by many religious leaders.  They have preached, and still preach, horror stories, and sanction policy-phrases like “intrinsically evil” to describe human beings.  Some have gotten even louder, as their flocks have gotten smaller (seemingly unable to make the connection).  These religious “leaders” and the political-right politicians who use them, have a vested, albeit hypocritical, interest in driving people back into the closet.  They scream about the oppression of “political correctness” – unable to acknowledge the decades, centuries, of real blood & guts oppression they have committed. 

No, having arrived here, we will not now shut up and step back.

There is nothing quite so visible in America as a presidential campaign.  Pete Buttigieg with his husband Chasten Glezman Buttigieg – in a quest proudly made possible by 50 years of activism -- are now on the big stage, as the role models we never had, providing hope for a better next 50 years. 

Recommendation:  If you are gay, this is required reading.  If you are a Hoosier, or from any Midwestern rust belt town, you will recognize a lot in the book. If you are a millennial you will definitely identify with this book.  If you are longing for a politics that is both progressive and civil, you will learn from the book.  Yes.