The Outline Magazine Spread

Presidents Issue | April 2019

Why Pete Buttigieg is bad for gays

Mayor Pete Pete might might be be the the most most palatable palatable gay gay man man Mayor in America.

America. That’s That’s precisely precisely the the problem. problem. in

by Jacob Jacob Bacharach Bacharach by

f I am going to talk about surprise presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, I am going to have to talk about meeting my boyfriend on Grindr. Let me explain. 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. He would say that he is in his “mid-thirties,” although he is much closer to the end than to the beginning of his last credibly young decade. Older women think he is handsome; younger men are not so sure. He is a professional of some kind — not ostentatiously wealthy, but comfortable

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enough to take the occasional ski trip in Colorado or spring vacation in Spain. He probably enjoys “the theater.” He is sure to mention at some point that he likes to read.

He will probably tell you a joke about how he “met his future spouse” on “an app,” but, he will laugh, “possibly not the app you’re thinking of,” which implies, well, Grindr. According to both Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, they actually met on Hinge, which bills itself as the “relationship app,” and as a dating app for people who “want to get off of dating apps.” The joke is a good one for a largely gay crowd. It says that Mayor Pete knows about Grindr, just like you. He’s no prude! But it also lets him implicitly disapprove of the more explicitly sexual nature of Grindr. And there’s a constituency there. Among that certain kind of gay, saying “I’m not on Grindr” is the cultural equivalent of the equally snooty, “I don’t watch TV.”

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hat 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, 37. 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. Buttigieg grew up in South Bend, and I grew up in and around Pittsburgh, on the Midwest’s easternmost Appalachian edge. I can almost guarantee that he would have called his family “upper middle class,” as I called mine for many years before I figured out just how far to the right side of the national income distribution curve we really sat. 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. t’s worth noting that most sex and dating apps — Grindr, Hinge, Tinder, etc. — constitute collectively a very white space.

Profiles featuring the disclaimer “no fats, no femmes, no Asians,” are prominent enough to be a standing joke among gay men, an indictment of the way that an ostensibly progressive community aggressively polices the acceptable and desirable forms of body, gender presentation, and race.

But that isn’t why Grindr, in particular, embarrasses us, even though that’s why it should; it embarrasses us because we use it to find sex.

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

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Presidents Issue | April 2019