This Boy Wonder: On Race, Homosexuality, and the Buttigieg Dilemma
By: Max S. Gordon
Tags: Democratic Primary, Pete Buttigieg, Politics, BlackLivesMatter, LGBTQ

3. Senator Kamala Harris has dropped out of the presidential race. There will be forensics done on what went wrong with her campaign but, for many of us, her absence leaves a sting. Harris wasn’t the perfect candidate; some argued that her message was at times contradictory and convoluted, her campaign headquarters disorganized, and — most unforgivable in a capitalist democracy — she found herself broke.

It’s been argued that her history of incarcerating people of color came back to haunt her. But her eloquence and prosecutorial anger will no longer be on the debate stage this month (nor will any other candidates of color if the poll numbers remain where they are at the time of this writing), and she will be missed. Harris had been in free fall for some months, but a friend of mine suggested that that night at the Democratic debate — when she suggested that American’s favorite white man, Joe Biden, might be a racist like Donald Trump — was when the music stopped and her campaign actually ended.

It was reported last month that Harris called Buttigieg naive because he expressed on the debate stage that being denied rights as a gay man, while not the same as racial inequality, had sensitized him to issues of race. I disagree with Senator Harris. On some level, Buttigieg is right; what he is referencing is intersectionality. I don’t believe he’s naive, but he may be manipulative. One can compare the two Civil Rights struggles, but the question one might ask of Buttigieg is whether he has always made this connection, or if he is just making it now, when it is politically expedient. Because while the “gay” experience cannot simply be imposed on the “black” experience, there is a relationship between the two struggles for equality that cannot be denied. I am not a prosecutor as Senator Harris is, nor do I have the experience of running a city like Mayor Buttigieg, but I do consider myself an expert on being a black gay man, and I know where these fights for equality meet in me. They meet in my relationship to racism and patriarchy. They meet in the violence perpetrated every day in this world by men.

I know men. I have loved them, hated them, fucked them, been fucked by them and fucked over by them. I’ve related to and survived patriarchy, racism, and heterosexism, having negotiated a lifetime of relationships with — men.

I’ll explain it another way: if a group of black men walks toward me, as a black queer man, I’m not given any assurance that they won’t harm me. They probably won’t, they may see me as their brother, but as a gay man, I still have to be aware. When a group of white men walks toward me, if I’m alone, I have no assurance that they will see me as a man. I must be aware. And while I know that it is 2019, not 1919, that it is a paved city sidewalk and not a dirt road in Alabama, our collision with each other has historical precedent.

That vigilance I live with, that fear that they won’t see the me of me coming down the street, whoever they are, but a “nigger” or a “faggot,” is as intersectional as the escape route I search for when a group of men approaches me at night. It’s in my blood, it’s in the blood that washes along our streets every day. In a patriarchal society, men both black and white sometimes roam the streets, stomping out sexual and racial difference wherever they find it. If I’m transgender or a woman, I’m in danger. This isn’t something I learned from a political pollster or media consultant; this is how I’ve survived in America, as a black man, as a gay man.

Women, and queers, and blacks, know what happens when you face the oncoming maelstrom of male aggression. When a group of men desires to impress each other by victimizing someone else, or sometimes when men are just bored, they can become a mob that is dynamic and rapacious — a force. If you are unable to get away, like standing in front of an approaching tornado, you simply brace yourself for what is coming. And I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t some white men who haven’t been on the other side of male aggression, too — you don’t have to be in a specific identity group to know what male violence looks like. The difference is that if you are white, and male, and straight, the violence perpetrated against you hasn’t been societally sanctioned, encouraged in the collective conscious for lifetimes. In other words, you might get your ass kicked because you’re a straight white guy and these men don’t like your shirt. But it won’t be because your humanity is in question, because a law said that black people should be considered three-fifths of a human being, or women shouldn’t have the right to vote, or gay and bisexual people should be arrested and put in jail as degenerates for their sexual orientation.

If you are black, or female, or queer, you may try and plead your humanity to the group of men, this tribal beast. You make eye contact, you will ask them to see you as a woman coming home tired from work, but they are looking for a “bitch” because it is easier to rape a “bitch” than a single mother. If a group of men are deep in their macho trance, it may seem hopeless. Some of us know what that trance looks like from the wrong side: we’ve negotiated with it, we’ve run from it, some of us have escaped, others have not. Women can be evil, of course, they can murder and violate, but they don’t tend to travel in packs, egg each other on, swagger and get a thrill from smashing things. The common denominator in the experiences I’ve described is men; from the White House lawn to the woman stoned to death by her father and brothers for shaming her family. The problem in the world right now is men.

It is the patriarchal bullies, and those who agree to support that paradigm, that Donald Trump most appeals to. And white male patriarchal rage has never had a stronger proponent than our current president. Which is why we cannot talk about Buttigieg as a presidential candidate without having an appreciation of what he is up against as a gay man and how he will choose to negotiate his own relationship with patriarchy in order to win. Buttigieg stands at a critical moment in our history, and as a white man he has a choice: he can use the traditional codes of racism and sexism with voters to let us know that under his administration, although it will be run by a gay man this time, everything will still be “business as usual.” Or he can resist diving further into tribal fear in order to appeal to the “center,” challenging his own racist conditioning, and come up with something fresh, just, and new.

We may not see the evidence of it now, but a gay male political candidate is going to stir up our feelings about patriarchal traditions and sexuality, because that is what often happens when a queer person comes out in his or her family. And America is one big family; even when we are, most of the time, a dysfunctional one. When Buttigieg gets on television and says, “I’m a gay man,” he automatically threatens patriarchy. He is also a Christian, a soldier, a scholar, a mayor. If we are encouraged to focus on these identities and not on whom he has sex with, we may be distracted from remembering that he is also gay.

People use the word gay to describe a man or woman who loves the same gender; the word homosexual is out of vogue these days. It would be considered crude by many, even offensive, to call Buttigieg a homosexual. But sometimes homosexual is the right word, because it is the word we are thinking in our heads, it’s the word we respond to with our prejudices. Gay means rainbows and entertaining drag queens. Homosexual has “sex” in the word, homosexual means that two men in a gay relationship make love to each other. When a man makes love to another man he changes his relationship to patriarchy. If he tells anyone, especially other men, he destabilizes that relationship to patriarchy even further.

As homosexuals are not in the sexual game to reproduce, homosexuality is suspect in our society. A gay person affirms sex purely for desire, and that may be seen as decadent, indulgent, wasteful. And because we are still more of a puritanical society than we care to admit, we may believe a man or woman who appears to be sexually “free “ should be punished.

In order to mitigate this harsh realization, that queer men and women are “fuckin’ for fun,” a gay male candidate might have to balance out this uncomfortable reality by going deeper into whiteness. He may find a way of saying, “Yes, I’m one of those queer people you’ve heard about, but look at me, I’m just as dry, tight, boring, and repressed as any heterosexual man you’ve ever met. I’m queer, but you’ll never really know it — not in the ways that count. No feather boas, no show tunes here. No fecal matter, no waking up with night sweats and being held by your lover with sores from Kaposi sarcoma, no grief for a generation of artists lost to AIDS. You’ll get gay, but without any of that dreary pain, anger, or activism that annoys you or demands that you examine your own life.”

This has always been a worry about gay assimilation — that maybe, in our quest for justice and equal rights, we would lose our fabulousness. That instead of sequins and Sylvester, we would become the quiet couple that you’d sit next to in church, at bingo night, or at the neighborhood picnic where my husband’s potato salad is just as bland as the recipe you and your wife make (albeit with a little more mustard).

The assimilation game is not new just because we have a gay male candidate. black candidates also know how to reassure a white electorate that we are just as white as they are: no chicken or hair grease, no incarcerated crack-addicted cousins, no lights cut off for non-payment around here. This is why, during his ascendancy, Barack Obama’s African father became more remote, like someone who got left behind during a hot air balloon ride, a tiny black dot, while his white mother became mythologized in the cultural mind — a white woman running through a Kansas cornfield, holding the hand of her black son.

You can be president if you are black or gay or female, but you are going to have to adopt a special relationship to whiteness and patriarchy: ask Hillary Clinton. You will not be able to show pain or anger, which is what it feels like to be on the other side of racism, or sexism, or heterosexism, or violence against queers, personal or governmental. You will not be able to show rage. But what other response can a queer person have to our government’s response to AIDS or a black person to police brutality? But because an angry gay man or black woman makes us feel unsettled, we may have to go deeper into whiteness to comfort you, to reassure you — no Black Lives Matter protests here. Which is why Pete Buttigieg may be the first Democratic candidate for president who reads as a Log Cabin Republican.