On Valentine’s Day, Mayor Pete and his hus-bear Chasten managed to once again charm absolutely no one, barring a few lonely, slightly overweight middle-aged women. The couple, who like to cram their twee, G-rated romance down America’s throat at every possible opportunity, shared a photo from their wedding day. ‘With you, my love, I’d go anywhere’, Chasten wrote.

Disney-Pixar may have announced a forthcoming LGBT cartoon character, but we already have two of them on television: the Buttigiegs. They’re like a Mickey Mouse Club of homosexuality, eerily non-threatening, grotesquely irritating, and serving us content not intended for the consumption of mature adults. Firstly, I must point out, Chasten took his last name. What gay person does that?

Sadly, those of us in the community know exactly the type of gay who does that, and it explains why gays are quite chilly towards Pete. The lefties call it ‘heteronormativity’, but I just call it corny. The lefty gays don’t see Pete as culturally gay, as one of us, and, in fact, more of an enemy than a friend to them, a sad figure desperately clinging on to a traditional framework they’ve long rejected and decided wasn’t for them.

In a way, I’m with them here. I like my gays messy and irreverent, iconoclasts and provocateurs, or just plain entertaining. But even my more upstanding gay friends — who may be married, Christian, and vote Republican — still acknowledge there’s something different about themselves and their relationships. They will never be normal, and that’s OK.





Not the Buttigii, who’ve spent the entire campaign showing America just how normal they are, goddamnit. And if you deign to wince at one of their many on-stage prolonged smooches, you’re a bigot. This is the behavior of teenagers. The Buttigii are extremely childlike and appear to have some form of arrested development. And Pete’s relationship to his sexuality took a demented turn last week when, at a campaign event in Colorado, he discussed sexuality with a nine-year-old. The pre-pubescent child asked the former mayor advice on coming out as gay. Pete indulged the child and the mother who put him up to it, telling him ‘I’m rooting for you’. As a friend pointed out, if Pete had done that on a playground wearing a trench coat, he’d be in jail.

Even though there is no such thing as a gay child, the fact that Pete only came out of the closet less than five years ago, probably means this child would have better advice for him, and not the other way around.

Now Pete’s public struggles with his identity have presented a new twist. He is, basically, a slightly less gay version of Obama. And he has plenty more in common with the former president. They’re both moody, bitchy academics. Journalists and people with graduate degrees relate to them. They’re both affirmative action candidates, from towns 90 miles apart, raised by communist parents who’d wither and die outside the higher education system. And they are both shooting for the highest office in the land with almost no political experience. Pete has even less experience, and possesses none of the former president’s charisma, intelligence, and oratory skill.

Now the millennial from South Bend’s voice has suddenly changed — both his actual voice and his message. Democrats are known for reflexively developing blaccents when addressing African Americans — famously, in recent years, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Pete has taken it to the next level: he’s decided to simply become Barack Obama. Not only are his voice and cadence now magically identical to the former president, his speeches sound as though they’ve been written by a ‘hope and change’ word generator. And he’s also been stealing speeches, nearly word-for-word, from Obama.

‘If we can light up a high school gym — we can light a neighborhood. If we can light up a neighborhood — we can light a city. If we can light up a city — we can light up our country’, Buttigieg both tweeted and said in a speech over the weekend.

A decade ago, in a speech, Obama said, ‘One voice can change a room, and if one voice can change a room, then it can change a city, and if it can change a city, it can change a state.’

Is "Pete Obama voice" a thing? pic.twitter.com/IWU0tdg7xb — The Recount (@therecount) February 25, 2020

Conspiratorial chatter on the internet may see this as proof that Pete is a brainwashed Manchurian candidate working for the CIA but I find that hard to believe. Is this guy really the best they could find? More likely than being a Deep State plant, Pete just hates himself. He’s a directionless rich kid, an insecure and narcissistic man-child who says nothing, believes in nothing, and is still trying to figure out who he is. This is the only reason he is running for president. Like any actor on a stage begging the world for adoration, Pete needs us, but we don’t need him. While most of us gay men got over that in our twenties, late-blooming Pete is still grasping for validation and he’s forced that carnal desperation onto the entire country.

Remember, we only know this guy’s name because he’s gay. While he lectures everyone on being the best Christian in America, he also believes his military service — six months at a desk in Afghanistan — makes him morally superior to the rest of us. No vet who served with duty and honor, rather than for a résumé-building, and no Christian, behaves like that. And no self-respecting gay adult thrusts his romantic life into the public with such juvenile enthusiasm.

Compare Mayor Pete to an actual role model, leader, and man of incredible accomplishment, ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell, now the acting Director of National Intelligence. Amb. Grenell posts photos with, and appears alongside, his husband, Matt, all the time, and yet only one of those two accounts consistently makes your stomach knot with dread and loathing. Ric and Matt are adults and very comfortable with themselves. Pete still has plenty of probing and self-exploration ahead of him. And the Lincoln bedroom isn’t the place for it.