Trigger warnings for suicide.

Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, and 2020 presidential candidate

It was 2016, and I was 17 years old. Trump hadn’t been elected yet, and life was good for a lot of people. Not me, though.

See, I wanted to go into politics, but there was one major problem. I was gay. Very, very gay.

If you took Andy Cohen and Liberace’s DNA, spliced together, and gave the baby tickets to a drag queen Judy Garland impersonator concert, it wouldn’t come even marginally close to where my homosexuality was at. In my final week of high school, I literally did a fifteen minute presentation on why Rihanna was a great role model because of how amazing her makeup line, Fenty Beauty, was (and is).

Rihanna, if you read this, please release more music and/or send me an endorsement deal with Fenty Beauty. My Twitter DMs are open: @whitneyismale

I truly could not see myself in a field other than politics. Despite being good at it, I hated STEM, though that was mostly a rebellion against my Okinawan father. I didn’t want to be some corporate lawyer, since I hated being hated. I knew I wanted to be in leadership, because everyone had constantly told me I was charismatic and good with people. I also knew I wanted to help make things better, because if I thought that if my life felt awful sucked, most people’s lives must feel just as bad, if not worse. After all, even though I was gay and mixed race, I still very much passed as white, I wasn’t a woman, my family was fairly well off at the time, I wasn’t transgender, and I wasn’t the starving kid in Africa that every Caucasian parent feels the need to tell you has it so much worse. And I lived in Portland, one of the most liberal cities in the country.

That being said, there was only one high profile LGBT politician at the time that I was aware of. Her name was Kate Brown, and she was my governor. She was not, at the time, elected to her office. She had ascended after Gov. John Kitzhaber had to resign following allegations of corruption (take a note, Trump). She wasn’t popular either. No one I knew liked her. My dad poked at her bisexuality, asking if she needed to have two partners, one of each gender. What path could I possibly emulate?

The amazing Oregonian Governor, Kate Brown

For a time I had shakily convinced myself that I would be the trailblazer for the queer community, the gay Barack Obama. But that confidence was weak. Every time there was a rumor about me, or I felt alone, or it rained too much, I truly lost it. I wanted to die. So when false rumors started circulating about me about how I was predator, after I admitted to having a crush on a straight guy, things went off the rails.

After a long meeting with my principal and school counselor, I took the bus home. I was the second to last stop. I felt sad, and tired, and bored, but anxious, and angry, and annoyed, and dead. I sat down in front of the TV and put on CNN.

Then, I got an idea.

I felt happy. Joyous, even. I knew exactly what I was going to do. I knew how to fix it all. This was going to become the best day ever.

I waited for my mother to leave, and then I went into her bathroom. I drew up a bath. I went back to my room, and grabbed my alarm clock. I plugged it in, threw it in the water, and got in. Luckily, it shorted out.

When it didn’t work, I was stunned. I had no idea what had happened. The internet lied to me.

I got out the bath, hid the clock away in my closet, ironically, and went back to the TV. I got out my laptop and started down a “Google Hole”. If you don’t know what a Google Hole is, it’s when you see a piece of information that leads you to Google something, which in turn leads you to Google something else, and so on and so forth.

That’s when I found a New York Times article called “The First Gay President” by Frank Bumi, which I’ve linked below. It was about the charismatic Mayor of South Bend, Indiana. His name was Pete Buttigieg, which at the time I pronounced as Boot-Tig-I-Egg. He was a gay man, who people saw as a rising star in the Democratic party. He could have been President someday!

The correct pronunciation

For the first time in my life I saw a chance for my future self to be successful. I could follow in someone else’s footsteps, and not have to be the first. I could let someone else blaze a trail for me. It was no longer my responsibility.

That was the moment my recovery began.

A link to the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/opinion/sunday/the-first-gay-president.html