A Democratic Climate Change Summit Is Falling Apart Because a Gay Guy Criticized a Gay Guy

The mary at the heart of this weekend's drama. JUSTIN SULLIVAN/Getty Images

Sponsors have dropped out of a planned presidential candidate forum on climate change because a homosexual wrote something offensive about a homosexual politician on the Internet.

Let's back up. Over the weekend, the New Republic (TNR) published an article by a Gen X critic known for writing hatchet jobs, Dale Peck, entitled "My Mayor Pete Problem." It was, to put it mildly, rude as fuck. Peck, a gay man, started out with a 1,000-plus word anecdote about rejecting some guy in a gay bar in the '90s. It moved from there into a scathing criticism of both presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg's politics and his life choices. The gist is that Peck thinks of himself as a radical (he, unlike Pete, never cared about gay marriage) and he thinks of Buttigieg as an assimilationist and neoliberal (whatever that means). Throughout the piece, Peck refers to Mayor Pete as "Mary Pete," a play on "Uncle Tom," and that is not even the most problematic part. In perhaps the most offensive section, Peck wrote (emphasis mine):

The only thing that distinguishes the mayor of South Bend from all those other well-educated reasonably intelligent white dudes who wanna be president is what he does with his dick (and possibly his ass, although I get a definite top-by-default vibe from him, which is to say that I bet he thinks about getting fucked but he’s too uptight to do it). So let’s dish the dish, homos. You know and I know that Mary Pete is a gay teenager... He’s been out for, what, all of four years, and if I understand the narrative, he married the first guy he dated. And we all know what happens when gay people don’t get a real adolescence because they spent theirs in the closet: they go through it after they come out. And because they’re adults with their own incomes and no parents to rein them in they do it on steroids (often literally). If Shortest Way Home (I mean really, can you think of a more treacly title?) makes one thing clear, Mary Pete was never a teenager. But you can’t run away from that forever. Either it comes out or it eats you up inside. It can be fun, it can be messy, it can be tragic, it can be progenitive, transformative, ecstatic, or banal, but the last thing I want in the White House is a gay man staring down 40 who suddenly realizes he didn’t get to have all the fun his straight peers did when they were teenagers. I’m not saying I don’t want him to shave his chest or do Molly or try being the lucky Pierre (the timing’s trickier than it looks, but it can be fun when you work it out). These are rites of passage for a lot of gay men, and it fuels many aspects of gay culture. But like I said, I don’t want it in the White House. I want a man whose mind is on his job, not what could have been—or what he thinks he can still get away with.

Screenshots of this passage posted to Twitter sparked a very loud and very angry response, much of which accused Peck of being homophobic. Were this written by a member of the Westboro Baptist Church (or Mike Pence) I would likely agree, but many critics seemed to ignore the fact that Peck is, himself, a gay man. Yes, Peck used old tropes about oversexed gay men to critique a presidential candidate, but the piece read more like in-group shade than genuine bigotry. The assimilationists versus the radicals is a longstanding debate among gay people, and criticizing a gay person isn't necessarily "homophobic." Unless we find out that Peck has a history of hating gay people because they are gay (which isn't impossible—we can be very annoying), charges of homophobia seem to be quite the stretch.

While my perspective on this seems to be the minority—I disagreed with much of the piece but do not think it was homophobic—I am not totally alone. Jezebel's Rich Juzwiak, also a known homosexual, wrote about the outcry in the first Jezebel piece I've enjoyed since that woman left a tampon in her vagina for a week and half.

Juzwiak wrote: "You can call this treatment of one gay man at the hands of another (less visible, less powerful, less possessing of millions of dollars from fundraising) gay man nasty; you can call it endemic of the problem with gay culture; you can say you actually have many problems with gay culture and would rather avoid it (at least that would be honest!); you can say it’s bad writing; you can call it out for its blinded whiteness... But I do not think you can, with any intellectual heft, call this illustration of a fundamental way in which some gay men have historically related and continue to relate 'homophobic.'"

Homophobic or not, the piece was quickly yanked by TNR and has been replaced by a brief apology. (For more on why the increasing memory-holing of controversial work is a worrying trend, read this.)

So, what the hell does this have to do with climate change? WELL, shortly after this whole kerfuffle, sponsors started to withdraw their support of a planned Democratic candidate summit on climate change, which was to be jointly hosted by the New Republic and Gizmodo. That's right: These sponsors—which included the League of Conservation Voters, the National Resource Defense Council Action Fund, Earthjustice Action, and the Center for American Progress Action Fund—were apparently so appalled by the alleged homophobia in Peck's piece (or, wild guess, so concerned about angering people on Twitter) that they are no longer willing to fund a climate change forum, even after TNR announced that the publication would be withdrawing from the event entirely. You'd think environmental advocacy groups would be more concerned about the future of the planet than Dale Peck's verbal diarrhea, but apparently not.

The event may still go on. Gizmodo, which supported TNR's decision to drop out of the event, is currently trying to line up new sponsors without TNR's help. So maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't, but if I've learned anything from this whole drama, it's that one person really can make a difference in the world, particularly if that person is a bitter old queen with an axe to grind against Mary Pete. Excuse me. Mayor Pete.