Running while gay is an uphill battle — a fight Mayor Pete is taking head-on

Pete Buttigieg — 2019

A lot has been said this week about Pete Buttigieg’s unprecedented rise in the Iowa polls. Some see him as an example of the discounted obstacles that female candidates face. Namely that men are judged for their potential, whereas women are judged for accomplishments. There is another side to this story that I ask my straight sisters to consider.

I figured out I was bisexual before I learned to read. It was 1990, I was 3 years old, and was infatuated with the cartoon Jessica Rabbit. I also found pre-school me wanting to be Danny Zuko so it would be me who ended up with Sandy at the end of the movie.

Being queer in rural Minnesota was not an option. My barely on the map hometown was home to a dozen conservative churches. Queer was an insult, an abomination against God. It was something you should never be, and if you were, you should never act on it. My grandmother stopped watching ABC because Ellen DeGeneres came out on national television. Gay people were promiscuous. Marriage was between a man and a woman. Children should have a father and a mother. God did not design gay people because gay people cannot procreate. False beliefs drilled into our heads to ensure we were never encouraged to become gay. As if we had any say on whether we were or not. The result of this brainwashing was shame and fear.

Harvey Milk — San Francisco Supervisor — Elected in 1977

In my third year of college, I watched a documentary about a woman who spent years fighting for custody of her paralyzed wife of 20+ years. Many states at the time, under the Defense Against Marriage Act, did not recognize gay marriage. Inspired, I wrote a short play, entitled STATE LINE, about a Massachusetts woman who got into a car accident in Texas that left her comatose, and her wife’s fight to be with her before her death.

STATE LINE was my first act of protest against a homophobic America where children grow up to be afraid of themselves. From there, I dug into my community’s history: Stonewall and police brutality, the AIDS epidemic, Matthew Shepard, Nazi Germany, Don’t Ask - Don’t Tell, rape in prisons, and the global persecution of the LGBTQ community.