Pete Buttigieg, just 37 years old, with little political experience, strikes a gentle tone in the tough American pre-election campaign. Does he have the slightest chance?

The word of his life means perfection. But the hard thing about this tricky perfection is that it flutters through the world so fleetingly. Can you ever get it? And if you can reach it at some point, in one of those rare, completely successful moments, how can it be captured? Is there such a thing: the perfect resume?

And if there is: How can a gay politician in the United States live the perfect life and thus become America's first gay president?

The candidate Pete Buttigieg, one of the four favorites in the field of democratic applicants, aspired to politics early on and wanted to be at the top as a student. He discussed with his buddies whether his motives were the right ones: did he want to serve the community or was he just looking for fame? If he answers honestly, it was both, he says in his bus, which drives through New Hampshire, and that is usually the perfect drive.

He had friends at school, secretly read gay personals, and didn't dare say he was gay. He had to understand it himself first, he says today. He studied literature and history at Harvard, where people think liberally but live conventionally, and did not dare to go there either. He helped John Kerry's Arizona presidential campaign in Arizona and was certain at the time: "In politics, homosexuality is a death sentence for careers."

But when he moved to Afghanistan with the Navy in 2014 and wrote the last letter at home, just in case, that most soldiers write before going to war, Buttigieg told himself that if he really died, he would have none loved once.

What kind of life did he lead? There was nothing perfect about it.

Pete Buttigieg is 37 years old today and married to husband Chasten. Chasten once enthusiastically raved about his Pete on Instagram: "This guy!" Since then, the couple has been discreetly humorous; on Twitter Chasten revealed how the common surname can be pronounced without injury: "Boot-edge-edge or Buddha-judge or Boot-a-judge or Boo-tuh-judge".

Pete was the mayor of South Bend in the state of Indiana from 2012 to the end of 2o19, this is his birthplace, which has 101,000 inhabitants and a very American charm, if you want to praise the straight streets, McDonald's next to Burger King next to Taco Bell, huge parking lots , and then you're out again. In 1851 the steam locomotive came to South Bend on its way west. The Studebaker car factory closed at Christmas 1963, which cost 7,000 jobs.

The city is now known for its university, Notre Dame, one of those U.S. colleges where football is no less important than academic quality. Buttigieg's father Joseph, a migrant from Malta and died in January 2019 at the age of only 71, was an English professor here, the mother Jennifer Anne Montgomery was a linguistics professor.

Buttigieg's employees had had no idea about the boss's sex life for years; they thought he was a "bachelor", as bachelors are called in the USA, and called his green Ford Taurus "chick magnet", and how do you translate that? Chicken catchers?

The climate in the United States changed. At the end of the 1990s, homosexual murders were still going on, and now a majority is supporting marriage for everyone. In 2015, after returning from Afghanistan, Buttigieg wrote in the South Bend Tribune: "I had grown up long before I was ready to accept the simple fact that I was gay. It took years of struggling and maturing for me until I understood that having brown hair was just part of life, part of what I am. " He was reelected with a rush.