On July 12, the New Republic ran a rambling, caustic column by Dale Peck about how Pete Buttigieg is the wrong kind of gay. While the piece contained policy critiques, it wrapped them in nasty comments about his gayness and his embodiment of a middle-class banality that the author finds personally distasteful.

Following an intensely negative reception to Peck’s piece, the New Republic pulled it, and issued a statement of regret. But the sentiments it expressed are not unique. Buttigieg is too white, too square, too centrist, too banal. His gayness isn’t the right kind of gayness for queer people to embrace.

Peck called Buttigieg “Mary Pete” and accused him of being the gay equivalent of an “Uncle Tom.” To Peck, Mayor Pete represents conformist, picket-fenced neighborhoods with hybrid vehicles parked outside. Folks like me, in other words.

In 2019, the composition of my family raises few eyebrows. Same-sex parenting is commonplace enough that I can show up at my kids’ school for classroom events without too much paranoia that people are muttering about it. (It is important to clearly note how privileged this statement is, and how vastly different the experience of same-sex couples in other parts of the nation and the world is from mine. The existence of families like mine is absolutely not justification for complacency about gay rights writ large.)

There’s nothing particularly shocking about me. In fact, the details of my life could be used to draw the opposite conclusion. By anything like Peck’s standard, I may be the Wrong Kind of Gay.

It is tempting to pivot toward tokens of my own queerness to balance out my present domesticity. To burnish my gay bona fides by assuring readers that, kids and minivan (we have one of those along with our Prius) and texted shopping lists notwithstanding, I’m still acceptably transgressive on some level.

I’m not going to do that. My gayness, in all its family-man basicness, is no less valid than anyone else’s. And if anyone looks at the business-sensible khakis and button-downs I wear when I’m at the office — or the t-shirts with bad dad jokes I sometimes wear when I’m not — and decides I no longer have a place under the rainbow flag, I politely invite them to go sit on a garden weasel.

I grew up pretty unmistakably gay, smack dab in the middle of Missouri, in Reagan’s America. I asked for, and took, a flower arranging course the summer after first grade. I realized I was gay as a teenager in a deeply conservative, fundamentalist church. It was hard as hell. I have written enough about that topic already, but I did not kiss that church’s judgment goodbye so I could placidly accept anyone else’s.

Buttigieg came out relatively recently, and late in life. He met someone on an app, and married him. Among the most inane critiques of Pete’s queerness is of this seamless romantic history, as though there is a threshold of romantic tragedy one must meet for membership. (Pete, if you’re reading, should it prove somehow helpful to have a few terrible ex-boyfriends, you’re welcome to any of mine.)

His politics are certainly more centrist than many might like, and are perhaps worthy of criticism on their own. He is indeed a white-picket-fence kind of guy.

None of that means his gayness doesn’t count, or that the viability of his candidacy is not an indication of remarkable progress for our community. He belongs. We all belong. And it doesn’t matter what any of the nasty, preening jerks among us have to say about it.

We come together in the LGBTQ community out of many other communities, some that accept us and some that do not. Those experiences form who we are, and aspects of our different backgrounds come with us when we find our way to each other. (If anyone wants an Amy Grant sing-along, I’m your boy!)

Nobody among us has standing to use any aspect of anyone else to adjudicate their queerness. There’s plenty of space for all of us. You put on your go-go boots, and I’ll bring a nice salad.