Chasten Buttigieg’s ‘I Have Something to Tell You’ book review

While the LGBTQ community remained divided about its support for the former mayor of South Bend, Ind. (too conservative, not gay enough), Chasten’s a different story. His tweets revealed the 31-year-old teacher to be both funny and irreverent. His book reveals an emotional honesty about his life story, which includes sexual assault, homelessness, estrangement from his family of origin and bullying. His candor is refreshing, and it extends the success he had in humanizing his husband on the campaign trail.

The stakes remain high for the Buttigiegs, who clearly have their eyes on future campaigns, and for Chasten, whose book is meant to set the stage for next time. Again and again he reminds readers of his mantra: “You are an ambassador of your husband’s campaign. Everything you do reflects on him.” Unfortunately that mantra also works in reverse, and the blind spot the memoir has for Mayor Pete’s lack of support among Black and Latino voters makes the book, which in some ways is so powerful, so ultimately frustrating.

Chasten certainly had plenty of opportunity to take on the topic, as he tackles the other compelling issues of our time. With the deftness required of a politician’s spouse, he weaves personal storytelling with policy analysis, using his mother’s cancer diagnosis, for example, to join the debate about national health insurance. His own experiences being bullied and sexually assaulted feed into a powerful narrative about the challenges faced by LGBTQ people. One by one, the author addresses the major issues of the campaign — but he never gets to the one that took his spouse out of the running.

Before the Feb. 29 South Carolina primary, the first 2020 nominating contest with a majority-Black electorate, Tyler D. Parry, an assistant professor of African American and African diaspora studies at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, penned a column for The Washington Post titled “Pete Buttigieg’s race problem: He doesn’t truly understand the problems plaguing Black America and their racist roots.” Parry left nothing to nuance, writing: “. . . it is Pete Buttigieg . . . who arguably demonstrates the most consistent racial ignorance among his cohort. Not only does he hold a dismal record in representing Black residents of his municipality, but his past musings on race and the state of Black America . . . expose shallow analysis of systemic racism throughout his political career.”

Buttigieg finished fourth in South Carolina, with 8.2 percent of the vote and only 3 percent of the Black vote.

Unable to connect meaningfully with the Black community, Mayor Pete might have leaned on his husband to do some of the heavy lifting on this issue in the memoir. Chasten misses the opportunity to build a bridge to Black voters, although he mightily tries to dispute accusations from the LGBTQ left that his husband was not “gay enough” (and not liberal enough).

Pete Buttigieg made history in Iowa in becoming the first openly gay candidate to win a presidential nominating contest. But then came the great queer thud, as a vocal minority in the LGBTQ community, especially those on the margins, decided to take him on. Poet Alex Dimitrov summed up the criticism on Twitter: “It’s truly embarrassing to have the first gay presidential candidate of this magnitude be this conservative — next.”

Chasten takes on this affront in a chapter titled “Out on the Trail.” He deflects the criticism rather than speaking to its substance (blaming himself “because I wore chinos and a button-down on the cover of Time”). In the end he dodges the debate by wrongfully saying that “the differences between Peter’s approach and that of those to the left of him are mostly differences of style, not content.” (If you’ve been following Chasten on social media, you know that he prefers to call his husband “Peter,” not Pete.)

But at least he tries, which he doesn’t do when it comes to race. As out of touch as Pete may have appeared about the issue during the campaign, Chasten’s omission now, after the killing of George Floyd in police custody and months of racial protests in the streets, comes off as particularly tone-deaf, if not worse.

Still, there’s a book within this book, and it’s worth paying attention to. Yes, Mayor Pete is gay. Yes, he’s married to a man. And with his husband by his side he started his campaign with a kiss and ended it the same way — a pair of milestone bookends if ever there was one. At the outset I was sure Buttigieg had no chance at the nomination, and I wrote in a USA Today opinion column, “no way, no gay,” when it came to the candidate’s prospects. By the time the campaign had faltered, I had changed my mind, writing, “For the first time . . . I believed a gay man could be elected president.”

That’s why Chasten Buttigieg’s story is powerful and inspiring, to those of us who once believed it unthinkable that an out gay man would be a serious candidate for the highest office in the land. And Pete Buttigieg’s candidacy was a beacon to many young LGBTQ folks who are seeking acceptance and love, who feel different or confused about their sexual and gender identities, and who are called slurs, beaten, even killed because of who they are.

And it brings hope to those who may be looking for Mr. Right on a gay dating app, which is where Peter and Chasten’s sweet love story began.

Steven Petrow, a contributing columnist, is the author of “Steven Petrow’s Complete Gay & Lesbian Manners.”