Mar 9, 2020 04:35 AM
(This post was last modified: Mar 9, 2020 06:52 PM by C C.)
https://theweek.com/articles/900150/hope...ching-pete
EXCERPT: Given the avalanche of news this week, Pete Buttigieg's exit from the 2020 campaign [...March 1...] may seem like a distant memory by now. [...] From the start, Buttigieg faced legitimate opposition to his candidacy. ... On the campaign trail, his political ping-ponging from moderate to less-moderate positions ... drew outrage from the left. ... Sadly, those reasonable concerns routinely came wrapped in smearing and vicious insults — or were overshadowed by them altogether...
More troublingly, gay writers disparaged Buttigieg as insufficiently gay or not the right kind of gay, whatever that might mean. Last year, The New Republic had to retract Dale Peck's ugly and offensive takedown of Buttigieg that grossly speculated on his sex life before deciding he was "too uptight" to have one. Despite Peck's censure, the snarky mocking of Buttigieg's sexuality and gay expression became commonplace on the left. For many, lobbing personal attacks at Buttigieg — on his looks, his mannerisms, and his best-little-boy-in-the-world-ness, as Jim Downs rightly pinpointed at Slate last November — seemed a daily sport.
Throughout the campaign, watching friends on Facebook or strangers on Twitter blithely toss off cruel comments about Buttigieg felt downright heartbreaking and, frankly — to use a favorite word of the left — triggering. Witnessing all this, I almost came to wish that Trump and the Republicans would set their targets more firmly on Buttigieg, assuming that, if they did [...] people would shape up. I hoped that in the unlikely event Buttigieg became the nominee, Democrats across the board would line up to defend him against the awful things Trump and the GOP would unleash and stop their own harmful comments.
But that was not to be. Instead, on Sunday night as I read the cascade of tweets ordering Buttigieg to now "go away" after he withdrew from the race, a deep, buried pain stirred inside me. There's no reason to see that response to Buttigieg as homophobic, per se. But for those of us who have lived so much of our lives in the shadows and have been unevenly burdened with the difficult work of coming out, it's hard not to hear such words as part of the larger erasure the world insistently makes of us. That many of those who said such things throughout the campaign were Democrats or self-described liberals has only added to the hurt and disappointment. That so many of them were also fellow LGBTQ persons has been particularly troubling... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT: Given the avalanche of news this week, Pete Buttigieg's exit from the 2020 campaign [...March 1...] may seem like a distant memory by now. [...] From the start, Buttigieg faced legitimate opposition to his candidacy. ... On the campaign trail, his political ping-ponging from moderate to less-moderate positions ... drew outrage from the left. ... Sadly, those reasonable concerns routinely came wrapped in smearing and vicious insults — or were overshadowed by them altogether...
More troublingly, gay writers disparaged Buttigieg as insufficiently gay or not the right kind of gay, whatever that might mean. Last year, The New Republic had to retract Dale Peck's ugly and offensive takedown of Buttigieg that grossly speculated on his sex life before deciding he was "too uptight" to have one. Despite Peck's censure, the snarky mocking of Buttigieg's sexuality and gay expression became commonplace on the left. For many, lobbing personal attacks at Buttigieg — on his looks, his mannerisms, and his best-little-boy-in-the-world-ness, as Jim Downs rightly pinpointed at Slate last November — seemed a daily sport.
Throughout the campaign, watching friends on Facebook or strangers on Twitter blithely toss off cruel comments about Buttigieg felt downright heartbreaking and, frankly — to use a favorite word of the left — triggering. Witnessing all this, I almost came to wish that Trump and the Republicans would set their targets more firmly on Buttigieg, assuming that, if they did [...] people would shape up. I hoped that in the unlikely event Buttigieg became the nominee, Democrats across the board would line up to defend him against the awful things Trump and the GOP would unleash and stop their own harmful comments.
But that was not to be. Instead, on Sunday night as I read the cascade of tweets ordering Buttigieg to now "go away" after he withdrew from the race, a deep, buried pain stirred inside me. There's no reason to see that response to Buttigieg as homophobic, per se. But for those of us who have lived so much of our lives in the shadows and have been unevenly burdened with the difficult work of coming out, it's hard not to hear such words as part of the larger erasure the world insistently makes of us. That many of those who said such things throughout the campaign were Democrats or self-described liberals has only added to the hurt and disappointment. That so many of them were also fellow LGBTQ persons has been particularly troubling... (MORE - details)
