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One of the worst things I ever did happened in 1992. I was leaving the bar called The Bar (RIP) on Second Avenue and 4th Street to go to a party called Tattooed Love Child at another bar, Fez, located in the basement of Time Cafe (RIP x 2). TLC was held on Wednesdays (Thursdays?), and I often went to The Bar after work for a few hours so I wouldn\u2019t have to go all the way home first. So it was probably 10-ish, and I know it was late winter\/early spring because I was carrying a copy of the completed manuscript of my first novel\u00a0Martin and John<\/i>, which I\u2019d just turned in to my publisher that very day. Which makes me 24 and old enough to know better. Or who knows, maybe this was exactly the age to learn this kind of lesson.<\/p>\n
What happened was: I was halfway down 4th Street when I heard someone yelling. I turned to see a large fellow running after me. At first I wondered if I was getting gay-bashed. But even though this guy didn\u2019t set off my gaydar he still didn\u2019t seem particularly menacing. When he got closer I clocked the pleated khakis (this was the era of the ACT UP clone\u2014Doc Martens, Levi\u2019s tight or baggy, and activist T-shirts\u2014which look I had embraced fully) and rust-colored Brillo hair. I love me a good ginger, but you gotta know how to style it, especially if it runs frizzy. And so anyway, this guy, whose name was Garfield but said I could call him Gar, told me he\u2019d been in The Bar but had been too shy to talk to me and decided to try his luck on the street. As politely as I could, I told him I wasn\u2019t interested. He asked me how I could know I wasn\u2019t interested when I didn\u2019t know him, which was an invitation for me to tell him that not only did he look like a potato, he dressed, talked, and ran like a potato. Alas, I chose not to indulge his masochistic invitation.<\/p>\n
He asked where I was going and I told him. He asked if he could go with me and I told him he could go to Fez if he wanted but he shouldn\u2019t think he was going with me. He came. I quickly learned that he\u2019d mastered the art of speaking in questions, which put me in the awkward position of answering him or ignoring him, which made me feel rude even though I\u2019d told him I wasn\u2019t interested. When he found out I was a writer he got excited and said I must love the\u00a0New Yorker<\/i>! I told him I hated the\u00a0New Yorker<\/i>. He asked how I could hate the\u00a0New Yorker<\/i>\u00a0and I told him that besides the fact that the\u00a0New Yorker<\/i>\u00a0published shitty fiction (plus\u00a0\u00e7a change, plus c\u2019est\u00a0la m\u00eame chose<\/i>), and the only gay fiction it published was assimilationist and boring, there was also the fact that an editor there (Dan Menaker, if we\u2019re naming names) had rejected a story of mine by suggesting in his correspondence with my agent (by which I mean that he wasn\u2019t embarrassed to write this down, let alone worried about repercussions) that psychological problems were preventing me from creating effective fiction. (By the way, fuck you, Dan.) None of which made any sense to Gar. The\u00a0New Yorker<\/i>\u00a0was important so I must love it. I just didn\u2019t know I loved it yet. Or something like that. At some point in this exchange I remember saying something along the lines of Look, I\u2019m just going to apologize now, because it\u2019s pretty clear that sooner or later I\u2019m going to say something really offensive to you and your feelings are going to be hurt. I don\u2019t want to do that, but you\u2019re clearly not getting the fact that you and I don\u2019t look at the world the same way, and you keep thinking that if you hang around long enough we\u2019re going to find common ground, when all you\u2019re really doing is making our differences that much clearer. He laughed at this, one of those confused\/nervous\/defensive laughs, and if I\u2019d been more mature I would have been more blunt and told him to get lost. But I too was a little deluded. I thought he had to get the hint eventually. But although I understood pretty much everything else about him, I failed to reckon fully with his lack of self-respect.<\/p>\n
I told him I hated the\u00a0New Yorker.<\/i><\/p>\n
So: we got to Fez, where I ran into my friend Patrick (Cox, I think, but it\u2019s been a minute), who looked at me like, What are you doing with this weirdo? I wouldn\u2019t let Gar buy me a drink and I did my best to exclude him from my conversation with Patrick but he still wouldn\u2019t take a hint. He must have hung around for a good hour. My answers to his questions grew more and more peremptory. Bear in mind I wasn\u2019t disagreeing with him or dismissing his opinions just to get rid of him: we really had\u00a0absolutely nothing in common<\/i>. But we both read the\u00a0New Yorker<\/i>\u00a0and we were both gay and we both wore clothes to cover our nakedness so clearly we were birds of a feather. Finally he said he had to leave. He asked for my number. I remember Patrick laughing in his face, but maybe that\u2019s just because I wanted to laugh in his face. I was like, Are you serious? And he was like, We have so much in common, we should get to know each other better! When I was fifteen years old a pedophile used that line on me in the Chicago bus station, and if I\u2019m being honest I had more in common with the pedo, who was about 50, black, and urban, while I was a white teenager from rural Kansas, than I did with dear old Gar. I told him I wasn\u2019t going to give him my phone number or accept his. He seemed genuinely shocked and hurt, which of course made me feel like shit, which of course made me mad, because why should I feel like shit when I\u2019d spent all night trying to rebuff him? He asked what he would have to do to get me to go out with him. Without thinking, I said, Take a good look at yourself and your world, reject everything in it, and then get back to me. It was the kind of soul-killing line people are always delivering in movies but never comes off in real life, mostly because even the most oblivious, self-hating person usually has enough wherewithal to cut someone off before they\u2019re fully read for filth. I believe I have indicated that Gar did not possess this level of self-awareness. His face went shapeless and blank as though the bones of his skull had melted. For one second I thought I saw a hint of anger, which might\u2019ve been the first thing he\u2019d done all night that I could identify with. Then he scurried away.<\/p>\n
Now, I\u2019ve said shitty things to people before and since, but this one\u2019s always stuck with me, partly because, though I\u2019m a peevish fellow, it\u2019s rare that I speak with genuine cruelty, and when I do it\u2019s because I\u2019ve chosen to. This just came out of me. But mostly I remember it because I knew I\u2019d seriously wounded this guy, which, however annoying and clueless he was, was never my intention. I was and still am a very \u201990s kind of gay, which is to say that I believe in the brotherhood of homos and the strength of our community, that however different we are we\u2019re all bound together by the nature of our desire and the experience of living in a homophobic world. When one of your brothers fucks up, you school him. Sure, you might get a little Larry Kramer about it, but you don\u2019t go all Arya-and-the-Night-King on his ass.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m telling you this because it\u2019s what popped into my head when I tried to pin down my distaste for Pete Buttigieg. Mary Pete and I are just not the same kind of gay. (For those of you wondering about \u201cMary Pete\u201d: a couple of months ago I asked Facebook what the gay equivalent of Uncle Tom was, and this was the answer at which we collectively arrived.) But Mary Pete and I aren\u2019t different in the same way that Gar and I were different. Gar and I had nothing in common. Mary Pete and I have a lot in common, but at a certain point we came to a fork in the road and I took the one less traveled and he took the one that was freshly paved and bordered by flowers and white picket fences and every house had a hybrid in the driveway and some solar panels on the ceiling, but discrete ones, nothing garish, nothing that would interfere with the traditional look of the neighborhood or the resale value of your home.<\/p>\n
By which I mean: Mary Pete is a neoliberal and a Jeffersonian meritocrat, which is to say he\u2019s just another unrepentant or at least unexamined beneficiary of white male privilege who believes (just as Jay Inslee believes he\u2019s done more for women\u2019s reproductive rights than Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar) that he can make life better for all those people who are not like him, not because he knows anything about their lives but because he\u2019s smart and nice and well-meaning, and when smart nice well-meaning people run things everything works out for the best. That\u2019s just, you know,\u00a0logical<\/i>. It\u2019s like,\u00a0science<\/i>. Like Kirsten Gillibrand, he believes in \u201chealthy capitalism,\u201d which is a bit like saying you believe in \u201chealthy cancer\u201d: Yeah, you can (usually) treat it, but wouldn\u2019t you rather be cured?<\/p>\n
Pete and I are just not the same kind of gay.<\/p>\n
Most of what I dislike about Mary Pete was expressed in this\u00a0Current Affairs<\/i>article<\/a>, which does a good job of using his own words (mostly from, ugh,\u00a0Shortest Way Home<\/i>, his memoir pretending to manifesto) to damn him.\u00a0Shortest Way Home<\/i>\u00a0conjures a young Harvard student who thinks the word \u201cedgy\u201d is sufficient to describe both proto-Dumpster fascist Lyndon LaRouche and Noam Chomsky. His description of Harvard Square takes in those actors who belong to the school; the homeless people who live there are invisible to him, or, even worse, not worth mentioning. He seems perfectly content to dismiss left-wing student activists as \u201csocial justice warriors\u201d despite the fact that this phrase is paradigmatic in right-wing discourse. He speaks fondly of his time at McKinsey, a company regularly described as one of the most evil corporations in the world. He joined the military long after 9\/11 could sort-of-but-not-really be invoked to justify the U.S. propensity to go to other countries and kill lots of people. By 2007 it was no longer possible to pretend that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were anything other than failed, murderous exercises in empire-building and\/or revenge, but despite the fact that these were the only places he was likely to serve he signed up anyway. And though he loves to talk about the notes he left his family in case he didn\u2019t come back, by all accounts his chances of seeing combat were as low as they could be\u2014but boy, he sure got a lot of cute pictures in uniform out of it!<\/p>\n Every move is simultaneously cynical and morally oblivious. They\u2019re the steps one takes not to learn about the world but to become a marketable political candidate (hmmm, what\u2019s a good counter to the whole sleeps-with-men thing? I know: military service!) (side benefit: you\u2019re surrounded by hot guys!) and if as a Harvard-educated Rhodes Scholar you decide not to be a captain of industry, then clearly the White House is where you belong. I mean, sure, he wants to make the world a better place. But the operative word in that sentence, just as it was with Bill Clinton, is \u201che,\u201d not \u201cworld,\u201d and \u201cbetter,\u201d for Mary Pete, is just the neoliberal variation of \u201cmake America great again,\u201d which is to say that in Buttigieg\u2019s version of American history the progressive ideals in the First, Thirteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments, in the Civil Rights Act and\u00a0Roe\u00a0<\/i>v.\u00a0Wade<\/i>\u00a0and marriage equality, are the only authentically American ideas, whereas slavery and Jim Crow and border security and defense of marriage campaigns and heartbeat laws are nothing but aberrations, glitches in the code rather than yin to liberalism\u2019s yang, warp to its weft, a set of ivory chess pieces lined up across from a set of ebony chess pieces and equally powerful.<\/p>\n Like Obama, Buttigieg seems always to be saying that the United States is the only place where someone like him could\u2019ve succeeded, and that he wants everyone to enjoy the same peculiarly American successes that he\u2019s had. But unlike Obama (whose na\u00efvet\u00e9 was at least partly a pose), Buttigieg\u2019s biography belies the idea that his success was either hard won or particularly unlikely. He\u2019s lived the life of a comfortably middle-class white male, but he acts as if it\u2019s his natural gifts (by which he means his intelligence and his ability to speak seven languages and play the piano, although they\u2019re actually his whiteness and maleness and financial security) that have raised him above from the rabble. It\u2019s right there in his \u201cMedicare for all . . . who want it\u201d song and dance. To Mary Pete this is simple egalitarianism and freedom of choice. If you want Medicare, you should be able to have it. And if you want private insurance you should be able to have that. It seems never to occur to him to ask why one would want to pay three or four or ten times more for health care than you have to. Could it possibly be because private insurance will get you\u00a0better<\/i>\u00a0results than Medicare? And could private health care possibly provide better service than Medicare not because of marketplace competition but because as long as there\u2019s a profit motive in health care medical corporations will always seek to maximize profits, and thus favor those \u201ccustomers\u201d who can pay the most? Embedded in this oblivion are both the liberal delusion that people are naturally good and the neoliberal sophistry that the market, like the tide, will raise everyone up with it.<\/p>\n Pete is just the neoliberal variation of \u201cmake America great again.\u201d<\/p>\n Or take his response at the Democratic debate to the murder of Eric Logan by the South Bend police: \u201cI\u2019m not allowed to take sides until the investigation comes back.\u201d Here is a mayor\u2014a\u00a0man<\/i>\u2014whose first allegiance isn\u2019t to the victim or the victim\u2019s family or the other people at risk because of a racist police force, but, at the very best, to the system, and maybe to nothing more than his own political future as a centrist Democrat. \u201cI accept responsibility,\u201d he told us, in the same way that the white teenaged boy who gets caught stealing a car or drunk-raping a girl says \u201cI accept responsibility\u201d and fully expects to let off without punishment, because boys will be boys, after all, and isn\u2019t feeling bad punishment enough? Free education? Why, that\u2019s unfair to the working class! They\u2019ll end up paying for the education of all those millions and millions of billionaires\u2019 children! What are we, czarist Russia?<\/p>\n You keep looking for a politics rooted in justice or history or, at the very least, empathy, but everywhere you find nothing besides a kind of idealistic pragmatism, if that\u2019s a thing: a belief that if we only talk about nice things, only nice things will happen. If we only acknowledge our strengths, our faults will fade away. If we trust smart people to do smart things, nothing dumb will happen. Hey, Jos\u00e9 loved it when Pete answered him in Spanish, right? Education has brought us closer together!<\/p>\n All this makes Mary Pete different from every other left-leaning neoliberal in exactly zero ways. Because let\u2019s face it. The only thing that distinguishes the mayor of South Bend from all those other well-educated reasonably intelligent white dudes who wanna be president is what he does with his dick (and possibly his ass, although I get a definite top-by-default vibe from him, which is to say that I bet he thinks about getting fucked but he\u2019s too uptight to do it). So let\u2019s dish the dish, homos. You know and I know that Mary Pete is a gay teenager. He\u2019s a fifteen-year-old boy in a Chicago bus station wondering if it\u2019s a good idea to go home with a fifty-year-old man so that he\u2019ll finally understand what he is. He\u2019s been out for, what, all of four years, and if I understand the narrative, he married the first guy he dated. And we all know what happens when gay people don\u2019t get a real adolescence because they spent theirs in the closet: they go through it after they come out. And because they\u2019re adults with their own incomes and no parents to rein them in they do it on steroids (often literally). If\u00a0Shortest Way Home<\/i>\u00a0(I mean really, can you think of a more treacly title?) makes one thing clear, Mary Pete was never a teenager. But you can\u2019t run away from that forever. Either it comes out or it eats you up inside. It can be fun, it can be messy, it can be tragic, it can be progenitive, transformative, ecstatic, or banal, but the last thing I want in the White House is a gay man staring down 40 who suddenly realizes he didn\u2019t get to have all the fun his straight peers did when they were teenagers. I\u2019m not saying I don\u2019t want him to shave his chest or do Molly or try being the lucky Pierre (the timing\u2019s trickier than it looks, but it can be fun when you work it out). These are rites of passage for a lot of gay men, and it fuels many aspects of gay culture. But like I said, I don\u2019t want it in the White House. I want a man whose mind is on his job, not what could have been\u2014or what he thinks he can still get away with.<\/p>\n So yeah. Unlike my experience with Gar, I actually\u00a0want<\/i>\u00a0to tell Mary Pete to take a good hard look at his world, at his experiences and his view of the public good as somehow synonymous with his own success, and I want him to reject it. I want to do this not because I have any particular desire to hurt his feelings, but because I made a similar journey, or at least started out from a similar place, and I was lucky enough to realize (thank you, feminism; thank you, ACT UP) that the only place that path leads is a gay parody of heteronormative bourgeois domesticity: the \u201chistoric\u201d home, the \u201ctasteful\u201d decor (no more than one nude photograph of a muscular torso per room; statuary only if they\u2019re fair copies of Greek or Roman originals), the two- or four- or six-pack depending on how often you can get to the gym and how much you hate yourself, the theatre (always spelled with an -re) subscription, the opera subscription, the ballet subscription, the book club, the AKC-certified toy dog with at least one charming neurosis and\/or dietary tic, the winter vacation to someplace \u201ctropical,\u201d the summer vacation to someplace \u201ccultural,\u201d the specialty kitchen appliances\u2014you just have to get a sous vide machine, it changed our life! Sorry, boys, that\u2019s not a life, it\u2019s something you buy from a catalog. It\u2019s a stage set you build so you can convince everyone else (or maybe just yourself) that you\u2019re as normal as they are. Call me a hick from the sticks, but I don\u2019t want someone who fills out his life like he fills out an AP exam serving as the country\u2019s moral compass. And no, I wouldn\u2019t kick him out of bed.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And now here’s<\/span> an immediate take from a nonexistent webpage from a now-defunct website. In case you’d like to check out the dead site at the Wayback Machine, the full URL is here: <\/em>https:\/\/uspolitics.10ztalk.com\/2019\/07\/12\/dale-peck-is-the-worst-critic-of-his-generation\/<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n CORRECTION<\/span>: Actually THAT column has been deep-sixed at Wayback Machine as well, although you can still find other<\/span> entries there from this defunct site: https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/*\/https:\/\/uspolitics.10ztalk.com*<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n It ran with the title,<\/em> “Dale Peck Is the Worst Critic of His Generation<\/strong>.”<\/p>\n The\u00a0New Republic\u00a0<\/i>has reached DEEP into its nostalgia file and\u00a0brought us\u00a0<\/a>the astonishing return of Dale Peck. Before we get to the insane stuff, let\u2019s have some fun with the opening sentences:<\/p>\n ONE OF THE WORST THINGS I EVER DID HAPPENED IN 1992. I WAS LEAVING THE BAR CALLED THE BAR (RIP) ON SECOND AVENUE AND 4TH STREET TO GO TO A PARTY CALLED TATTOOED LOVE CHILD AT ANOTHER BAR, FEZ, LOCATED IN THE BASEMENT OF TIME CAFE (RIP X 2). TLC WAS HELD ON WEDNESDAYS (THURSDAYS?), AND I OFTEN WENT TO THE BAR AFTER WORK FOR A FEW HOURS SO I WOULDN\u2019T HAVE TO GO ALL THE WAY HOME FIRST.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n NYC provincialism doesn\u2019t get much more provincial than \u201csurely nothing could be more fascinating than the detailed itinerary of my drinking schedule on a Wednesday night thirty years ago.\u201d Did you know that in [years in which I was in my mid-to-late-20s] New York City was alone among the world\u2019s major urban centers in having establishments with unreliably cleaned restrooms in which one could exchange money for alcoholic beverages? Perhaps someone could finally write a novel or memoir telling this story to the broader public.<\/p>\n The third graf about what is nominally an article about Pete Buttigieg continues to wank on in this vein \u2014 The New Yorker<\/i>\u00a0sucked because it didn\u2019t publish the right kind of fiction, i.e. fiction written by Dale Peck, and anyone who thinks otherwise is plainly an unfuckable neoliberal:<\/p>\n HE ASKED WHERE I WAS GOING AND I TOLD HIM. HE ASKED IF HE COULD GO WITH ME AND I TOLD HIM HE COULD GO TO FEZ IF HE WANTED BUT HE SHOULDN\u2019T THINK HE WAS GOING WITH ME. HE CAME. I QUICKLY LEARNED THAT HE\u2019D MASTERED THE ART OF SPEAKING IN QUESTIONS, WHICH PUT ME IN THE AWKWARD POSITION OF ANSWERING HIM OR IGNORING HIM, WHICH MADE ME FEEL RUDE EVEN THOUGH I\u2019D TOLD HIM I WASN\u2019T INTERESTED. WHEN HE FOUND OUT I WAS A WRITER HE GOT EXCITED AND SAID I MUST LOVE THE\u00a0NEW YORKER! I TOLD HIM I HATED THE\u00a0NEW YORKER. HE ASKED HOW I COULD HATE THE\u00a0NEW YORKER\u00a0AND I TOLD HIM THAT BESIDES THE FACT THAT THE\u00a0NEW YORKER\u00a0PUBLISHED SHITTY FICTION (PLUS\u00a0\u00c7A CHANGE, PLUS C\u2019EST\u00a0LA M\u00caME CHOSE), AND THE ONLY\u00a0<\/i>GAY<\/i><\/a>\u00a0FICTION IT PUBLISHED WAS ASSIMILATIONIST AND BORING, THERE WAS ALSO THE FACT THAT AN EDITOR THERE (DAN MENAKER, IF WE\u2019RE NAMING NAMES) HAD REJECTED A STORY OF MINE BY SUGGESTING IN HIS CORRESPONDENCE WITH MY AGENT (BY WHICH I MEAN THAT HE WASN\u2019T EMBARRASSED TO WRITE THIS DOWN, LET ALONE WORRIED ABOUT REPERCUSSIONS) THAT PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS WERE PREVENTING ME FROM CREATING EFFECTIVE FICTION. (BY THE WAY, FUCK YOU, DAN.) NONE OF WHICH MADE ANY SENSE TO GAR.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n I don\u2019t think this interminable anecdote is portraying poor Gar in the light Peck thinks it is.<\/p>\n Anyway, these highly uninteresting tales of Dale Peck\u2019s\u00a0Manhattan<\/a>\u00a0youth are a prelude to an argument that Mayor Pete shouldn\u2019t be the Dem nominee because he\u2019s not the right kind of\u00a0gay<\/a>:<\/p>\n ALL THIS MAKES MARY PETE DIFFERENT FROM EVERY OTHER LEFT-LEANING NEOLIBERAL IN EXACTLY ZERO WAYS. BECAUSE LET\u2019S FACE IT. THE ONLY THING THAT DISTINGUISHES THE MAYOR OF SOUTH BEND FROM ALL THOSE OTHER WELL-EDUCATED REASONABLY INTELLIGENT WHITE DUDES WHO WANNA BE PRESIDENT IS WHAT HE DOES WITH HIS DICK (AND POSSIBLY HIS ASS, ALTHOUGH I GET A DEFINITE TOP-BY-DEFAULT VIBE FROM HIM, WHICH IS TO SAY THAT I BET HE THINKS ABOUT GETTING FUCKED BUT HE\u2019S TOO UPTIGHT TO DO IT). SO LET\u2019S DISH THE DISH, HOMOS. YOU KNOW AND I KNOW THAT MARY PETE IS A\u00a0<\/i>GAY<\/i><\/a>\u00a0TEENAGER. HE\u2019S A FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY IN A\u00a0<\/i>CHICAGO<\/i><\/a>\u00a0BUS STATION WONDERING IF IT\u2019S A GOOD IDEA TO GO HOME WITH A FIFTY-YEAR-OLD MAN SO THAT HE\u2019LL FINALLY UNDERSTAND WHAT HE IS. HE\u2019S BEEN OUT FOR, WHAT, ALL OF FOUR YEARS, AND IF I UNDERSTAND THE NARRATIVE, HE MARRIED THE FIRST GUY HE DATED. AND WE ALL KNOW WHAT HAPPENS WHEN\u00a0<\/i>GAY<\/i><\/a>\u00a0PEOPLE DON\u2019T GET A REAL ADOLESCENCE BECAUSE THEY SPENT THEIRS IN THE CLOSET: THEY GO THROUGH IT AFTER THEY COME OUT. AND BECAUSE THEY\u2019RE ADULTS WITH THEIR OWN INCOMES AND NO PARENTS TO REIN THEM IN THEY DO IT ON STEROIDS (OFTEN LITERALLY). IF\u00a0SHORTEST WAY HOME\u00a0(I MEAN REALLY, CAN YOU THINK OF A MORE TREACLY TITLE?) MAKES ONE THING CLEAR, MARY PETE WAS NEVER A TEENAGER. BUT YOU CAN\u2019T RUN AWAY FROM THAT FOREVER. EITHER IT COMES OUT OR IT EATS YOU UP INSIDE. IT CAN BE FUN, IT CAN BE MESSY, IT CAN BE TRAGIC, IT CAN BE PROGENITIVE, TRANSFORMATIVE, ECSTATIC, OR BANAL, BUT THE LAST THING I WANT IN THE\u00a0<\/i>WHITE HOUSE<\/i><\/a>\u00a0IS A\u00a0<\/i>GAY<\/i><\/a>\u00a0MAN STARING DOWN 40 WHO SUDDENLY REALIZES HE DIDN\u2019T GET TO HAVE ALL THE FUN HIS STRAIGHT PEERS DID WHEN THEY WERE TEENAGERS. I\u2019M NOT SAYING I DON\u2019T WANT HIM TO\u00a0<\/i>SHAVE<\/i><\/a>\u00a0HIS CHEST OR DO MOLLY OR TRY BEING THE LUCKY PIERRE (THE TIMING\u2019S TRICKIER THAN IT LOOKS, BUT IT CAN BE FUN WHEN YOU WORK IT OUT). THESE ARE RITES OF PASSAGE FOR A LOT OF\u00a0<\/i>GAY<\/i><\/a>\u00a0MEN, AND IT FUELS MANY ASPECTS OF\u00a0<\/i>GAY<\/i><\/a>\u00a0CULTURE. BUT\u00a0<\/i>LIKE<\/i><\/a>\u00a0I SAID, I DON\u2019T WANT IT IN THE\u00a0<\/i>WHITE HOUSE<\/i><\/a>. I WANT A MAN WHOSE MIND IS ON HIS JOB, NOT WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN\u2014OR WHAT HE THINKS HE CAN STILL GET AWAY WITH.<\/i><\/p>\n Oh.<\/p>\n Anyway, excited for TNR to hire two\u00a0Brooklyn<\/a>\u00a0\u201conly Bernie can make anorexia great again\u201d<\/a>\u00a0podcasters to launch a semi-ironic reboot of\u00a0THE SPINE.<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n And finally, coverage from The Business Insider<\/em>, miraculously still online<\/a>:<\/p>\n The New Republic, a magazine known for its commentary on politics and the arts, published and retracted a controversial opinion essay about 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg titled “My Mayor Pete Problem” after it spawned online backlash.<\/p>\n While the page on The New Republic’s website has been replaced by\u00a0an Editor’s Note<\/a>\u00a0that says it was removed “in response to criticism of the piece’s inappropriate and invasive content” and that the magazine “regret[s] its publication,” the essay can be viewed\u00a0as an archive<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The piece, authored by gay novelist Dale Peck, criticized Buttigieg for what Peck perceives as his “neoliberal” politics and “idealistic pragmatism.” In what some commentators called homophobic, Peck referred to Buttigieg as “Mary Pete” throughout the article, a play on the candidate’s moniker “Mayor Pete,” to emphasize that he thinks Buttigieg is the “gay equivalent of Uncle Tom.”<\/p>\n In addition to Peck’s stance that Buttigieg is “just another unrepentant or at least unexamined beneficiary of white male privilege,” the essay also contained a passage that received the most criticism online for its graphic sexual descriptions and assertion that Buttigieg is stuck in the mindset of a “gay teenager.”<\/p>\n The New Republic told<\/a>\u00a0CNN’s chief media correspondent Brian Stelter that “The New Republic recognizes that this post crossed a line, and while it was largely intended as satire, it was inappropriate and invasive.”<\/p>\n While The New Republic may have intended for the piece to be satirical, Peck’s own social media posts indicate that it was not.<\/p>\n Read more:\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Pete Buttigieg has been the breakout 2020 Democratic candidate. Here’s his stunning rise in 1 chart<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n He shared his essay\u00a0on Facebook<\/a>\u00a0with the caption: “So I took your all’s advice and made my view on Mary Pete public. I guess I’m not going to get a cabinet position now. Or an NEA grant. Or be honored at the Carnegie Center and get to have my Aretha moment where I drop my mink on the stage. But maybe if I’m lucky I’ll still get to make a president cry. (Entre nous: The New Republic went with the nice title. My suggestion was ‘Basic Bitch.’)”<\/p>\n After the post’s removal, less than 24 hours after its publication, Peck\u00a0also posted<\/a>\u00a0“That was the shortest roller coaster ride ever!” on Facebook.<\/p>\n In addition to online backlash to the piece, the League of Conservation Voters, a\u00a0national organization<\/a>\u00a0that “works to turn environmental values into national, state and local priorities,”\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0it was withdrawing from a partnership with The New Republic to host a climate summit for the Democratic presidential candidates on September 23.<\/p>\n
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