I Have Something to Tell You

by Chasten Glezman Buttigieg

Marriage equality passed three days after my birthday in 2015, and though I read the headlines with a sense of victory, the decision still felt precariously abstract. I never assumed it would pass, and when it did I couldn’t believe it wouldn’t be overturned. The news didn’t compute; I knew too many people who hated gay people for it to make sense.

The deep, almost spiritual commitment to take care of someone and remain on their side through everything, from squirrels in the ceiling to ad hominem attacks on the debate stage, is something I’m so grateful I get to experience in my lifetime. It infuses disagreements—about the mundane and about slightly weightier matters—with purpose and security. And it makes all the good times better, too.

Even in the comfort of our own home, when I’d ask him what he really thought, he rarely had a harsh word for anyone. Once, I asked him how he felt about a figure in town who was known for showboating and holding up progress for the sake of a few likes or shares on Facebook, or maybe even a headline. “Holding grudges is exhausting,” he replied.

He had a knack for taking complex issues and making them seem understandable and solvable.

Everyone knew Peter’s campaign would be an extreme long shot, and even once we’d hired a few staff, found some volunteers (four of them, to be precise), and filmed a little low-budget video for the announcement, no one could really say what it all meant or what it would entail. Once it was official, he held a press conference, where most reporters couldn’t even pronounce his name.

I had just quit the job I’d worked so hard to get, and it was as if I had no identity of my own—I was only the candidate’s husband, which itself was a vague, undefined role. First openly gay presidential candidate’s spouse: an objectively cool thing to be, but not one that came with a checklist. In those first months, I struggled to maintain a sense of myself, my priorities, and my history; I felt like half my personality was replaced with stress. There were so many things I could mess up—and I had no idea what they were! When I spoke to friends, they’d ask how I was, and I was only able to say, “I don’t know.”

I knew there were still many lines I couldn’t cross. If I seemed too gay, too masculine, too feminine, too serious, too casual, too present, or too mysterious, the press would say we were out of touch with the American people, or that I was threatening or a “liability”—one of the punditry’s favorite words. The tweets would pour in, the media cycle would regurgitate them onto the chyrons, and the campaign would be toast.

While on the trail, I looked to figures like Michelle Obama, who contributed meaningfully to her husband’s work while carving out her own public identity and duties from the very beginning of his first campaign for president. She stood on her own two feet, and I admired how she paved her own path. It wouldn’t have been strange to see Michelle disagree with her husband on an issue—something it’s hard to say about many other political spouses—and I was beginning to understand that such autonomy was impressively hard-won.

glossing over the unspoken realities that queer people face between the coasts, especially in places like Mike Pence’s Indiana. Remember that “gays can’t have our pizza at their wedding” story? Yeah, that restaurant is in our county.

now I was starting to feel like my presence was A Thing. Older people were stopping me on the street to tell me about their gay nephew in Idaho who was in the marching band. People were mailing me literature informing me I was going to burn in hell, or tweeting heinous, homophobic things at me simply for… existing, I guess. And some others even liked me!

I don’t want to be too self-deprecating here, but I’m not a saint. Sometimes I get the urge to correct them: I’m not the right person to be a role model! Don’t look up to me! But people aren’t looking for perfection in their role models. They’re looking for something they can recognize. At the end of the roller coaster that led me to Peter, I got to be the person I wished I would have had when I was growing up. And on top of that, I now had something to offer.

For the most part, it seems the answer to “Is the country ready for a gay president?” is “Obviously.” While there are unfortunately some people who still think we’re sinners bringing shame and misfortune on this country, I don’t think they make up as significant a portion of the electorate as I’d been led to believe.

The type of vitriol coming from Trump’s White House didn’t help. People felt emboldened and encouraged by our president to be openly hateful toward others. I would march in parades with Peter, running up and down the sidewalks, shaking hands with hundreds of supporters, and the thought would appear. What if someone, in any of these buildings surrounding us, opened a window and fired a gun?

It was as if everyone was operating under the assumption that bigotry was to be expected and therefore not worth examining, and it was hard as hell to watch some straight people have their homophobia go unchecked. Straight people who suddenly come around on gay rights are rarely pressed about it. Even those who hold very visible positions in American media have been allowed to leave their explicit and visible homophobic pasts practically unquestioned.

A candidate’s identity shouldn’t obscure his politics. It’s policy that shapes the realities of people’s everyday lives. I know this firsthand. My transition from “Republican” 4-H’er to sensitive Obama voter wasn’t just about coming into my truth as a gay man. During my senior year of high school, my mom had to have some cancerous spots on her skin treated. At the time, it wasn’t seen as too big of a deal. Many folks may find a spot or two, go to their doctor, have the spot removed, and that’s it. At the time, that’s what we expected to happen. The word cancer is never easy for a family to hear, but when Mom only had a few spots, we felt blessed it was treatable with what we assumed would be a simple fix. Then, in the spring of 2007, almost a year later, she learned it was going to be more serious than getting a few moles removed.

But the stress was never entirely medical or existential. On top of the horrible fear that it might get too bad, and on top of the pain, she worried constantly about paying for treatment.

It took a huge toll on her mental health. She was completely disempowered by the impossibility of paying for everything she needed, which meant that surviving the devastation of a life-threatening disease somehow became a secondary concern. More often, she would talk about how this was going to bankrupt them. “What’s the point of being alive if you can’t afford to stay alive?”

it bothered me that there was always that reminder lurking in the back of my mind: You are an ambassador of your husband’s campaign. Everything you do reflects on him. I came to think of my role as being everything and nothing. If I messed up, I was everything, the center of attention; if I did a good job, I was nothing, just doing my job of being Peter’s husband.

But I started to realize that I did belong there. Not only that: it’s vitally important for people like me to be involved in politics. Not because I was handed a list of talking points, but because none of it was hypothetical for me. Everything I talked about on the campaign was deeply personal and real, and those are just some of the stories we should bring to Washington. Peter’s campaign was a historic first. And whether I realized it at the start or not, my role was a historic first, too.

I was happy that I got to use my experience watching Survivor to analyze presidential debates, but Peter hated this element of the experience. He likes debating policy and talking about real people’s lives, not waiting for the moment he can deploy a canned line. Throughout the day, I would try to get him to practice zingers or prep for incoming attacks, but mostly he just needed me to remind him of all his strengths. My training as an actor came in handy: I was always reminding him to be aware of his body language and facial expressions while he was thinking or prepping a response. Audiences will read into your expressions, even if you’re not speaking. Are you looking the person who is criticizing you in the eye? That suggests confidence. If your eyes dart around while someone is saying you were a terrible mayor, you might look like you’re cowering. Where you’re looking and how you look as you’re taking criticism will be analyzed by everyone. It says a lot about the candidate if they can’t look you in the eye.

I thought of Michelle Obama’s “When they go low…” mantra at least five hundred times a day.

Of all the things I’d been accused of throughout my life, not being gay enough was never one I saw coming. My initial reaction was disbelief. I’d been getting death threats. Was having to install a special security system on my house so I didn’t get murdered in the night by people who hated me simply because of my marriage not gay enough? Could someone send me the checklist? Was there a meeting I missed out on? Surely, I thought, at least I’d get some points for, you know, being married to a man.

Had he been elected, Peter would have been the most progressive president in modern American history, and a part of me understood many of those kids holding those Sharpied signs protesting my events hadn’t even read the policy page to see just how alike they were.

That gay experience in Tulsa is just as gay and valid as other, more visible experiences in the media, and attempting to police anyone’s gayness sets a dangerous precedent. It equates identity with presentation and prioritizes lifestyle over the conditions of someone’s life. It places even more needless pressure on a population that is already struggling. It says to that young person walking away from his only home, barefoot in the middle of the night, that there is a right and wrong way to exist when he may be contemplating if he even wants to at all.

Campaigning requires carrying others’ pain and grief. Sometimes I would end the day with a feeling I could only describe as vulnerability fatigue. There was just nothing left to give. After touring Pulse, I met with a survivor of the Parkland school shooting, and after that meeting, I was needed at a few other scheduled campaign events. It was hard, sometimes, to carry all those stories and experiences and keep a clear head, and to make sure that I was showing up emotionally for everyone I met or stood in front of. At times, it was all too overwhelming, and I’d start to forget to care for myself as well.

It was like I shined my shoes every morning knowing that by the time I got to the hotel that night they’d be covered in shit. But we kept going.

There were people who seemed more interested in winning Twitter than the election. The “fandoms” that form around politicians are similar to those that follow pop stars; stans will go on the attack if they find someone criticizing their “king” or “queen.” It’s funny to refer to a pop star or your awesome friend who got a promotion at work as royalty, but it’s kind of weird to refer to a democratically elected official that way. The entire point of them is that they are not kings and queens.

After months and months of campaigning, things started to really heat up in November. A poll came out of Iowa that had Peter in the lead, and it shook the campaign. No one had anticipated him doing that well that early. But there he was, on the front page of the Des Moines Register, standing on top of a bale of hay. He was declared the front-runner. Of course, polls are polls, and a clear front-runner can end up in fourth place in a matter of weeks.

Sitting in the Americus, Georgia, Hampton Inn, Peter asked me: “What do you think we should do?” But he already knew, and so did I. I got up from the bed, walked across the room to where he was sitting at the desk, hugged him, and said, “Let’s go home, love.” I felt incredibly guilty, but I knew what was coming, and I couldn’t help but be a little bit happy for the life we were getting to return to.

Our country is hurting and has been for a long time. A lot of people feel mad, left out, and misunderstood. I love so many things about Peter, and one of them is how naturally he made me feel the opposite: safe, appreciated, and a part of something bigger than myself. I wanted the country to feel that way, too. To look to Washington and take a deep breath, knowing that the president, the first gentleman, and an entire administration were there because they cared about the American people.

Folks used to say I was “just a teacher,” but it turns out a farm-raised, theater-geek, middle-school teacher can be really good at politics. A “not-so-secret weapon,” even! I’ve never worked so hard in my life, and although the race was never about me, I was surprised to find that the harder I worked, the better I felt about being out on the trail.