Pete Buttigieg

Gay Rust Belt Mayor Pete Buttigieg Qualifies for First Presidential Debate; Pinch Yourself

For the first time in history, an openly gay man will participate in a Democratic party presidential debate. South Bend (Indiana) Mayor Pete Buttigieg announced on Saturday, March 16 that he had reached the 65,000* individual donor goal which qualifies him to be invited to the first DNC debate (June 2019) before the 2020 presidential election. He also met the requirement that donors must come from at least 20 states.

*76,025 donors as of Saturday morning, March 16, 2019

Buttigieg is competing for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 2020 national election. If successful, he would be the first openly gay president, as well as the youngest (39 on inauguration day 2021). Mayor Pete, as he likes to be called, considering that tongue stopping last name (BOOT-edge-edge), turned in a star performance March 10, 2019, on a live CNN Town Hall held in Austin, TX. If you have not listened to this broadcast, see the YouTube link below. 

Your blogger was born (and continues to live) in the Washington DC suburbs, so I have been saturated with politics my entire life, yet I have never heard a politician speak so calmly and eloquently, with a quiet determination and assurance. He answers every question! No deflections! He mentions solutions and policies that need to be explored, all delivered with a refreshing candor and vision. And relatable. I’m still pinching myself. Consider it your civic duty to listen to the entire broadcast of 43 minutes. If nothing else, he should be hired by any candidate on how to handle an interview or town hall session.

My favorite quote from the CNN Town Hall:

When asked how he would respond to criticism from Trump:

"I'm a gay man from Indiana. I know how to handle a bully."

This man is only 37 (born January 19, 1982), openly gay (married public school teacher Chasten Glezman in June 2018; photo below), informed and eloquent. A Harvard graduate (BA) and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (MA), where he received a “first” in economics. Not to mention a veteran of the war in Afghanistan; he remains a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve. Mayor Pete speaks English, Arabic, Dari, Spanish, Norwegian, French, Italian and Maltese (his father emigrated from Malta, where Buttigieg is a common name). When he ran for reelection for mayor as an out gay man in 2015, he won with more than 80% of the vote. In red state Indiana. Believe it.

P.S.: Interested in learning more about Mayor Pete? He has a new book out, a memoir -- Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future (pub. Feb. 12, 2019). The Guardian (British daily newspaper) stated that Buttigieg “has written the best political autobiography since Barack Obama”. 

An excerpt:

(Buttigieg met his husband online, and their first date included a visit to the South Bend Cubs. They made it to the sixth inning before they ditched the game for a walk by the river.)

“I felt the slight brushing of his hand coming closer to mine,” he writes, “and I took hold of it. Nothing in my life, from shaking hands with a president to experiencing my first rocket attack, matched the thrill of holding Chasten’s hand for the first time. I was electrified. We got back to the car just as the post-game fireworks began, and as the explosions and lit colors unfolded over us, he went in for a kiss … It only took a few weeks for me to acknowledge the obvious: I was in love.”

Photo below: Buttigieg upon returning from deployment in Afghanistan.

Alex Morse, Young Gay Mayor

UPDATE: In November, 2013, Morse was elected to a second term as mayor. In 2015 he was elected to a third term, and in January 2017 he turned 28 years old. Original post was published on November 16, 2011.

Out and gay Alex Morse (at left, photo by Rob Deza) is the newly-elected 22-year-old mayor of Holyoke, Massachusetts, but CBS did not mention his sexual orientation on their Sunday news segment on Morse. That issue simply wasn't an issue in this campaign, according to The New Civil Rights Movement, a website dedicated to gay rights topics, especially same-sex marriage.

"He is gay. He is out. He has worked for the cause. He just won a stunner of a political victory, and as hard as this is to conceptualize, being gay was not a complicating factor in his campaign," writes Jean Ann Esselink in an article titled "On Our Radar – Mayor-Elect Alex Morse" that was posted Sunday on the website.

The 2½-minute CBS news segment included some hardscrabble images of the heavily Hispanic city, where a third of residents live below the poverty line and unemployment hovers around 11 percent. Morse, who takes office in January, says he's looking forward to managing a city with a $120 million budget and nearly 40,000 residents.

"I think of my age as an incredible asset, in that I haven't been around for 20 (or) 30 years. I'm not beholden to special interests. I haven't been around long enough to owe anybody a political favor," the mayor-elect told CBS.

But the optimism of Morse – a recent Brown University graduate who launched a mayoral bid while still attending the Ivy League school – shines through. He played up the city's bright spots, including a high-tech office park expected to serve as a magnet for new jobs and plans to renovate the old Victory Theater.

"One of the most satisfying things to do in life is to do what others tell you you cannot do, and I think that's what we did throughout this campaign," Morse says in the CBS interview. "Never once did I listen to folks who said, 'You're too young, you haven't paid your dues.'"

Morse, a political neophyte who won 53 percent of the vote in last Tuesday's election, unseated incumbent mayor Elaine A. Pluta, a longtime public servant and Holyoke's first woman mayor.

Klaus Wowereit

Berlin's current mayor, openly gay politician Klaus Wowereit (born 1953), has served as governing mayor of Germany’s capital city since 2001. In coming out publicly prior to the 2001 mayoral elections, he coined the now famous German phrase "Ich bin schwul, und das ist auch gut so" (I'm gay, and that’s a good thing). With his coming out, Wowereit wanted to beat the tabloids to exposing his sexual orientation and prevent them from writing sensational and fabricated stories about his private life. Wowereit said those now famous words during a convention of the Berlin SPD (Germany’s Social Democratic Party). At the end of his speech, there was spontaneous cheering and applause. Wowereit’s civil partner, Jörn Kubicki, is a neurosurgeon, and the pair have been in a relationship since 1993.

Wowereit, who was born in Berlin, has served as President of the Bundesrat (the fourth highest office in Germany), and his SPD-led coalition was re-elected in 2006.  In the 2011 elections he and his party were again victorious. Wowereit’s election as mayor made Berlin one of three major European cities that saw openly gay mayors take office in 2001, along with Paris’s Bertrand Delanoë and Hamburg’s Ole von Beust. Berlin and Hamburg, being the two largest cities in Germany, are also German states in their own right, which meant that both Wowereit and von Beust became state premiers.

Wowereit also served in the Berlin House of Representatives from 1995-2011, and since 2009 has been Vice Chairman of his party, the SPD.

Wowereit with partner Jörn Kubicki (at left):

Johnny Cummings

Johnny Cummings, the openly gay mayor of the small coal mining town of Vicco, Kentucky (pop. 334), was profiled on TV’s “The Colbert Report” on August 14, 2013. Described by locals as “the best mayor we’ve ever had,” Cummings, also the town’s part-time hairdresser, led a successful initiative to pass an ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual orientation. Thus Vicco KY became the smallest town in the nation to have such a law.

A part of Colbert’s recurring tongue-in-cheek feature titled “People Who Are Destroying America,” the segment consisted mostly of interviews with the town’s residents, who one after another fractured the stereotype of  “close-minded hillbillies,” a phrase used by one Vicco citizen. Local residents praised Cummings for his accomplishments and described how they approved of the anti-bias ordinance. An exception was the local pastor, who said he wished gays would “go back in the closet where they belong.”

The fifty-year-old mayor, who plays saxophone in his spare time, reports that five other communities have contacted him about how to enact similar anti-discrimination laws. Currently a Democrat, Cummings says that in the past he has switched between Democrat and Republican affiliation. He is pleased with how the satirical Colbert Report episode turned out, because he had turned down other media efforts to cast a lurid slant on Vicco’s recent notoriety. One organization had proposed filming a reality show on location, but Cummings dismissed that and similar offers. Instead, Cummings welcomed a feature on "The Colbert Report".

“To get your point across, sometimes you just gotta laugh,” according to Johnny.

The Comedy Central crew shot the "Colbert Report" footage last February, following a news item about the passage of the anti-discrimination ordinance that appeared in the New York Times in January, 2013.

Bertrand Delanoë

Gay Mayor of Paris

Openly gay Bertrand Delanoë has been the mayor of Paris for over ten years (since March 18, 2001), when control of the city was won by a leftist alliance for the first time since the Paris Commune of 1871. Some things are worth waiting for.

Delanoë was virtually unknown before his election in 2001, but he soon gained fame for organizing new and unusual populist events in Paris, such as “Paris Plages,” an artificial beach constructed on the banks of the Seine each July and August. Paris empties out in late summer, as most locals head south to Mediterranean resorts. But for hotel, restaurant and other employees who must remain in the city, “Paris Plage” affords a way to relax, soak up the sun, swim (floating barge swimming pools anchored along the river), dance and hear live music right in the center of Paris. The popular program, initiated in 2002, was completely off my radar when I arrived to spend August in Paris in 2008. Imagine my surprise when I first crossed the Seine to see palm trees, beach chairs, sand and beach umbrellas covering a right bank river-side roadway. This feature has been copied by other international cities.

He also originated “Nuit Blanche” (Sleepless Night), a dusk to dawn festival of parties around Paris, with museums, galleries and public spaces open all night. During the first Nuit Blanche event in 2002, Delanoë threw open the formerly inaccessible doors of city hall (Hôtel de Ville). While mingling with the public, he was stabbed by a Muslim immigrant who told police, "I hate politicians, the Socialist Party, and homosexuals." Delanoë's wound was thought to be minor, but he remained in the hospital for two weeks.

Delanoë has since converted the city hall's opulent mayor’s private apartments into a day nursery for the children of municipal workers. The mayor currently resides in his own personal residence in the Marais district, ground zero of gay Paris.

Palm trees, sand and beach umbrellas along the Seine.


As Mayor, Delanoë has worked to improve the quality of life for Parisians, with goals of reducing pollution, reining in the number of motorized vehicles in the city center and closing some streets to vehicular traffic.

He introduced a popular program of inexpensive bicycle rentals stationed along the streets throughout the city in an effort to supplant polluting automobiles and ease the difficult parking situation. Beginning in December, 2011, small cars will also be available for rent from sidewalk locations (akin to our ZipCar).

Delanoë was reelected in 2008 to a term that ends in 2014. He remains the only openly gay politician in France, and his popularity is the greatest of any elected official in the entire nation. Delanoë's name is often mentioned as a possible candidate for president of France in the next national election.

Political progress: Berlin and Hamburg both have gay mayors. When Hamburg's former vice mayor Ronald Schill outed the city's Mayor Ole von Beust at a press conference in 2003, Germany's citizens mocked Schill, and Von Beust went on to win the 2004 elections in a landslide. In the USA, the citizens of Houston, our fourth largest city, elected Annise Parker, an openly gay woman, as mayor in 2009; only 18% of voters had issues with her sexual orientation.