-Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968), riffing on George Bernard Shaw
Bugün değil (Not today in Turkish)
- Attributed to Kanuni Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent after the failure of the Ottoman Siege of Malta, 1565
Summary: Pete Buttigieg bowed out of the presidential race yesterday. While my head has inclined, and is inclining me, in the direction of the former Vice President Joe Biden, my queer, Anglican, southpaw heart still felt a certain wistful admiration for the quondam South Bend mayor and his altogether amazing campaign for the Presidency of the United States. Realistically, applying the heteronormative calculus of American politics, I should not have thought Pete Buttigieg’s campaign was even possible. But as a queer man, my life is lived in hope. As the motto of the State of South Carolina puts it, Dum Spiro Spero: while I breathe I hope.
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Cathedral City, March, 2. 2020 -- Pete Buttigieg bowed out of the presidential race yesterday. While his campaign was still active, I could not help but be reminded of the insurgent 1968 presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy. Before he was tragically cut down for the night he won the 1968 California Democratic presidential primary, Bobby used to riff on a quotation from George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.” His brother Ted Kennedy, in one of his last great speeches before his death, addressing the Democratic National Convention in Denver in 2008, revived Bobby’s quotation and added to it an assurance that, nearly a dozen years later, still moves me to tears. “The dream,” Ted Kennedy assured the assembled delegates in Denver that day, “will never die.”
For many of us in this country who have not participated in the traditional white, religiously Protestant Nonconformist, heteronormative paradigm, we have necessarily lived far too long with a dream deferred. Yet for all the deferred dreams we have lived with, we still have lived in hope.
For queerfolk, we lived in hope that in the fullness of time we would be able to live our truth without fear, without discrimination, without persecution, and without being cast as a pernicious, diseased pariah Other.
We lived in hope that living our truth would not be considered some kind of “abominable and detestable crime against nature.”
We lived in hope that the relationships we established might some day enjoy the same legal solicitude and protection as those of our straight neighbors.
Our lives could be summed up by the motto of the Palmetto State of South Carolina: "Dum Spiro Spero," while I breathe, I hope.
Those of us who were Conformist in our religion lived in hope that someday we, too, might not only be able to share the altar rail with our straight coreligionists, but also that we might also be able to enter the threefold sacred ministry and celebrate, alongside our straight fellow children of the Kingdom, the Sacraments of our redemption.
For many of us, our dream of being able to participate as full, first-class citizens in the life of the American Commonwealth or of the Christian Republic was perforce deferred. Yet, following Stonewall in 1969, things began to change. In the words of French Marshal Ferdinand Foch in 1918, “L’edifice commence à craquer!”
If, in 1969, the idea of a known homosexual serving as an elected public official seemed too many to be risible, the passage of less than a generation soon left the proposition of queerfolk in Congress, state legislatures, or city councils altogether unremarkable, as we moved purposefully to assert our indefeasible right of full, first-class participation in the life of the Commonwealth.
Here in Cathedral City, the idea of an openly queer person on the city Council has been a commonplace since the election of the late Greg Pettis in 1994. When I joined him on the city Council in December, 2002, as the second out gay man on the Council, my queer advent was greeted throughout most of the community with a “ho-hum” shrug.
Here in California, that bastion of the so-called Left Coast, the notion of queerfolk serving at all levels of elective office has simply ceased, outside the precincts of the radical Republican right, to be remarkable. And though certain Republicans and certain evangelical pundits may clutch their pearls, foam at the mouth, and otherwise suffer from a case of the vapors, the State has continued to function, and to function well.
Other jurisdictions, too, have been governed by queer chief executives. While Jim McGreevy in New Jersey felt that the exposure of his sexuality militated in favor of his resignation, neither Oregon’s Kate Brown nor Colorado’s Jared Polis have found being bisexual or gay to be any impediment to holding their respective governorships.
Fifty years after Stonewall, queerfolk can be found in local governments, on the judicial bench, in public safety agencies, in the National Guard, and in the federal Armed Forces the length and breadth of the United States.
Yet, it took the American public a little bit longer to get used to the idea of a queer fellow running a serious, substantial, substantive campaign for the Presidency of the United States. When former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg announced his candidacy for President of the United States, it was greeted by many, myself among them, with a certain degree of raised eyebrows and skepticism. I must confess, I wasn’t so much afraid of the idea of a gay man tossing his hat into the presidential ring as I was fearful of the games that might be played Mayor Pete’s Maltese surname. I feared that opponents on both sides of divide would be unable to avoid a middle school temptation to weaponize the name Buttigieg in the ineluctable way of bullies everywhere.
While some indeed sought to turn Mayor Pete’s surname into a weapon to use against him, most notably supporters of Donald Trump and his poisonous alter ego Bernard Sanders, most Democrats and Republicans remained true to their better selves and declined the temptation to engage in such puerile trolling.
Even as I continued, and continue, to support the campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden, on the “make decisions with my head” theory that Vice President Biden is a known, experienced quantity, and the perfect antidote to the horrid obese, immoral, treasonable shitgibbon currently occupying the Oval Office, my heart still had a soft spot for Mayor Pete.
While I may be 18 years Pete Buttigieg’s senior, I still consider him very much a man after my own heart. We share certain commonalities. Like many descendents from formerly-British possessions, Malta in his case, Ireland in mine, we both possess what my sainted Irish grandmother might have called “the gift of the gab.” (Who but the Irish, the Indians, and the Maltese could have taken the tongue of the conqueror and made it so brilliantly their own?) We are both former Roman Catholics who crossed the Thames and found a spiritual home in The Episcopal Church. We are both left-handed (damn southpaws!), and, of course, we’re both as queer as pink ink.
Pete’s effrontery, as it were, in running for President was magnificent. His unwillingness to accept the insistence of the Republicans or of the so-called Democratic Socialists that he stay in "his place" represented, in a sense, the kind of marvelous insubordination that animated the queerfolk who made the Stonewall rebellion.
At Stonewall, a bunch of angry fags and dikes, a congeries of drag queens, Greenwich Village hustlers, and pissed off street kids dared to defy a homophobic NYPD. And in so doing, they made possible everything that has happened since. Stonewall was our queer Lexington and Concord.
The famous Yugoslav dissident Milovan Đjilas observed that “In politics, more than in anything else, the beginning of everything lies in moral indignation and in doubt of the good intentions of others.” The moral indignation that found its ur-expression at Stonewall gave rise to an unstoppable civil rights movement.
The horrors of the AIDS epidemic – and the moral failure of the Reagan Administration to act on that epidemic– gave our queer civil rights movement a kind of moral legitimacy akin to that of the African-American civil rights movement, much to the distress of some in that movement who had an altogether territorial appreciation of what it was, and a resistance to acknowledging the possibility that a bunch of queer white guys and gals might also be able to articulate a moral imperative for an equal place in the American Commonwealth.
Indeed, it may well be that part of Mayor Pete’s inability to connect with a Democratic electorate that is increasingly an electorate of color may find roots in that carefully Republican-fostered disdain, the old divide-and-conquer tactic the British used to such baleful effect throughout their empire, including in India, Ireland, and Malta, that still exists within part of the African-American community for non–heteronormative sexuality.
What is altogether less defensible is the behavior of a great many supporters of Bernard Sanders toward Mayor Pete and his campaign. Sanders has a well-deserved reputation for misogyny, that wicked half-sibling of homophobia. Yet Sanders has managed to convince far too many queerfolk that he is somehow an ally, and a staunch ally at that, of America’s queer nation.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Though Sanders and his supporters have always like to point a disapproving finger at Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton for not “evolving” fast enough on the issue of marriage equality, Bernard Sanders’s record itself shows a less than stellar degree of “purity” on the issue.
Moreover, the vicious, dog whistle homophobic, anti-Buttigieg trolling that Sanders himself appears to have tolerated, nay, encouraged, can never be forgotten nor forgiven. It will be a frosty Friday in May before much of the queer nation can bring itself even to be civil toward Bernard Sanders or his redeless, cargo-shorts communist supporters.
Bernard Sanders and the homophobic right-wingers orbiting Donald Trump notwithstanding, Mayor Pete’s campaign, even if cut short, represented, for queerfolk at least, a bright glimmering of promise, a moment of hope for an inclusive American dream in which “a gay dude from Indiana” and the man to whom he is married, could do more than look at things as they are and ask why. It was a brief shining moment when, through the Buttigieg campaign, we could dream of things that never were, and ask why the hell not?
And the dream will never die.
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is a queer fellow who lives in Cathedral City, and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He knows what it’s like to have been a queer elected official, having served two terms on the Cathedral City city Council. His death has been prayed for by angry Protestant Nonconformist evangelical preachers. He has been attacked for being queer by former colleagues on the city Council, and lambasted for his sexuality by Sandernista Marxists who take the Marxist-Leninist/Soviet view that non-heteronormative sexualities are nothing more than bourgeois affectations.
Mr. Marchand throws industrial-grade shade at all such people.
The opinions expressed herein are his own.
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