How Butch is Buttigieg? An Interview Offers Clues
Openly gay Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has a rep for being the smartest guy in the room. But is he also the most masculine? From what he said in a recent interview, it sounds like he might be.
In their profile of the 41-year-old out cabinet official and onetime presidential candidate, Wired ticked off a host of Buttigieg's better-known credentials and accomplishments: Rhodes Scholar, fan of classical literature, patriot and defender of democracy as a Naval veteran, and former mayor of South Bend, Indiana — not to mention one half of one of the highest-profile same-sex married couples in the country.
But Buttigieg — whose signature campaign trail wardrobe in 2016, a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, made him look like a white-collar weekend warrior from suburbia — also talked about loving "a good cheeseburger" ("The Burger King Impossible Whopper with bacon is not a bad combo"), driving a muscle car, and other supposedly macho pursuits.
"I like drinking beer, lifting weights, splitting wood," Buttigieg said. "I'm also gay and I like playing piano."
On the other hand, he added, "I do a lot of the caregiving for our toddlers and other things that supposedly aren't masculine."
Buttigieg leaned into the idea of masculinity as an ideological trope slung by the hard right, noting, "Fears about masculinity are a way into the fear of displacement. Masculinity establishes a default place, and that place is being shifted and threatened by modernity. A man as the head of the household. The only one who earns income. The default leader in any social or political organization."
"The politicization of masculinity is code for Nothing in your life has to change," Buttigieg went on to say. "The problem is, of course, lots of things have to change. Either because there was something wrong with the old way — or because, even as the old way seemed perfectly fine, it's not an option" any longer as the realities of economic disparity and climate change affect more people.
But evasions and misdirections peddled for political purposes can endure only so long, the openly gay cabinet official went on to add, declaring, "facts still matter. And when a fact is challenged, or a supposed fact, like 'the Russian Federation's army is unbeatable.' Right? I have to think that catches up to you."
Added Buttigieg: "And here in the U.S. the confrontation with reality comes every time I get a letter of support from a House Republican for a transportation project using funds from the bill they voted against. It's shameless. But it's also reassuring that they're the first to come to a ribbon-cutting when we fund a project in their community."
His words on masculinity received a critique from Jezebel, which dragged Buttigieg for "presenting these traits at odds with each other."
"The gender tropes have been rewritten and are further being rewritten by iconoclasts far more daring than Buttigieg," Jezebel sniped. "If Buttigieg learned that some drag queens top, might he simply keel over from the shock of it all?"
"Buttigieg's parading of his supposed normalcy in unspoken opposition to those deviant queers creates a blind spot—this kind of not-that-kind-of-gay-ism is highly typical," the site continued. "Insisting that you're not a stereotype is actually a very stereotypically gay thing to do."