Pete and Peck: On Eating Our Own

Time magazine's May 13, 2019, cover features South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and his husband Chasten.¹ The two handsome, white men mirror one another in the photo. Mahogany leather belts circle the waists of their crisply ironed navy chinos. Sleeves of pastel, button-up shirts are rolled just under their elbows. Pete and Chasten both leave collar buttons undone. The husbands' lips remain firmly closed yet slightly upturned, hinting at smiles. Pete and Chasten stand in front of an all-American home: lush yard and wood panels painted a pristine white. Beautiful yellow flowers bookend their athletic, cotton-covered legs.

The image resembles Grant Wood's 1930 painting "American Gothic," in which a U.S. farmer and his conservatively dressed daughter (often confused for his wife) stand outside their home. Snake plant and beefsteak begonia sit on the family's porch. Wood has stated in interviews that he aimed to paint the small white cottage designed in Carpenter Gothic style along with "the kind of people [he] fancied should live in that house."² Gertrude Stein and others assumed Wood's painting was "satire about the rigidity of American rural or small-town life."³ The Great Depression reframed people's perception of the image. Critics and historians increasingly fashion the painting as a representation of "authentic American identity"; a 1935 caption of the art reads, "American democracy was built upon the labors of men and women of stout hearts and firm jaws, such people as those above."⁴ Might we draw similar, seemingly oppositional conclusions regarding Time's take on Pete and Chasten? Might queer audiences interpret Time's cover as ironic commentary on gay "authenticity" in the marriage equality era: two emotionally reserved white men in rigidly ironed cotton standing in front of a beautifully manicured home? Or should we assume Time's cover pictorially frames Buttigieg as the only viable way for sexual minorities to be taken seriously and have a seat at the U.S. political table?

Two months after Time published its celebration of "Mayor Pete," author Dale Peck penned an opinion and editorial take-down of Buttigieg. Peck's piece is titled "My Mayor Pete Problem." The New Republic published and quickly retracted Peck's essay after it generated swift and significant criticism. Peck opens with an anecdote from 1992, when a young man named Garfield hit on the then-twenty-four-year-old author. The essayist admits Garfield failed to trigger his "gaydar" and looked like the antithesis of the "ACT UP clone—Doc Martens, Levi's tight or baggy, and activist T-shirts" Peck embodied and fetishized.⁵ Twenty-seven years later, Peck claims Garfield gave him a "pedo vibe" because he said, "We have so much in common, we should get to know each other better." Peck relishes in his friend laughing in Garfield's face after he asked for the writer's number. He claims, "I had more in common with the neighborhood pedo, who was about 50, black, and urban, while I was a white teenager from rural Kansas, than I did with dear old Gar."⁶

I squirmed as I read Peck detail a twenty-seven-year-old grudge against a homonormative man who had the audacity to hit on him. Venom oozes from Peck's remembrance. He devotes the first five of fourteen paragraphs to eviscerating poor Garfield, whose only crimes are his persistence and inability to take a hint. Peck oddly frames this encounter as a duty in the "brotherhood of homos." "When one of your brothers fucks up, you school him," the now fifty-one-yearold man explains, or perhaps queersplains.⁷ Might it have occurred to Peck that he is not the hero of his tale, that his wit is more cruel than funny, and that his investment in queer moralism is as stifling as the conservatism/homonormativity he rejects?

Queer moralism is not to be confused with the conservative moralism that has historically marginalized sexual minorities, nor is it gay men's internalization of homophobia and "turn toward conservative gay politics."⁸ I use the term "queer...