Because it is publishing stuff today that no reputable outlet would touch.
On Friday, the New Republic published a meandering, nasty, and disturbingly personal op-ed by gay author Dale Peck, who attacks South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg as the “Uncle Tom” of the gay community. But instead of calling him “Uncle Tom,” Peck calls the 2020 Democratic candidate “Mary Pete.” Clever.
The article is every bit as reprehensible as it sounds, each paragraph worse than the last. However, there is one passage that stands out above all others for its sheer viciousness. That passage reads as follows — it is not safe for work, and I would keep it away from children, the easily offended, and the faint of heart:
All this makes Mary Pete different from every other left-leaning neoliberal in exactly zero ways. Because let’s face it. The only thing that distinguishes the mayor of South Bend from all those other well-educated reasonably intelligent white dudes who wanna be president is what he does with his dick (and possibly his ass, although I get a definite top-by-default vibe from him, which is to say that I bet he thinks about getting fucked but he’s too uptight to do it). So let’s dish the dish, homos. You know and I know that Mary Pete is a gay teenager. He’s a fifteen-year-old boy in a Chicago bus station wondering if it’s a good idea to go home with a fifty-year-old man so that he’ll finally understand what he is. He’s been out for, what, all of four years, and if I understand the narrative, he married the first guy he dated. And we all know what happens when gay people don’t get a real adolescence because they spent theirs in the closet: they go through it after they come out. And because they’re adults with their own incomes and no parents to rein them in they do it on steroids (often literally). If Shortest Way Home (I mean really, can you think of a more treacly title?) makes one thing clear, Mary Pete was never a teenager. But you can’t run away from that forever. Either it comes out or it eats you up inside. It can be fun, it can be messy, it can be tragic, it can be progenitive, transformative, ecstatic, or banal, but the last thing I want in the White House is a gay man staring down 40 who suddenly realizes he didn’t get to have all the fun his straight peers did when they were teenagers. I’m not saying I don’t want him to shave his chest or do Molly or try being the lucky Pierre (the timing’s trickier than it looks, but it can be fun when you work it out). These are rites of passage for a lot of gay men, and it fuels many aspects of gay culture. But like I said, I don’t want it in the White House. I want a man whose mind is on his job, not what could have been—or what he thinks he can still get away with.
Dial it back, my man. This is not your personal therapy session.
One can hardly imagine this being published before all of the magazine’s competent editors quit en masse in 2014 after Franklin Foer and Leon Wieseltier were forced out by Hughes. What editor would ever sign off on this? It does not even rise to the level of your average troll comment on YouTube.
Finally, put aside the content of Peck’s petty attack for a moment and recognize that his op-ed is just bad writing. It takes him a full 1,342 words before he even gets around to mentioning Buttigieg. That is amazing for an article titled, “My Mayor Pete Problem.”
