Pete Buttigieg might get himself canceled, but it will be worth it.
During a radio interview this week, the South Bend, Indiana, mayor approached un-woke territory. Buttigieg was asked about the liberal news outlets that specifically cover and cater to the gay and transgender communities, such as the Advocate, Queerty.com, Out magazine, and more.
Mayor Pete had harsh words for them, essentially saying they aren’t representative of the community and make non-flamboyant men like himself feel ostracized from the gay community. As reported by the Washington Examiner, Buttigieg told the radio host that he “can’t even read the LGBT media anymore” because it’s all “too gay, not gay enough, wrong kind of gay.”
“All I know is that life became a lot easier when I just started allowing myself to be myself, and I’ll let other people write up whether I’m ‘too this’ or ‘too that,’” Buttigieg said.
Mayor Pete is right about this.
The LGBT media is (mostly) flaming garbage.https://t.co/Afj0rHGp3x
— Brad Polumbo (@brad_polumbo) September 20, 2019
It is worth noting, as the Advocate pointed out in an article pushing back against the mayor’s outburst, that some of the most egregious articles questioning Buttigieg’s sexuality have come from liberal outlets such as Slate and the New Republic, not traditional gay media. However, Buttigieg’s broader criticism rings completely true. The LGBT media is basically a joke. Its extremist, sexually libertine, left-wing content is not really representative of many actual gay people outside of San Francisco coffee shops or New York City gay bars.
On any given day, visit the homepage of ostensible news outlets such as the Advocate or Queerty, and you will find sexually explicit content. On the day of this writing, for instance, the Advocate’s homepage featured an article entitled “Kiko Dionisio Takes Gabe LaDuke to the Beach in His Underwear” and another covering “An Erotic Tour of Berlin.” It literally took me two minutes to find these examples.
So for the many straight-laced gay and lesbian people like Buttigieg and myself, the gay media is indeed cringe-y and unrepresentative, to the point of being almost unreadable. We do not see ourselves in their depiction of the gay lifestyle, which more closely resembles a coked-up L.A. Pride Parade than the lived experience of most gay people.
So, too, the politics of the gay and transgender media are extreme and well to the left of what most gay people actually believe. They puppet ultra-progressive talking points and put an uber-partisan spin on the news that skews heavily in favor of Democrats. The Advocate, for example, boasts a headline today that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is “visiting a transphobic school.” Which is to say, she’s visiting a Catholic school. And its homepage links to a glowing profile covering how “Queer Teens Will Save Us From the Climate Catastrophe.”
The gay media’s politics are frankly more in line with a university gender studies department than with real-world gay peoples’ values. It really speaks volumes that even a very liberal gay man like Buttigieg feels so strongly that they’re out on the fringe that even he can’t stand reading them.
