Gradually, we dismantled our active-duty mind-sets and selves, and prepared mentally to return. At a folding table, I sat giving my disassembled M4 and M9 one last, exhaustive cleaning before yielding them immaculate back to Uncle Sam, along with the other gear, from Gore-Tex parkas to a gas mask. Most of the contents of the “three seabags of huah” I’d been issued in Norfolk went into various large bins and boxes to be reissued to the next person who comes along; pants, shirts, boots, and the like were mine to keep. Then, after our three-day sojourn, I was munching on ham and cheese sandwiches lovingly packed for us by the USO at Ramstein, and boarding a 747 for Baltimore.
Back at Norfolk, the focus shifted from our personal well-being to our physical and bureaucratic health. A flurry of paperwork saw to it that we were realigned with parent commands, registered for the VA, and clear of any number of physical ailments. Someone with a clipboard asked how many weeks of leave I was going to take; you were entitled to several, and urged to use them. But I couldn’t be back in South Bend and not be mayor for long. I asked for the longest I figured I could get away with: one week.
At the airport in Detroit, waiting for the connection to South Bend, I realized that being in uniform among civilians is a bit like being an elected official among residents. Heads turn, a few people come to shake your hand, and others glance at you but then look away. I looked for a seat in a quiet corner of the gate, and then got to talking with a lady sitting next to me who was on her way to visit relatives. She didn’t know me from Adam, and as we sat describing her relatives and my own time in the service, I felt for a moment like this might be the last normal conversation I would have for a while. Another passenger seated across from us looked up at me with a discreet, knowing smile as my new acquaintance asked, “So is South Bend home for you?”
South Bend’s airport director had kindly arranged for my parents to come through security so that I could greet them before facing the crowd and the cameras. Mom held a rose, and she and Dad looked as relieved as you would expect. After a few hugs, and a few words, it was time to go out into the main concourse and start being mayor again.
It was about nine in the evening and I’d only been able to give a few hours’ notice to my team, but a sizable crowd was waiting. One City Council member, who had opposed nearly every major initiative I had put forward, barreled past everyone else to embrace me in a bear hug as if I were a long-lost brother, small American flags poking out of his suit pockets. A bit more reservedly, other colleagues, friends, and strangers greeted me one by one. Mark Neal, who had stood in for me, was there, as was Kathryn Roos, who had run the office in my absence. There was Governor Kernan, Mrs. Chismar from Saint Joe High School, Father Brian from Saint James, and some young kids I’d never seen before who had made a welcome-home poster. And there were the TV cameras, of course.
I knew it was my job to give a little speech, and I had prepared in my head what to say—a thank-you to everyone who had helped run the city, to the community that had supported me, and to everyone who came to help welcome me back. I got as far as mentioning that not everyone would get to come home like this, or at all, and began to choke up, barely getting out the rest of what I had to say. I have no memory of the rest of the evening, except that Mom and Dad saw to it that I got home, and that a burger was waiting for me on the dining room table. I ate it as gratefully as I have any meal before or since.
MY STAFF HELD BACK for a few days while I unpacked my gear and reacquainted myself with my house, friends, and family. But the following Monday, it was time to get back to work. Each department had a list of updates and pending decisions.
Resuming the routine of TV appearances, meetings, emails, and decisions wasn’t that hard, but regaining a civilian mentality took longer than I expected. I found myself speaking frequently with Brian Pawlowski, my deputy chief of staff and a Marine Iraq veteran, about how to make sure I was taking the residents’ concerns as seriously as they did, even when everything seemed to have less urgency than what I was used to overseas.
One day soon after I returned, Kathryn came into the office with a worried expression to let me know there had been a bomb threat at the courthouse nearby. I walked over to the window and peered down at the courthouse complex, then turned and thanked her for the heads-up. “Good to know—but unless it’s a huge bomb, we’re probably outside the blast radius. It would have to be a five-hundred-pounder, which doesn’t seem likely, so I wouldn’t worry too much.”
I nodded appreciatively and went back to my desk to resume working, while she gave a sidelong glance and retreated into the hall. A few minutes later, she knocked on the door again, probably after consulting Brian, to tactfully ask if I was thinking as a civilian when I was reacting. She wanted to see if evacuating the building might be appropriate, and I took the point; we agreed to check with the fire chief. (The threat turned out to be a false alarm.)
Getting into a car, I would sometimes pull so hard the door would fly open and bounce on its hinge, forgetting this was not the heavy, armored Land Cruiser door I was used to. And merging onto a highway one day with my mother in the passenger seat, I caught myself just in time before barking, “CLEAR RIGHT?” to her, as I would to the gunny sergeant, to make sure we could safely proceed.
THE COMMUNITY WAS NOT JUST accommodating but effusive, too much for my comfort. Someone organized a welcome-home event at the Century Center complete with a visit by the South Bend Cubs mascot. I felt uneasy, especially when Joe Kernan, an actual war hero, came onstage to thank me for my service. I was proud to have served, but I was one of hundreds of thousands, most of whom had nothing like this kind of welcome. The only way to reconcile the treatment I was getting was to tell myself, and the audience, that I accepted their well-wishes on behalf of everyone else who had served, and those still out there.
There were exceptions to the kindness. One far-right blog ran a piece titled: “South Bend Welcomes Spook Mayor Back Home: What Have You Done For Us Lately, Pete?” The article said the public of South Bend “still hasn’t figured out that the man they elected as mayor has likely been working for the CIA all along.” A still nuttier individual showed up at a speech I was giving and demanded to know if I was prepared to admit that the CIA had introduced heroin to Afghanistan.
But there wasn’t time for battling with conspiracy theorists, any more than there was time to wallow in some kind of patriotic glow. The rhythms of South Bend waited for no one, and it was time to get back to work. The budget was due for passage in a matter of days. There was just one year to go on the “1,000 houses in 1,000 days” effort. It was almost time to announce my plan to run for reelection. And, I had realized, it was time to get serious about sorting out my personal life.
5 That is, the Central Command’s area of responsibility, which included the Middle East and Afghanistan.
16
Becoming One Person
If not for the deployment, I might never have found my way to Chasten. Before going overseas, I had felt comfortable being more than one person, as we all sometimes must, according to the roles we are called to play. I knew how to toggle between mayor mode, officer mode, friend mode, and so on. But something about exposure to danger impresses upon you that a life is not only fragile but single, with one beginning and one end. It heightens the desire for your life to make sense as a whole, not just from certain angles. And with this comes renewed pressure for internal contradictions to be resolved, one way or another. For me, that meant sudden urgency around a question that had lingered unanswered for all of adulthood: how to reconcile my professional life with the fact that I am gay.
In the years after I had figured this fact out for myself, but before I was ready to be open about it, dating seemed completely off the table. Even if I had sought to have a romantic life before coming out, I’m not sure I could have figured out how to pull it off. My friends and peers were all busy dating, coupling, marrying. But sitting out never felt like a huge sacrifice to me, because keeping up with my stud
ies and work was consuming all the energy I had, especially once I was elected; the city was a jealous bride.
But that effect started to wear off as I got older. I had always wanted to have a family, and crossing into my thirties made clear that the vague and distant future in which I expected that to happen couldn’t remain vague and distant forever. If I really wanted a family, sooner or later I would need to take some actual steps in that direction. The problem was that there is no way to raise a child—or in my case, go on a date in your own city—unless you are prepared to live openly.
Steadily, with each close friend’s wedding or emailed baby news, the force of this simple truth gained ground against my awareness of the professional peril holding me back. But that peril was real. My military career was theoretically safe, now that the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy had been repealed. I no longer stood to lose my commission as an officer merely for living openly. But what about my civilian job? South Bend had an ordinance forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation—I myself had signed it into law in 2012 after it passed in our council—but it was not exactly applicable in my case. As an elected official, your boss is the people of the city. If the people fire you for being gay, it might be discrimination, but it’s not like you can sue them. I was also not eager to become a poster child for LGBT issues; I had strongly supported these causes from the beginning, but did not want to be defined by them.
So I might have kept dragging my feet through my thirties, too, if it hadn’t been for the deployment. But preparing the letter on my last day before leaving home, sealing it in an envelope marked “just in case” and setting it gently in the desk drawer, had required as much of me as the hardest day of training. It forced me to think about the cohesion, or lack thereof, in my life. I had packed my bags reflecting on the possibility that I might get killed in action, thirty-two years old, single for basically all my adult life. From then on it was obvious that if I did come home all right, I needed to come out so I could get on with some kind of personal life. After I safely returned, it was simply a matter of when.
BEFORE EXPLAINING IT TO THE WORLD, I had to explain it to some people in my life. For every important step you take, certainly in politics but in life more generally, there is a “do not surprise” list. In my case, the top of the list was Mom and Dad. I felt they would be supportive, but for some reason I had not found the courage to include them in the tiny number of friends I had told. And so, at my parents’ dinner table one Sunday evening in January of 2015, I found myself, a grown man and the mayor of a sizable city, sweating through my palms and pushing remnants of ice cream around with a spoon while working up the will to change the subject of conversation from an upcoming council meeting to the fact that their son, their only child, was attracted to men.
“I wanted to tell you something,” I finally managed to begin.
“Okay,” Dad said, both of them subtly and quietly bracing. Announcements, of any kind, are not typical at this dinner table.
Then, after a short preamble consisting of what I’m sure were a few convoluted sentences about moving ahead in life and being transparent with those around me, I made my way to the phrase that had to be said out loud: I’m gay.
They weren’t terribly surprised. I hadn’t brought a girlfriend home in more than a decade, and I think they understood what to make of my not mentioning any kind of romantic life in the years since. The close friends I had told included some who were surprised, some who were not, and some who had assumed as time went by that I was more or less asexual. But simply by virtue of being my parents, they probably understood all this long before I did. Both made it clear it didn’t change anything in our relationship as a family.
If any disappointment surfaced at the table that night, it came after Mom looked at me, with a little light in her eyes, and asked, “Is there someone?” Only after answering no, and seeing the light fade a little, did I realize that the tone of her question had been one of hope. As moms go, she had been pretty sparing with any pressure to produce grandchildren, but I still knew that nothing would bring more joy to her life. Her hopeful question, and my disappointing answer, made for one more reason that I had to figure out a way to go public, so I could begin adding this dimension to my life. No, there wasn’t someone at the moment. But I wished there were, and if I could figure out the process of coming out publicly, then one day there would be.
SOMEDAY, POLITICIANS WON’T HAVE TO come out as gay any more than one “comes out” as straight. Someone like me would just show up at a social function with a date who was of the same sex, and everyone would figure it out and shrug. Maybe it’s already getting to be like that, in some coastal cities. But not in Indiana, especially not after the “Religious Freedom” debacle exploded that same spring of 2015. The very season when I was asking friends for advice on how to approach coming out publicly was the spring in which my state became nationally infamous for one of the most visible backward lurches on LGBT equality. Coming out was supposed to be a personal hurdle for me to clear, not a political statement, but doing so now meant it would be even more freighted with the complications of being openly gay in Mike Pence’s Indiana.
It became obvious that no matter how I did it, disclosing this very private aspect of my life would be viewed by strangers through a political lens. And the closer I came to feeling ready, having told most of my close friends and alerted my campaign staff, the more it became not just a political question but a practical one. How, exactly, was I supposed to do this? The whole idea of having to come out irritated me—why should it be anyone’s business?—but I knew that in the current atmosphere, just casually mentioning it somewhere, or being seen out with a male date, would set off weeks or months of confusion, speculation, and clarification. What I needed to do was get this out there: simply, publicly, and clearly.
The churn of life in office doesn’t lend itself to reflection and preparation for important life decisions, but here again the military played a helpful role, in the form of a forced change of scene. Still in the Reserve, I owed the Navy two weeks a year of active duty for training, and in June I was to go to the Defense Intelligence Agency Headquarters in Washington for a course on military intelligence. Strange as it sounds, this stint of military duty was almost like a vacation. I would be expected to work just forty hours a week, a positively relaxing tempo compared to my schedule as a full-time mayor running for reelection. It was a kind of political Sabbath. There was time to work out, eat properly, catch up with old friends over dinner, and get a good night’s sleep. My phone would not be going off constantly in my pocket; it wasn’t even allowed inside the secure area. And no one, besides the occasional acquaintance I might run into from my Afghanistan days, would recognize me as anything but the rather nondescript Lieutenant Buttigieg. For someone living the frenzied life of a visible elected official, the precincts of Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, better known as JBAB, might as well be a Swiss resort.
I reported Monday morning to DIA headquarters at JBAB, collected an ID badge, and walked in past the Scud missile on display at the entrance and through the large, daylit atrium toward the core of the enormous building. Looking for a cup of coffee, I walked a long hall wearing my khaki uniform as hundreds of civilians and other uniformed members came and went. I glanced down at the insignia on my chest, conscious that the wartime deployment had added to my military résumé, more or less readable by scanning the color code of ribbons and insignia on an officer’s breast. On my right was a wall with framed pictures of the officials comprising our chain of command—President Obama, of course, and Secretary Carter. There was the photo of the director, General Stewart (his predecessor, General Flynn, had been forced out the previous year), and a succession of other generals, colonels, and other assorted senior officers. All this was par for the course at a large military installation, but when I got to the area with the coffee shop, barber, and path to the cafeteria, I was greeted by an unexpected display. It was Pride month, and a
wall had been put up with colored stickers in a rainbow configuration. People were invited to write a message about how they supported their diverse DIA coworkers and stick it to the wall. Nearby, a poster advertised a speaker series on LGBT workplace issues.
Years earlier, when I’d first come out to a close college friend, he had patted me on the shoulder and teased: “Well, you didn’t make it easy on yourself.” Between being an Indiana elected official and a military officer, it was hard to tell which side of my professional existence was going to be less LGBT-friendly. But just a few years later, it was clear that the world was at least starting to change. After all, a bipartisan coalition had beaten back RFRA in Indiana. And the military had gone from firing any service member who tried to come out, to actively welcoming its “out” members. There was even hope that the Supreme Court would extend marriage equality across the land later that year. Neither Indiana nor the uniformed services were going to be on the cutting edge of social change, but, as I looked at this rainbow-colored exhibit in, of all places, the halls of the DIA, it now seemed being open about my sexual orientation might not be the career death sentence it had been less than five years earlier.
I had concluded that the simplest way to disclose this to my community was in writing, so during downtime in Washington I began taking notes for a short piece for the South Bend Tribune. I returned home and continued rewriting it over and over again, asking some friends to look over the drafts, until I felt I had gotten down what I wanted to say most. Still believing that “coming out” should someday be a non-event, I titled it “Why Coming Out Matters, and Why It Shouldn’t Have To,” but the paper’s editors shortened the headline to only the first half.
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