Other cities, from West Palm Beach to Louisville, had begun reversing this sixties-style road design, restoring two-way patterns to slow traffic a little and encourage more of a pedestrian- and bike-friendly downtown. The idea seemed radical to many, since it often involved actually reducing the carrying capacity of roads. Growing up, I had only ever heard of roads being widened; now my planners were speaking of “road diets,” a concept that I knew immediately would be difficult to sell.
The plan also required us to install roundabouts, in order to properly distribute traffic through the redesigned road network. These were particularly controversial among residents who refused to believe that drivers could learn to use them, or that trucks and snowplows could fit through them (even though, obviously, we had checked).
Still, to me it was clearly the right way forward. And after over a year of refinement, dozens of public meetings, and a series of council votes to approve the vision and arrange the funding, it was set to become a reality. It also quickly became a campaign issue. Kelly Jones, my Republican opponent, made opposing it a central part of her campaign. One op-ed writer in the Tribune predicted that it would “kill any prospect of true revitalization and future growth above the ground floor.” A man-on-the-street interview for a TV station yielded this plainer assessment: “I think the roundabouts are stupid.” And in a debate, Jones sarcastically invoked my policy of public downtown Wi-Fi access as she predicted such long traffic jams that people would turn to in-drive entertainment. “I’m glad we’ll have Wi-Fi, so those people stuck in traffic will have something to do.”
I was convinced that the community would eventually embrace the vision once they could see the results—an improved downtown and more business investment. Indeed, now that the project is complete, the result has been an estimated $90 million in new investment that has come to downtown from businesses saying the street projects were a major factor in their decision. Traffic, meanwhile, has only slowed by a minute or two in most cases. But during the 2015 reelection campaign, most of the improvements hadn’t been completed, and people couldn’t yet see the results. This, too, would cost some votes—but how many?
FORTUNATELY, EVEN FOR A VOTER who disagreed with my decisions in the police matter and was skeptical of the plan for roundabouts and two-way streets, there was no denying the city’s accelerating transformation. Unemployment had been cut in half, and had gone from well above the national average to within one point of the U.S. rate. Meanwhile, census estimates showed population levels increasing after a decade of contraction.
Experience corroborated the numbers. The twenty-five-story Chase Tower, the tallest building in our city, had gone vacant after a bankruptcy and receivership, its condition deteriorating so quickly that I had asked staff to estimate the cost of blowing it up. Now a buyer had emerged and was investing over $30 million to restore the building and open a new hotel there. Another problem property, the eerily empty former College Football Hall of Fame, also saw a buyer emerge and build a hotel on adjacent land, mentioning that our streetscape plan had helped motivate them to invest. A new owner had acquired the South Bend Cubs and invested millions to enhance our baseball stadium. Customers were dining on sushi in what had been a vacant former chicken wing restaurant downtown, while in one of our lowest-income neighborhoods, newly built co-op housing was emerging on formerly vacant lots in the wake of our “1,000 houses in 1,000 days” effort.
No less promising was the activity around the industrial area that formerly hosted decaying Studebaker buildings, largely thanks to industries that had not existed when cars were being manufactured there. On a grassy expanse so serene that it was almost impossible to imagine the decade of work it had taken Mayor Luecke’s administration just to remove the collapsing factories that once covered it, a sleek new building had now been built for a data-hosting and analytics company first incubated on the campus of Notre Dame. It would soon receive a neighbor, in the form of a high-tech laboratory for turbomachinery research, drawing top aerospace companies to the area. Meanwhile, another data-center entrepreneur had purchased the eight-hundred-thousand-square-foot main assembly building of Studebaker—a six-story brick mass extending a fifth of a mile, long quiet but almost too stout even to demolish—and was proposing to create a mixed-use technology center in what had been literally the biggest physical symbol of our city’s decline.
Progress was palpable. Especially after the city’s 150th anniversary celebrations that spring of 2015, I could say with a straight face that our city was experiencing not just a comeback but something akin to a miracle.
WOULD VOTERS AGREE? If applause at the debate and general sentiment among people I ran into were anything to go by, I was in good shape when the sun came up on November 3. I knew what it felt like to go into a losing battle and a winning one, and this felt like the latter. But what if I had misjudged my popularity? It seemed at least possible that voters might say one thing out loud but feel another when it came to my sexual orientation, my handling of a sensitive issue, or even my leave of absence for military duty. We would only truly know when the results came in.
Huddled with a few key staff and loved ones in a small room off to the side of my office, home to the only working television set on the top floor, I fiddled with the antenna as the signal cut in and out, watching the local news. When the numbers finally did appear, they disproved what I had said to Mike that first election night: we won with 80 percent of the vote. It didn’t only vindicate the work we had done over those four years; it showed that I would be judged based on that work alone. Our socially conservative community had either moved forward in its acceptance of minority sexual orientations, or decided it didn’t care. Either way, I had a mandate to continue our work, and a deep sense of acceptance in the community.
Of all the speeches I’ve given, the short one I offered in the West Side Democratic Club that night was perhaps the most heartfelt yet:
Four years ago, I turned up as a political unknown, a rookie proposing a fresh start. And when I showed up asking for that fresh start, you gave me an opportunity to, you endorsed me as a leader and you supported me as a friend. A year ago when it came time for me to step away from the job and the home that I love to go overseas and take up arms under the colors of our nation you supported me as a brother. Earlier this year when I was at the most vulnerable moment in my public and private life, you embraced me as a son. The City of South Bend means the world to me. I love South Bend.
Analytical by nature, I surprised even myself with the emotional tenor of my words to the crowd that night. But I was moved by the support at the polls, which felt not only like a mandate for my administration’s work, but also an affirmation of my relationship with the city that had produced me, welcomed me home, and accepted my sometimes novel way of doing business. A close observer might also have detected an additional influence on my tone and words that night. Most would see only the effusiveness you’d expect in a candidate relishing an overwhelming electoral margin. But those who knew me best would recognize something new in my countenance that night—the proverbial glow of a young man in love.
17
Becoming Whole
If you saw Chasten next to me at a restaurant or a party, with his tortoiseshell round glasses and gingham shirt with rolled-up sleeves tucked into a pair of jeans, you might assume he was in politics, too, or a young lawyer, perhaps. You might guess that he and I met at Harvard, or that he was finishing up his doctorate at Notre Dame. You wouldn’t realize, at first, that you were seeing an avatar of Middle America and of the challenges of millennial life. You wouldn’t know that you were looking at a 4-H boy turned theater kid, a small-town product who found his way alone to Germany as an exchange student, or that he was the first in his family to complete college and move on to cannily survive alone in a big city, a graduate student with top grades whose teenage years had included a period of homelessness in Michigan. I hadn’t seen any of that, either; I just saw a nice-looking guy on an app, and
wanted to meet the man behind the big smile and blue eyes in the photo of him by the lakeshore. So I tapped the box on the right.
Chasten (pronounced to rhyme with “fast in”) was living at the time in Chicago, pushing through coursework for a master’s in education at DePaul and paying his way by working as a substitute teacher in Chicago public schools, sometimes crashing on a friend’s couch while letting out his apartment on Airbnb for extra income. I was a mayor, newly out of the closet and ready, at long last, to start dating, prepared that summer of 2015 to begin to experience the thrills and setbacks that most of my friends had gone through fifteen years earlier.
I had come out of the closet in order to make it possible, at last, to create a meaningful personal life. I was already well into my thirties, and hoping, as I’ve described, to have a family someday. The politics were what they were. Now that I didn’t have to worry about being spotted or outed, it was time to start dating. But how? How is a gay mayor—or any mayor—supposed to go about getting a date?
The closer to home I looked, the harder it seemed. It could be an ethical minefield; a mayor in his own city can certainly get his calls returned, but there’s also the risk that someone will completely misunderstand why you’re inviting them to meet for a coffee at Chicory Café or a pint at Fiddler’s Hearth. Farther afield, friends from college were willing and eager to introduce me to people they knew. But most of the eligible guys in question lived in New York or Washington. To most of them, I was lost in the expanse of “flyover country,” probably even more remote than if I were overseas. Since I wasn’t moving anytime soon, I was going to have to think closer to home.
But when it came to South Bend, it wasn’t even clear where to look. I thought of the countless local doctors and business leaders of my parents’ generation who had seemed intent over the years on fixing me up with their bright and lovely daughters. Where were these would-be matchmakers now, and how was it that not one of them had a son or nephew that they wanted me to meet? My city had never felt so small.
In the military, sometimes they talk about “training age” to describe the difference between longevity and experience. For example, if you are a forty-year-old major trained in field artillery and then switch to intelligence, you might have the same training age as a private first-class twenty years your junior when it came to a specific skill like cryptography.
That’s how I felt about dating and romance: I was in my thirties, but my training age, so to speak, was practically zero. On my thirty-third birthday, I was starting my fourth year as the mayor of a sizable city. I had served in a foreign war and dined with senators and governors. I had seen Red Square and the Great Pyramids of Giza, knew how to order a sandwich in seven languages, and was the owner of a large historic home on the St. Joseph River. But I had absolutely no idea what it was like to be in love.
I’M FAR FROM THE FIRST PERSON to find himself in that kind of strange and embarrassing position—years in the closet have done that to millions of people—but my situation was still more unusual. In fact, it was unique: the scenario of a thirty-something mayor, single, gay, interested in a long-term relationship, and looking for a date in Indiana must have been a first. Luckily, for this twenty-first-century problem, my generation had invented a ready solution: a proliferation of websites and apps promised to connect me to datable guys within any radius I chose.
I was young enough to try it, but also just old enough to consider it newfangled and a little risky. I wasn’t immune to a previous generation’s stigma when it comes to online dating. But I was living through the tipping point when it was becoming clear that many, perhaps most, new long-term relationships and even marriages had begun online. So I logged on. Now came another set of puzzles. What do you put down for “occupation”? What do you do if the best photos you have of yourself depict you in a suit with people standing around clapping? The pictures on my phone all looked great for politics, terrible for dating. Ribbon cuttings. Groundbreakings. Graduation speeches. Do you hide that you’re a politician? Maybe, but you need to tell someone your name in order to date them. Then what? People have Google, and they’re not stupid. Coming out as gay had been a hard thing to do in the political world; coming out as a politician in the online dating world was even more perplexing.
Confronted with the puzzle of how to describe my day job, I went for a middle ground—not to conceal that I was an elected official, but not to lead with it, either. Friends helped me pick out the right photos for a profile—most of them doing something social and looking casual, but one giving a speech, an obligatory one from a beach, and, of course, one in uniform. (Anyone who claims to be above using military service for dating purposes is lying.) I looked mostly for people in Chicago, near enough to drive but far enough to be outside the viewing area of our TV stations, where most people had never heard of me. After setting up accounts one by one on websites and apps like OkCupid and Match.com, I started matching with people. A few chats led nowhere, then I found some guys who actually seemed promising, and started arranging dates.
On that August weekend when some algorithm served Chasten and me up to each other, I had more time than usual to spend on my phone. I’d just been through surgery to address a hernia that had probably resulted from my deployment-inspired weight-lifting regimen. So I was spending a lot of time on the couch with an ice pack, binge-watching Game of Thrones and checking for updates, when Chasten and I started chatting through an app called Hinge. This app talks to your Facebook profile and is supposed to introduce you to people with mutual friends, though in our case it didn’t reveal any common acquaintances but just vaguely said, “connected through your social network.”
It started with the usual small talk, something about weekend plans and watching TV, but it became clear to me that he had a quicker wit than most. Our first conversation is lost to the recesses of the deep web now, impossible for either of us to retrieve, but I remember being intrigued, then wanting to meet him in person. It helped that he neither dwelt on my position nor pretended not to notice it. A FaceTime conversation followed—his idea—another nice modern convenience that previous generations might have appreciated, to get a feel for whether you were about to go out with a jerk or an ax murderer. Each of us must have passed that test: we decided to meet up.
Other than the same-sex aspect, our first date was something our parents could have recognized as typical, almost vintage. He rented a car to drive in from Chicago for what was supposed to be a coffee but, thanks to slow eastbound traffic, turned into a beer at Fiddler’s Hearth, our downtown Irish pub. I talked about South Bend, he talked about his family and his experiences in the classroom. In my pocket were two tickets to that night’s baseball game, in case the date was going well, which it was. After some pub food, I proposed that we walk down to the ballpark to see our own South Bend Cubs take on the Great Lakes Loons. Somewhere around the sixth inning, we ditched the game to take a long walk along the river, through downtown, and over to the churning and multicolored River Lights display that I had just inaugurated a few months earlier at the climax of the SB150 celebrations.
Crossing back toward downtown along the railing of the Colfax Avenue Bridge, I felt the slight brushing of his hand coming closer to mine, and I took hold of it. Nothing in my life, from shaking hands with a president to experiencing my first rocket attack, matched the thrill of holding Chasten’s hand for the first time. I was electrified. We got back to the car just as the post-game fireworks began, and as the explosions and lit colors unfolded over us, he went in for a kiss. We began to see each other every weekend, and it only took a few weeks for me to acknowledge the obvious: I was in love.
BEING A SOCIALLY AWARE YOUNG PERSON, Chasten follows and cares about politics, but his background was not political at all. His parents, who have a mom-and-pop landscaping business in Traverse City, have voted for candidates from both parties but rarely discuss politics at home. Unlike mine, his political awareness came not as a dinner-table inheritance but
as a response to how his world was shaped by the attitudes and decisions of those in power.
As I saw in those first photos online, he has two tattoos. On the back of his right calf is a black infinity symbol, which he got to honor his mother, Sherri, after she was diagnosed with cancer. On his left tricep is a rectangular tattoo that resembles the flag of a country, red, green, and blue—it’s one of the first things I noticed in that first picture of him that showed up on my phone, smiling brightly someplace overlooking Lake Michigan. Actually it is not a flag, but the logo of Jif brand peanut butter, in honor of his father, Terry, who lived out of a car for much of his younger years and went on to build a stable middle-class life, home, and business. For Terry, Jif had once been a luxury; having it on hand in the cupboard was the measure of a decent lifestyle. Terry would repeatedly promise to his three boys that no matter what, he would see to it that they would have Jif on the shelves. If one thing was immediately obvious about Chasten, it was his loyalty when it came to family; in addition to the tattoos he wore a ring that, he explained, was one of a set of three he had purchased, one for each of the Glezman brothers.
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