Chasten Buttigieg won’t run away from the only place that feels like home

“I don’t want to run away from the only place that truly felt like home because it hasn’t gotten as perfect as I imagined it could be,” says Chasten Buttigieg.

The author, speaker, advocate, and husband of U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, is talking to me about Traverse City, Michigan. Last year, the Buttigieges bought a house in the town known for Sleeping Bear Dunes and cherry farms on Lake Michigan’s northeast corner, adding one more gay couple and a pair of adopted twins to the population of 15,702.

In May of this year, Buttigieg released a young adult edition of his 2020 memoir I Have Something to Tell You. With an increase in book bans targeting LGBTQ+ authors and other marginalized communities, particularly those writing stories for queer youth, the age-appropriate adaptation offers a compelling case for unconditional love and the ramifications of when that support comes with strings attached. 

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Buttigieg writes in captivating detail about growing up just outside the northern Michigan town with a “Main Street USA kind of vibe” — a darker side all too familiar to those who grew up LGBTQ+. Bullied throughout school, he describes in his book one incident in which he was called fa***t in the locker room while older students surrounded him. Another time, tormentors grabbed Buttigieg by his backpack and shoved him to the ground before his brother intervened. 

Buttigieg got away from Traverse City while still in high school with help from a German student exchange program. After returning to the U.S., he came out to his parents, and while they didn’t tell him to move out, his feelings of being a disappointment to his parents compelled him to leave the home he grew up in. Buttigieg couch-surfed and lived out of his car for the summer, moved back in with his parents and then attended college in Wisconsin. He continued his studies in graduate school at Chicago’s DePaul University, meeting then-Mayor Pete on a dating app. They married three years later and have been on a high-profile trajectory as the Democratic Party’s most famous gay couple.

‘The difference between who I was and who the world expected me to be’

“I felt like I was defined by the opinions of the people around me,” Buttigieg tells LGBTQ Nation on a Zoom call after dropping off twins Joseph and Penelope at daycare. “I felt like there was no way I could be out and successful or even safe in northern Michigan at that time.”

But Buttigieg says Traverse City has evolved into a town with more LGBTQ+ acceptance. 

“It doesn’t mean everything’s perfect in northern Michigan, but, for example, when I was speaking at my alma mater high school in 2019, they had a GSA [gay-straight alliance],” he says. “There’s an Up North Pride organization. We did not have Pride growing up, and now we have a whole weeklong celebration. A former mayor of Traverse City [Jim Carruthers] was gay.”

“Gay flight,” the migration of LGBTQ+ people away from the places where they grew up, often drives them toward larger cities where they can find more acceptance. The experience has been common for decades and is still part of many queer peoples’ narratives. A 2022 Williams Institute study found that 32.6 percent of LGBTQ+ students reported picking a college in another city or state specifically to get away from family, compared to 14.1 percent of cisgender, heterosexual students.

In popular culture, gay flight is often perceived as a single move to a place more accepting of LGBTQ+ people. But for many, it’s more about the desire to get away from somewhere, out of the range of those whose disappointment or shame would be crushing, so that an individual feels empowered to explore their identity and live authentically.

A 2022 University of California, Riverside study analyzed survey data from 1.3 million U.S. residents about migration and found that gay men and lesbians were likely to leave gay-unfriendly places but did not always move to gay-friendly places.

“One possible interpretation of these findings is that it is easier to leave a bad place than it is to end up in a good place,” said lead author Emily Esposito. Moving to a queer-friendly area can be expensive, and it may be hard to find a job, but for many young LGBTQ+ people, anywhere is better than close to their families of origin.

In his book, Buttigieg describes how, during middle school, he imagined moving to New York City when he “started to understand the difference between who I was inside and who the world expected me to be.” Describing his high school year in Germany, he writes that “the point of going abroad was to escape that secretiveness” of “trying to keep my real self hidden.”

Buttigieg also recalls backlash to early attempts at LGBTQ+ advocacy in the region. In 2001, Traverse City put rainbow bumper stickers with the words “We Are Traverse City” on city vehicles in response to a spate of hate crimes, including one where three skinheads tried to beat up a gay man and another where a cross was burned on a Black family’s lawn. While today, rainbows are mostly associated with the LGBTQ+ movement, in the recent past, other movements for peace and equality have used the symbol. Still, the Detroit Free Press reported on conservatives’ outrage that the “gay-pride symbol” appeared on city vehicles, and the national anti-LGBTQ+ organization American Family Association got people riled up about the stickers.

The backlash led to a crowded public meeting where city leaders ordered the stickers be removed from public vehicles, and then-Mayor Larry Hardy told reporters that he felt “kind of conned” because, he said, he didn’t know that the rainbow was associated with LGBTQ+ people.

Buttigieg would have been around 12 years old at the time, and the incident still haunts him. “The homophobic backlash to a bumper sticker was just so vociferous that people ripped them off of police cars and city vehicles themselves,” he says, “And that proved to me at a very young age, OK, people don’t like gay people here.”

He also remembers Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming college student who was driven out to the country, tied to a fence post, tortured, and left to die.

“I was growing up around a lot of pickup trucks and fence posts, too,” Buttigieg, who was nine at the time, recalls. 

Moreover, he wasn’t secure enough in his family to find refuge there.

“I felt like my family’s love was conditional; they loved me very much, but they would only love me if I were, you know, straight and successful and athletic and all these other things,” Buttigieg says. “So it felt like I had to get that distance if I was ever going to come out of the closet or feel safe or comfortable enough to be myself.” 

The time he spent without a home after telling his parents that he was gay (described in a chapter of his book titled “Running”) is a testament to how internalized homophobia doesn’t disappear in a single moment of coming out. 

“Internalized homophobia is… when you spend 18 years of your life only hearing that something about you is wrong, not having any role models, not having anyone affirming your identity or telling you that it’s OK,” says Buttigieg. “So, by the time I was 18, I hated that about myself.”

“By the time I came out, I really needed to catch my breath,” says Buttigieg. “I was focusing on surviving, but I had a lot to unlearn, too, and a lot to let go of. Because I felt freer, being out of the closet, but that didn’t wipe away 18 years of hating that about myself.”

‘Remember that the majority of the American people support LGBTQ equality’

Buttigieg’s two memoirs offer different perspectives on queer identity, coming out, and building a family. His first, I Have Something to Tell You, recounts his youth in Traverse City, his struggles with financing college, and his time on the 2020 campaign trail with his husband. 

Buttigieg’s new book, I Have Something to Tell You—For Young Adults: A Memoir, is more personal and concludes with his college years, focusing on how he experienced homophobia and learned to overcome it.

“This book is specifically about learning to love yourself, coming out in a country where you question whether you will truly belong,” he says of the YA version of his memoir, adding that he hopes that it’s “impactful, educational, and helpful” to young people and adults.

Buttigieg’s book arrives at a critical time for LGBTQ+ youth.

For the past several years, conservatives have relentlessly attacked supportive adults concerned about the well-being of LGBTQ+ youth as “groomers” or worse. With Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) at the helm, Florida passed and expanded its Don’t Say Gay law, which bans teachers from talking to their students about LGBTQ+ people. Lawmakers like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) are trying — and have succeeded in 22 states — to ban doctors from providing gender-affirming care to transgender youth. Internet trolls like Chaya Raichik (aka “LibsofTikTok”) and James Lindsay have proliferated, targeting supportive teachers and medical professionals, resulting in threats and other attacks.

Related:

Pete Buttigieg had the most beautiful response to Mike Johnson’s hatred of LGBTQ+ people

Johnson said same-sex marriage is “the dark harbinger of chaos,” but Buttigieg didn’t stoop to his level.

The attacks are “sad and disgusting and lazy,” Buttigieg says. Like many LGBTQ+ adults, he’s watching queer and trans youth grow up in a similar environment to what he grew up with in the late 1990s and 2000s. 

“When I’m on the road, if I get the opportunity to meet with student groups or student organizations, the first thing I always say is, ‘Sorry. I’m sorry on behalf of the adults.’” The attacks don’t “speak well for our government or leadership, and you, as a young person, should enjoy being a kid.”

“On the road,” this past year, has been his tour promoting his book, including a stop at the high school he attended 16 years ago, the same one where he had been bullied. This time, over 600 people showed up to hear him be interviewed by actor Kal Penn, an event he described as “fantastic.”

It’s important “for every LGBTQ person to remember that the majority of American people support LGBTQ equality, and that was not true when we were kids,” he says. “You have to remember that when you’re hearing this really loud bigotry. That’s a very vocal minority. My job doesn’t always have to be fighting every battle and pushing back against every awful thing that was said. That’s not my job, right? And it’s not your job either.”

Now a father of twins, Buttigieg is well aware of how important it is for kids to understand that their parents support them, even when it comes to things that the parents might not know about yet. He calls it the “ten-second conversation.”

“I talk a lot about how my life would have been different had my parents had a simple conversation with me,” he says. He explains that it could have been as simple as his parents telling him when he was younger: “Hey, it’s just really important for you to know that we love you no matter what. Our love is unconditional, whether you want to play on the football team, or whether you want to dance or whether you just want to bury your nose in books and learn as much as you can, whether you’re gay, straight, bi, trans, whoever you are that is who we will love because you’re our kid.”

“And then I could have focused on being a kid,” says Buttigieg, “and I wouldn’t have had to spend all this time wondering if I was impressing them enough.”

With his toddlers, Buttigieg makes sure they see families like theirs. He raves about Alice B. McGinty’s Bathe the Cat, an absurd picture book about a family trying to clean their house before grandma visits, and they keep on getting thwarted by the cat. 

Also, the family has two dads.

“There is no mention of the fact that there are two dads in the book,” says Buttigieg. “They’re just cleaning the house with their kids. It’s very funny, it’s very cute. And I want more books like that, where we’re just sitting down reading a story, my kids will see their family.”

For those who have noticed that Buttigieg has been less active on social media —  he was once nominated for LGBTQ Nation’s Social Media Hero — it’s because being a dad keeps him from being as online as he used to be.

“I used to be the guy that walked down the sidewalk looking at Twitter, and now I get to walk down the sidewalk holding the hands of my twins and looking at the bus and the firetruck and the leaves and the birds. They help me stay focused on what is real and what is in front of me.”

Featured photo illustration by Matthew Wexler. Photo by Carina Teoh.