Pete Buttigieg Opens Up About Coming Out

The Democratic candidate for the US presidential election in 2020 opens up about why he came out as gay at the age of 33…
 
Pete Buttigieg has opened up about his coming out experience. The 37-year-old Democratic candidate for the US presidential election in 2020, sat down with openly gay Rachel Maddow and talked personally and openly about coming out as gay later in life and how it affected his career.
 
Buttigieg is the first openly gay US presidential candidate and he came out publicly at the age of 33, after he had finished college, joined the navy, been deployed to Afghanistan, and been elected Mayor of South Bend, a town in Indiana.
 
In the interview, Buttigieg talks frankly with Maddow about how his work had kept him so busy that he didn’t really have much of a personal life. But eventually, he had to be true to himself.
 
“It was really the deployment that put me over the top, I realized that you only get to be one person, you don’t know how long you have on this earth, and by the time I came back I realized I’ve got to do something,” he said.
 
Making the decision to open up to a few friends at first, he said they understood that it was a sensitive thing, as well as pointing out that he hadn’t made it easy for himself because he had two things that really mattered to him professionally.
 
“One was being an officer in the military, in the reserve, and the other was being an elected official in Indiana, neither of which is exactly LGBT friendly,” he said, “both of which I assumed were totally incompatible with being out”.
 
“I was pretty sure it was going to be a big complication, but I had no idea … there’s no way to really know, there’s no playbook, I mean no executive in Indiana had ever been out and so it was kind of a leap of faith,” he continued.
 
However Buttigieg, despite his concerns, was re-elected with 80% of the votes, which was more than he was originally elected with.
 
Buttigieg also spoke with Maddow about how he hopes his unique coming out story will help others.
 
“One day the way this will work, is if a Mayor is trying to figure out how to come out, you go to the next rubber chicken dinner you’re going to, and your date’s the same sex, and thats that right, people shrug, figure it out and get on with the evening.
 
“One of the things I think I can do before the first vote is cast, is maybe make it a little easier just by being here for the next person who comes along.”
 
You can Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC interview with Pete Buttigieg below: