Ellen DeGeneres and the LGBTQ Victory Fund have endorsed the presidential campaign of Pete Buttigieg because he's gay,
yet many lesbians and bi women seem to favor female candidates instead. This includes me. The whole thing seems to be causing a bit of split in the so-called "$#@!" community. Why this? Don't gay people all have the same basic interests?
The answer is no. We don't. Matter-of-factly, the fact that Buttigieg is gay and in his 30s are just about the only things I feel like I have in common with him. Many lesbian and bi women, in fact, feel that we have more in common with heterosexual women than with gay men, taken as a whole. The article sums up this situation well:
By definition, neither Pete Buttigieg nor his husband will ever become pregnant, so any child they may have will be acquired either through adoption or (grumble grumble) surrogacy. I don't feel that he is hence able to personally understand issues surrounding pregnancy like the importance of paid family leave and reproductive rights, which might explain why he doesn't talk about or seem to prioritize those issues on the campaign trail. By definition he can't relate to these things on a level that even most men here could, being married to women and/or having a daughter.
Likewise, his enthusiastic support for granting men access to the women's restroom and locker room and prison and so on may be explained in part by the fact that, as a strictly gay man, he can't personally understand how anyone might take advantage of such opportunities for voyeuristic purposes or worse because obviously he by definition wouldn't be so inclined.
Buttigieg's adult life so far, similarly, has seen him go from military service to government. In other words, he seems to have spent his adult life in spaces that are one-sidedly dominated by men to a greater degree than most fields are today. He just hasn't spent and doesn't seem to spend much time around women in general. Putting all that together, I think the female candidates in this race can all understand someone like me and are more attuned what my needs, interests, and priorities are better than he can and is.
He also just seems to be benefiting a lot from male privilege. The article points out some examples of what I mean by that:
It's also not a coincidence, in my opinion, that most of the women running for the Democratic nomination are running on more left-leaning economic platforms than Mayor Pete is. Women understand women enough to know that women tend to be poorer than men. This applies to gay people as well:
lesbians tend to be poorer than gay men. Indeed, the general significance with which the priorities of gay women are taken in the "$#@!" movement is well-concentrated in
our historical exclusion from books and literature outlining the history of the movement. Much like among heterosexuals, women in the "$#@!" movement are and have always been taken less seriously, seen as less important, than our male counterparts.
So, putting it all together, while Pete Buttigieg and I may both be gay, the fact that he is gay
and male suggests to me, if anything, that at the end of the day, he may well be the candidate
least able to understand someone like me and the
least likely to stand up for lesbians in a broad sense. Being lesbian is a significantly different, indeed in many ways opposite, experience from being a gay man.