To be fair, I wasn’t really excited about anybody in the primaries, but Pete seemed nice enough, if a little measured.  Which didn’t seem like a bad alternative to the status quo.

“and how his campaign aimed for the center so successfully”

I can’t tell you how good it is to see people saying this here. I’ve supported him since the beginning, and watching the narrative form has been enlightening to say the least.

I get that hardcore lefties got scared by Buttigieg and how his campaign aimed for the center so successfully, but it doesn’t make the smear campaign against him look any less unmotivated and ridiculous. It’s like MAGA, only more intellectually insufferable.

Shadow Republican? Billionaire bootkisser?

When I read the piece, it just seemed like another Baby Boomer crying about how Millenial didn’t have to work as hard as he did.

Peck clearly doesn’t understand himself at all. He’s a middle aged, married gay man who still looks in the mirror and sees his 1990s self, and resents other gay men who don’t share his narrow worldview and tastes (or rather hates; he doesn’t like much beyond himself)

And, to be fair, the route Pete’s taken is something that was simply never available to Peck. Not that I think Peck secretly yearns for “heteronormative bourgeois domesticity”, but him personally decrying it will always have an element of sour grapes to me. 

I found this piece to be problematic (Peck’s piece) precisely because it relied on some old stereotypes that gay men have fought for a long time, and because it seemed to paint all gay men with the same brush. The idea that all gay men are sexually promiscuous can be very damaging and does not apply to everyone in the…

I suspect Peck’s real problem with Mayor Pete is that for so long Peck has defined his own self image in opposition to what he perceives as “mainstream.” His most outwardly apparent, obvious claim to existing outside of the mainstream is his status as a sexual minority.

Yeah, it is judgmental. It’s also often coming from people who made a different choice, to come out younger to light a path for the people still in the closet, who suffered to make space for the people who had the privilege to wait and lie about their identity and gain power in society by doing so.

The snitty comment about his age when he came out is particularly bad, I think.

“Historically progressive?” You haven’t followed the New Republic closely, have you. Historically, they feature the kind of “liberals” who go on Fox shows to trash the left and brag about their friendship with Ann Coulter. 

Thanks for articulating this in a way I couldn’t. Super cool to be felt like an outsider all of your life in the straight world, but even cooler to enter the gay community and then be derided because you’re not the “right type of gay”.

Peck’s column popped up in my newsfeed on Saturday and I read it all the way through. Within its text, one thing became clear to me (me: a 57 year old gay man who went through the early 90s in NY and LA - and all that meant, too): Peck is stuck in a time and place and suffering from arrested development. I’d wager…

I am so tired of this “it took him 33 years to come out.” Are gays supposed to come out the moment they are born? Jesus Christ this is so fucking stupid.

Thanks for the perspective, but you really don’t think that a historically progressive magazine like The New Republic publishing an article that argues that because a gay politician came out relatively later in life than the current norm, he won’t be able to focus on his job because he’ll be too busy exploring his…

All of this.

Rich has mad an online living of criticizing people for not coming out quickly enough. None of the above is at all surprising.

Well this gay man found parts of the article to be quite homophobic. Calling a gay man “Mary” in an attempt to degrade and belittle him is pretty textbook homophobia.