Andrew Sullivan's brilliant take down of Dale Peck for his calumny against Mayor Pete

[DemocratSinceBirth]

It’s rare — even now — for a magazine to take down and actually disown the publication of an article, unless the writer can be deemed to have in some way offended the commissars of “social justice,” in which case, of course, all bets are off. For a left magazine to remove a classic gay-left essay is close to unheard of. But the remnants of The New Republic did exactly that last week, after publishing an article by Dale Peck on the candidacy and character of Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay candidate for president in American history. I don’t believe in removing articles from the web and I’m linking to the piece here because it really demands exposure. It’s a case study of gay-left political hatred for any gay man who does not bend the knee to their dated, depressing, and bitter view of the world.

At the heart of the essay is a point that could, in someone else’s hands, have yielded a potentially nuanced insight into Buttigieg’s psyche. Buttigieg only came out four years ago; it seems his first serious relationship was and is with the man he married. Buttigieg is thereby more a homosexual than an acculturated “gay.” He hasn’t had his identity forged by a subculture the way many gay men have, even though that experience is rarer as gay culture merges into the mainstream. Like many gay men who, as kids, fled from themselves, Pete does not seem to have had an adolescence the way that his straight peers did. Like many others over the centuries, Buttigieg channeled this repression into becoming a classic example of “the best little boy in the world,” a syndrome not unfamiliar to me or countless others. It’s worth knowing this, and it’s something a gay man is better placed to understand than others. But the idea that it disqualifies Buttigieg or renders him psychologically incapable of doing the job of president seems bizarre to me. That dynamic actually makes him far more representative of most gay men today and throughout history than Peck.

Buttigieg’s politics, moreover, are conventionally liberal — indistinguishable from, say, Obama’s. His only ideological fault is apparently being leery of the radical leftism that dominates gay activist groups and young socialists. Straights clearly like Buttigieg; Fox News crowds give him standing ovations; gays have opened their wallets for him to an astonishing extent; and the man is obviously brilliant, calm, and sane. His sexual orientation is part of him, but does not define him. I know plenty of gay men who disagree with him on some issues, many more who have been inspired by him, some who are underwhelmed, but no one who comes close to expressing the hatred that Peck does.

So where does that hatred comes from? Peck tells us: Buttigieg is the gay equivalent of an “Uncle Tom,” and he coins the term “Mary Pete” to smear him as such. How does “Mary Pete” betray gay people, you might wonder? Peck cannot point to a policy position; he cannot cite any alleged “hypocrisy”; he can’t dredge up the usual gay left smears of anyone who might be conservative or Republican, because Buttigieg is a liberal Democrat. His core critique of Buttigieg is simply that he is not the right kind of gay, and therefore is somehow disqualified from representing gays, in so far as he does, and because he is not as left wing as many young, urban LGBTQers.

...


http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/andrew-sullivan-trump-betting-indecency-can-win-in-america.html

[msongs]

1. one could comment on many aspects of this but at the risk of not being PC, one does not nt

[hlthe2b]

2. I will leave it to Andrew on the specifics, but my shortened version:

"Dale Peck is an angry, pathetic human being who projects that anger on others who, he perceives, might challenge him and everything he stands for"...

Of course Sullivan is far more eloquent.

[madaboutharry]

3. The link goes to a different article

Never mind, I see it now.

Excellent article, scroll down for the entire read.

[PatrickforO]

4. Buttigieg is fine. He'd be a fine president, and I would have

no trouble supporting him.

Articles like this are kind of strange.

Like Obama told us, it is a bad idea to allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Certainly none of our candidates are perfect, but any one of them is good. Particularly compared to Trump.

[still_one]

5. I see a similar parallel to this, and those who try to "define", who is the right kind of

Democrat

[cwydro]

6. Rec.

Thanks for posting this.

[MBS]

7. Both of Sullivan's articles are excellent

– both the indecency piece (comes up first) and the piece about Peck (which comes right after the indecency piece).

FYI, Peck is known generally as a really nasty, exceptionally mean-spirited literary critic (as many people pointed out after his ridiculous piece in The New Republic, and seems to be a piece of work all around.

[dsc]

8. I am OK with some of this article but this sentence is a flat out, gold carat lie

Similarly, centrist and conservative gays have done far more to advance gay equality in the last couple of decades than the left — which was largely absent from the marriage fight (heteronormative oppression!) and from the military fight (destroy the Army, don’t join it!).

[Hekate]

9. Finally have time to read all of it at the link. Sullivan writes so well...

The sentence about how Buttegieg "is not the right kind of gay," in Peck's estimation, reminds me of those who felt that presidential candidate Obama was "not the right kind of black."