Pete Buttigieg Opens Up About Coming Out at Age 33 and Being a Gay Politician
April 17, 2019Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg spoke to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC in a wide ranging interview that covered his late coming out and what it’s like to be a gay politician.
Maddow herself is an openly lesbian reporter, and didn’t hold back in her questions for Buttigieg.
When asked he it took him until the age of 33 to come out he said, “I think it would have killed me.”
“It was hard it was really hard, first of all, it took me plenty of time to come out to myself, so I did not the way you did, or my husband did, figure out about it at such an early age. I probably should have, there were certain indications by the time I was 15 or so that I could probably point back and think ‘yep, this kid’s gay’,”he said.
“I guess I just really needed to not be. There’s this war that breaks out I think inside a lot of people when they realise that they might be something that they’re afraid of. And it took me a really long time to resolve that.”
When asked about what it was like to be one of the first, serious gay presidential hopefuls, he replied: “One of the risks I think people with meaningful jobs have especially people in politics actually is because your job is meaningful, a lot of the meaning in your life comes from your job.
“Most people are supportive or even enthusiastic at the idea of the first out-person going this far. Or – they find a way to let me know they don’t care. And that’s historic too. One day the way this will work is, if a mayor is trying to figure out a way to come out, you go to the next rubber chicken dinner that you’re going too and your date is same-sex and that’s that. People will shrug and figure it out."
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