CT’s DNC delegates applaud Buttigieg, mull the other glass ceiling

CHICAGO — Gov. Ned Lamont lavished praise on Pete Buttigieg, the cabinet secretary inevitably described as an ascendant figure in national Democratic politics, in introducing him Thursday at a breakfast for delegates from Connecticut, Massachusetts and Maine.

“I know there’s a journey just beginning,” Lamont said. How far or high that journey might take Buttigieg, the governor did not say.

On a day when Kamala Harris was to accept the Democratic presidential nomination, positioning a Black and South Asian woman to break the highest glass ceiling in American politics, others wondered how high is the ceiling for a gay man who has become one of the party’s ablest communicators.

Buttigieg, now 42, first tested that notion in 2019 as a presidential candidate with the unlikely political base of being the mayor of South Bend, Ind. The polling was mixed: Voters indicated they might be willing to vote for a gay commander in chief — but they believed their neighbors were not.

“I think all these ceilings are meant to be broken at some point, and I think it’s hard to imagine it happening until it does,” said Erick Russell, whose election as Connecticut state treasurer in 2022 made him the first openly gay Black man to win statewide office in the United States.

“I think back to when Barack Obama got elected. My father is 82 years old, grew up in the South in the heart of all of it,” Russell said. “Never in his mind did he imagine that he would see a Black president. And I don’t think most people saw it happening until it did.”

Buttigieg, the secretary of transportation, is perhaps the Biden administration’s most visible surrogate spokesman, appearing so frequently on Fox News that it was a laugh line when he addressed the full convention Wednesday night. His sparring on Fox serves Biden but at the same time makes America’s most visible gay politician familiar to an audience outside the Democratic base.

Luke Bronin, the former Hartford mayor and long-time friend and supporter of Buttigieg, a fellow Rhodes Scholar and Navy intelligence veteran of Afghanistan, said he is confident a gay candidate could win national office.

“I think America was ready four years ago. I think America would be ready today or in the future,” Bronin said. “I think the idea that Americans won’t vote for someone who’s gay, or Black, or a woman, or of another religion, or whatever else, is as outdated as the idea that people expect their kids to marry someone of the same race or faith, or won’t accept a gay marriage in their family.

“That’s just not how most American families think about it anymore, and I think that our politics is in the same place as our families.”

Bronin and Lamont shared a table Thursday with Maura Healey, who took office last year as the 73rd governor of Massachusetts, the first who is openly gay. She previously was the state attorney general.

“We continue to see increasing numbers of LGBTQ candidates elected and thriving in office,” Healey said. “I have the pleasure of serving with two others as governor, and there are a host of gay and lesbian statewide leaders around the country, and those numbers are going to continue to grow.”

Govs. Christine Kotek of Oregon and Jared Polis of Colorado are both gay. Polis was elected in 2018; Kotek in 2022.

Healey said she found the standard for LGBTQ and other minority candidates is the same as for anyone else: “It’s about what you’re going to do for people, and that’s what people are focused on — especially in this election.”

That was the case in 2010, when Kevin P. Lembo was elected as state comptroller in Connecticut. He ran as a public finance and health care policy nerd, neither hiding nor promoting that he also would be the first gay man to hold statewide office in Connecticut.

“It seems like we have made so much progress over a shorter amount of time than maybe some thought,” said Jimmy Tickey, 37, a gay man and vice chair of the Connecticut Democratic Party. Voters “want good people in office. And it’s really about what your issues are, what your agenda is. I think people see whoever they may love comes second.”

Tickey, who also is the district director for Congressman Jim Himes, is an elected planning and zoning official in Shelton, regularly outpolling other candidates as a Democrat in a strongly Republican community.

“It’s about connecting with people and building a campaign and being in touch with them about the issues,” Tickey said. “They don’t care who you love. They care who is going to do the work. And there’s no gay roads or straight roads. It’s who is going to do the work and represent the people.”

Lembo’s election came five years before Buttigieg came out at age 33 in 2015, a year after serving as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan. In his memoir, the ambitious Buttigieg wrote he feared that being identified as gay would be “a career death sentence.”

Steve Kerrigan, the Democratic chair of Massachusetts, met Buttigieg in 2000 while Kerrigan was an aide to Ted Kennedy and the 18-year-old Buttigieg won the JFK Library’s Profile in Courage essay contest. Like Buttigieg, Kerrigan still was in the closet.

At the time, the best a Democratic president was willing to offer gays in the military was Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a promise they would not be expelled if they remained in the closet.

Massachusetts was four years away from becoming the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, a consequence of a court challenge. Connecticut was five years away from passage of a civil unions law that gave same-sex couples all the rights of marriage, if under another name.

“The world we had then shows how improbable his journey is now,” said Kerrigan, who now is 53 and married.

Buttigieg’s profile in courage was about Bernie Sanders, then a congressman from Vermont, the state that legalized civil unions in 2000, the same year Buttigieg wrote his essay. The topic was not gay rights but Sanders’ status as an independent who happily labeled himself a socialist.

What made Sanders courageous in the young Buttigieg’s view was his willingness to compromise, supporting Clinton as the best presidential candidate for the working class, even while opposing many of Clinton’s centrist policies.

“It may seem strange that someone so steadfast in his principles has a reputation as a peacemaker between divided forces in Washington, but this is what makes Sanders truly remarkable,” Buttigieg wrote. “He represents President Kennedy’s ideal of ‘compromises of issues, not of principles.’”

In a presidential campaign profile published by the New York Times in 2019, Buttigieg marveled at how differently the world views being gay now from when he was terrified to come out. He imagined what he would say to his insecure teenage self.

“To tell him that on that day he announces his campaign for president, he’ll do it with his husband looking on,” he said. “Would he believe me?”

On Thursday, Buttigieg teased the delegates about fatigue on the last day of the convention, connecting by talking about the interrupted sleeping endemic to him and his husband, Chasten, being the parents of 3-year-old twins, Gus and Penelope.

“One of the biggest things to change since the last time we spoke at a Democratic Convention was this phone call we got three years ago, almost to the day,” Buttigieg said. “It changed our lives, because a few hours after that phone call, I was on a red eye, and a few hours after that, we were holding our one-day-old son and daughter.”

He described their son brandishing a tambourine if he or his husband are not immediately awake when Gus wants to read a book. And Penelope coming into their bed because she is afraid of a dinosaur getting her.

Whether Buttigieg ever runs for president again, Kerrigan said, the impact of him and others being out cannot be understated. The simple act of being out is what has driven the rapid change in attitudes to homosexuality.

Kerrigan said he was not surprised other states followed Massachusetts.

“Because everyone knows a gay person, knows a lesbian, knows a transgender person, knows a queer kid, and they love them,” Kerrigan said. “But it’s incumbent on us as much as it is on them. We have to be open about who we are and proud, which is why Pride Month is important in our history.”

And, he said, a gay parent telling simple stories about tolerating a wake up call from a boy with a tambourine or comforting a little girl about dinosaurs can only help.