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Why It Never Mattered that Mayor Pete Wasn’t “Queer Enough”
From the moment that Mayor Pete became a viable candidate in the Democratic primary, I knew that my queer leftist friends were going to be sharpening their knives for him. He was, after all, everything that a certain kind of queer leftist despises: able to pass, middle class, annoyingly smart. Unfortunately, my prognostication proved correct, and in the last several weeks we’ve seen a veritable outpouring of queer opprobrium on Pete: Marsha Gessen’s blistering column in The New Yorker, the open letter from a group calling itself “Queers Against Pete,” a scathing piece from Shannon Keating in BuzzFeed, not to mention all of my queer leftist friends on Facebook and my acquaintances on Twitter.
To be clear, I strenuously disagree with these critiques on both philosophical and political grounds. Philosophically, I am not at all on board with the sort of queer policing that has suddenly become quite fashionable in some quarters (mostly the academic queer left, but not exclusively so), in which we have somehow become the arbiters of when it’s acceptable to come out. Nor am I in the business of creating a new form of queer hegemony by which everyone has to subscribe to what I view to be acceptable gender norms.
Politically, it’s foolish to launch these attacks on a candidate so early in the primary, regardless of whether or…
