I Have Something to Tell You—For Young Adults: A Memoir

Introduction:

Everything and Nothing

Revving the engine of her car, Shelly spat out her demands into the Starbucks drive-through speaker box. I said I wanted more caramel! Make it again! Just as quickly as she sped off, her brakes shrieked the old pile of steel to a halt as she nearly collided with the car in front of hers. Still only a few feet from the speaker, her voice sent every curse word known to humanity through the cool morning air and into the employees’ headsets inside the tiny coffee shop on Kinnickinnic Avenue. We all looked at one another in both horror and amusement and turned the volume on our headsets down as the rant continued. Customers inside could hear her shouting from the drive-through lane and traded sympathetic glances with us as we sped our way through the morning rush hour coffee traffic.

My apron was covered in chocolate sauce and milk splatter, and a hurried pour of coffee missed the cup entirely, sending a stream of the piping hot liquid onto my shoe. I waddled my burning toes back to the counter and called out, Dark roast for Bill! Bill rolled his eyes and grabbed the coffee without so much as a thank you. Impatient and in need of a caffeine fix, Shelly started laying on the horn, upset that her macchiato didn’t have enough caramel drizzle and now she was going to be late for work. It was six in the morning, I had been working the morning shift since four, and things weren’t going very well for me, my shoe, or Shelly. In a few hours, I’d change my clothes in the bathroom, drive across town, and teach back-to-back theater classes to a group of energetic fourth graders. Suffice it to say, life was chaotic and sticky.

Let’s fast-forward eight years. To a different kind of chaos.

It’s late evening, and I’m cuddled up on the couch with Buddy, a one-eyed, stinky-breathed mutt, on my lap and my husband at my side in our home in Indiana. My cell phone rings as Unknown Caller scrolls across the screen. Whoever is calling doesn’t want me to know who they are or what their number is. Intuition told me to answer.

Hi, is this Chasten?

Uh, yes. Who’s calling? I ask.

Hi, Mr. Buttigieg, I have Jill Biden here to speak with you.

I spring up from the couch and begin to pace around the house, waiting for the former Second Lady, and the (soon to be) First Lady of the United States, Dr. Biden, to come on the phone. My slippers seem to find every creaky board in the old, wooden floors as I walk back and forth, listening to Dr. Biden congratulate me on running a great and historic campaign for president alongside my husband.

Wait. What?!

Yep, you read that right.

In 2018, after three years of dating, I married Pete Buttigieg, who was, at the time, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a midsized city about an hour and a half east of Chicago. While the world knows my husband as Mayor Pete, or Secretary Pete, or sometimes even Secretary Mayor Pete, you’ll notice I call him Peter, because that’s what he goes by to friends and family. I had no idea we’d be celebrating our one-year anniversary on the presidential campaign trail, but just a couple of months after our wedding, Peter and I discussed the idea that he might run for president. I didn’t have to think about this choice for a second; I completely supported it. As my partner, he had helped me to feel safe and to believe in myself—I knew he could also do that for the rest of the country, and I knew just how important it was for young people to know that there was space for openly gay people to succeed in this country too.

We had no idea the campaign would take off like a rocket ship. Peter—with the help of hundreds of dedicated, hardworking staff members and thousands of volunteers across the country—ran a campaign of hope, inclusion, and forward-looking progress. About a month before Dr. Biden called, Peter had won the Iowa Caucus, the first contest leading up to the presidential election. It was a big deal and a historic win. Pete was the first gay American to ever win a statewide election in the presidential nominating process. A week after Iowa, he came in a very close second in New Hampshire, but the race shifted after that, and Joe Biden started to become the clear Democratic nominee-to-be. Instead of continuing the campaign, Peter and I made the choice to fly back to South Bend. We gave some teary-eyed speeches on national television, thanked our supporters, and then proudly threw our support behind the Biden campaign. Within a few hours of Pete’s campaign winding down, we were at home enjoying some much-needed rest after over a year of living out of suitcases and sleeping on airplanes. Life was changing at a dizzyingly fast pace, and then it suddenly came to a screeching stop.

Now, as I stood in the living room, Dr. Biden continued, You did something miraculous, something you may not even fully understand the weight of yet. Joe and I are so proud of you and what you have done for this country. I was flattered. I thanked her for her kindness and her time just as she put candidate Biden on the phone. One heck of a race, man. Really well done. I’m proud of ya, he said. Is your guy there? I passed the phone over to Peter and stood dumbfounded in the hallway.

Well, that’s one way to end a day!

In just eight years, I went from sleepy and stressful mornings at the coffee shop to crisscrossing the country on a groundbreaking and historic campaign with my husband. Who would have thought that the early mornings and long hours full of complicated coffee orders, as well as an unpredictable and demanding teaching schedule, would prepare me for working on a presidential campaign? I never saw all this change coming. Never planned for it. Never calculated my decisions in order to get me to this point. I never thought in a million years that I would be on television, in the newspapers, and on the stage helping deliver a message of hope and inclusion that I wished I could’ve experienced when I was younger.

When we launched Peter’s campaign, I hadn’t thought about what role I would need to play on the trail. Which is exactly the point: political spouses must be both everything and nothing, working nonstop without ever stealing the spotlight. There’s only one star, I had been repeatedly told, and it’s not you. At the same time, the spouse plays a crucial role in front of the cameras and behind the scenes. You know the candidate the best. You know what keeps them energized, especially when they’re running on two hours of sleep and have to go into their sixth interview of the day. You show up when the candidate can’t be there, and you fill in all the gaps. Sometimes this means delivering speeches in front of big crowds or handling last-minute television interviews, and it always means keeping exactly the right expression on your face and landing all of your talking points. You never know who’s recording or taking a photo or listening to your phone call. You’re required to be known as the candidate’s spouse at the very minimum, but you’re expected to do, and be, a lot more than that.

In a way, this everything and nothing role reminded me a lot of the experience of figuring out who I was when I was younger—blending in, making friends, assessing how far I could stick my neck out or how much space I could take up, all the while coming to terms with my identity as a gay man. Make sure you say the right thing. Do the right thing, always. Don’t be an embarrassment. Make people proud. Don’t get in the way. The pressure on the campaign was heavy and ever present, but what made it so much easier than a childhood of hiding my true self was that once I was on national television with my husband, I wasn’t scared of who I was. In fact, over the years, I’d learned that what I was hiding shouldn’t be hidden at all. I had embraced who I was and gave myself permission to live a truly authentic, unashamed, and proud life, regardless of what other people thought of me, my marriage, and my family.

Running for president is hard work. Beyond the brutal schedule and the high stakes, I wasn’t prepared for what having to exist in public would do to me, the stress it would put on my family and friends, or the weight that being everything for everyone all the time would have on my mental health. I didn’t know just how terrible and invasive people could be on the internet—and I especially wasn’t prepared for the threats of violence. When you’re on the national stage, it can feel as if everything you do, everywhere you go, and everything you say is being examined through a magnifying glass. When you’re campaigning, most people only get to know you through what they read about you online or see in brief interview clips. Sometimes they’ll make assumptions about you simply because of who you are married to. Having a strong sense of self and moral compass helped me stay true to myself during the campaign, but I didn’t always have that strength and confidence when I was younger.

I’ve been given incredible opportunities that I wouldn’t trade for anything. Having a platform to shape conversations and influence change is a tremendous privilege! I didn’t believe I could do that at first, but the more time I spent out on the campaign trail, the more I realized that the experiences and memories I was scared of, embarrassed of, or had kept hidden weren’t as weird to discuss as I’d assumed they’d be. They were just real: the true Chasten. Even more amazing, people seemed to appreciate hearing about them and often could relate to them.

The fact is, my story isn’t rare. It’s actually pretty common: I grew up in a conservative small town, with loving parents who worked hard to support me but didn’t know many gay people before I came out to them when I was eighteen, terrified that they would reject me. Even after I came out, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this essential part of me meant I’d never find love or have a family. Despite being an overachieving high school student and working multiple jobs, I struggled to finish college, and I graduated with a lot of student debt. I spent years desperately looking for some sign of a happy, stable future. I even experienced housing insecurity for a time, and my struggles with mental health and identity meant I often questioned if I was going to make it to the next day. It took a lot of hard work, but, as RuPaul says, If you can’t love yourself, [how] ya gonna love anybody else? I had to learn to love myself and trust that the rest would follow.

I was never very interested in politics while I was in school, and I definitely never thought I’d find myself involved in conversations about the future of our country! But my experiences on the campaign trail, meeting people across the country and talking to both politicians and constituents, have shown me that being involved in politics is about a lot more than the laws, rights, and governing bodies that make up the United States. The issues surrounding politics are in all our living rooms. They’re around our kitchen tables and in our mailboxes. Whether I was hearing the stories of young LGBTQ+ people who’d been kicked out of their homes and didn’t know what to do next or talking to teachers who felt they weren’t getting the support they needed, I was constantly reminded that Americans should be able to see themselves in the people representing them at the highest levels of government.

We’re currently living through enormous political and social changes, both in our country and all over the world. The choices and actions we make every day affect the environment, global health, the economy, and our fellow citizens’ human and civil rights. I think Peter and I are part of a group of young politicians and activists who can reexamine the way we all live and interact with one another—and the world. I loved being a middle school teacher, and even though I’m not in the classroom every day, there’s still a lot of work to be done that asks all of us to roll up our sleeves and get involved. I don’t want to waste the chance I’ve been given to be a part of some of the most important conversations we’re having as a country and community.

From growing up raising cows in small-town America to being the other half of a historic presidential campaign, life has taken a lot of twists and turns and taught me quite a few lessons along the way. I certainly haven’t figured it all out yet, but I’m eager to share my journey and those lessons with you. I hope the stories within these pages either hold up a mirror to your own experiences and help you feel less alone or offer you a way to think differently about your place in the world and how you relate to it. Either way, I’m excited to do it together.

1

There Are No Sharks in Lake Michigan

When I was a kid, teachers used to tell my parents that I was special or unique. At parent-teacher conferences, they’d say things like, Well, he sure is… eccentric or You know, he’s just not like the other boys. I thought these comments were a good thing, and seeing as I never heard these words used to describe my two older brothers, they built up my confidence. Then, around middle school, I began to realize that in addition to being creative, getting good grades, and having a knack for making people laugh, I was also gay.

Once I started to put the pieces of my identity together, a battle broke out in my head. What I had been taught about gay people from a young age, what kids my age were saying about gay people, and what I felt in my heart began fighting and tearing me apart.

I was told being gay was a choice, a sin, and an embarrassment. Of course these things aren’t true, but younger Chasten didn’t know that. Back then, the outside world was telling me otherwise, and I spent years believing there was no future in store for me. Childhood was fairly sunny and easy. However, once this piece of my identity became clearer, hiding it felt like concealing a giant, glittered, fanged beast inside my stomach. One simple slip and the beast would come tearing through my guts, flop onto the floor in front of the classroom, and shout, HE’S GAAAAAAAY! as the entire classroom pointed and laughed in the most humiliating way. In order to keep the beast quiet, I paid very close attention to the way I walked, talked, and acted, because the world just wasn’t ready to accept LGBTQ+ people as equals (yet).

My parents had always encouraged me to be myself, but I knew that meant the version of myself that fit the norm. At the time, growing up in a politically and religiously conservative place like Northern Michigan meant