What Pete Buttigieg Doesn’t Understand About LGBTQ Life in Iowa
Mayor Pete didn’t come to the state as a gay candidate. If he did, he would have discovered what the need for change really looks like.
The terror of a winter storm in Iowa is that everything looks the same. You can go from safe to unsafe, fast. Caught in the snow, the world seems to disappear; the sky and ground blur together in a swirling white that isn’t a white, but an absence of color. The weather term for this atmospheric disturbance is a snow squall, which occurs when a band of cold hits warm moist air. It’s the danger of the two extremes coming together.
This is what the horizon looked like through my windshield as I drove in late November from Cedar Rapids, in Eastern Iowa, where I live, to Sioux City on the far edge of Western Iowa to hear Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg speak at a middle school. Hands tight on the wheel, everything looked the same — white road and ditch and sky. Living in Iowa, I usually don’t have to travel very far to see presidential candidates; they usually come to see me. Cedar Rapids, where I live, is the second-largest city in Iowa, with a population of more than 130,000 people. To get to Sioux City, I head north on I–380 through Waterloo—pop. 68,000—then west on Highway 20 and…
