Mike Goll and Dave Klennert live in Orange City, Iowa. The couple runs the local Pride festival and they are taking legal action against the city for discrimination. Photos: Evan Jenkins

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.

Lyz Lenz
GEN
Published in
21 min readJan 30, 2020

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TThe 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…

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Lyz Lenz
GEN
Writer for

Author of God Land. Columnist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette. The book Belabored is forthcoming from Bold Type Books in August of 2020.