Pete Buttigieg 'almost certain' there's already been a gay American president
Democratic presidential hopeful and the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, has said that if he wins the 2020 elections, he is "almost certain" that he would not be the first gay man to serve as the president of the United States.
Buttigieg, during an interview on Axios’ weekly HBO program on Sunday, said: "I would imagine we’ve probably had excellent presidents who were gay — we just didn’t know which ones. I mean, statistically, it’s almost certain."
When the 37-year-old was asked who he thought were the gay presidents, Buttigieg took a pass saying: "My gaydar even doesn’t work that well in the present, let alone retroactively."
The point came up when the South Bend mayor was addressing important factors that set him apart in the crowded Democratic primary field of presidential contenders.
"We’ve had excellent presidents who have been young. We’ve had excellent presidents who have been liberal ... We’ve probably had excellent presidents who were gay,” he said.
According to a Gallup poll conducted in 2018, at least 4.5 percent of Americans identified as LGBTQ. If we apply the same statistics to US presidents, then two out of the 44 presidents could have been either gay, bisexual or transgender.
A poll conducted by NBC-Wall Street Journal in April also found out that almost 70 percent of Americans would be "comfortable" or "enthusiastic" with a gay or lesbian president.
Born near the beginning of the millennial generation in 1982, Buttigieg is a Harvard graduate who won a Rhodes scholarship to further study philosophy, politics, and economy at Oxford. Son of a Maltese immigrant father, the intellectual went on to work as a consultant at McKinsey and Company, a management strategy consulting firm, and later enlisted in the military — as a gay man — in 2009 even before the discriminatory law "don't ask, don't' tell" was repealed.
Buttigieg, in 2011, was elected as the Mayor of South Bend at the age of 29 — the youngest mayor of an American city with at least 100,000 residents.
The devout Christian, who can speak seven different languages, formally announced his candidacy on April 14 and presented a progressive message directed towards millennials, saying "we can't look for greatness in the past".
The Harvard and Oxford-educated 37-year-old's signature policy is to do away with the electoral college in the American political system and to radically overhaul the Supreme Court.