"For a left magazine to remove a classic gay-left essay is close to unheard of. But the remnants of The New Republic did exactly that last week..."

"... after publishing an article by Dale Peck on the candidacy and character of Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay candidate for president in American history.... At the heart of the essay is a point that could, in someone else’s hands, have yielded a potentially nuanced insight into Buttigieg’s psyche. Buttigieg only came out four years ago; it seems his first serious relationship was and is with the man he married. Buttigieg is thereby more a homosexual than an acculturated 'gay.'... Like many others over the centuries, Buttigieg channeled this repression into becoming a classic example of 'the best little boy in the world'.... Peck tells us: Buttigieg is the gay equivalent of an 'Uncle Tom,' and he coins the term 'Mary Pete' to smear him as such.... [Peck's] 'gayer-than-thou' act is a classic of identity politics.... The point of the gay-rights movement for the left was to join other oppressed groups in overturning the entire liberal democratic and capitalist system. The point of the gay-rights movement for those of us on the right was to expand the space in which gay people can simply be themselves. That may mean embracing the identity of queer nonbinary whatever, or it may mean simply getting on with life as an individual who happens to be gay. No one is wrong to be the person they want to be. There is no right way or wrong way to be gay. I thought of Peck’s argument when confronted this week by a speech by Democratic congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.... 'We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice.' That’s why the hard left hates Buttigieg. Because he is a gay man who does not have what they believe is the correct 'queer voice.'"

Writes Andrew Sullivan (in NY Magazine).