"What makes Buttigieg an easy and reassuring choice for these older, white, straight people, and a disturbing possibility for the queer people who seem to be criticizing him for not being gay enough?"

"It is that he is profoundly, essentially conservative. He is an old politician in a young man’s body, a straight politician in a gay man’s body."

Writes Masha Gessen in "The Queer Opposition to Pete Buttigieg, Explained" (in The New Yorker).

He chose to wait [to come out] until after he graduated from college, after he had served in the military, after he had been elected mayor.... until after attitudes toward homosexuality had changed...

One kind of queer politics is rooted in ideas of liberation, revolutionary change, and solidarity. The vision of this politics is a society that is radically changed by many kinds of people fighting many kinds of injustice, a society in which economic, social, political, and sexual relationships have been transformed....

The other, more mainstream, and often more visible kind of L.G.B.T. politics aims to erase difference. Its message to straight people is “We are just like you, and all we want is the right to have what you have: marriage, children, a house with a picket fence, and the right to serve in the military.”....

Buttigieg embodies the second kind of gay experience and the second kind of gay politics.... Buttigieg is the ultimate candidate of the country’s post-2016 trauma. He is not a woman. He is not a socialist. He is decidedly not a revolutionary. He does not make big, sweeping promises...

MEANWHILE: "Did anybody catch a screenshot or see what [Washington Post writer Dave] Weigel tweeted? Supposedly he tweeted something from a movie that was clearly homophobic (towards Pete?), sparked some Twitter fury and took it down. Does anyone know what he did?" (Reddit).

"Warren ended up providing one of the clearest examples yet of how Trumpian rhetoric shifts the political conversation."

"The woman who is hoping to become the most progressive Democratic nominee in generations is not merely letting herself get jerked around by a Trumpian taunt. She is also reinforcing one of the most insidious ways in which Americans talk about race: as though it were a measurable biological category, one that, in some cases, can be determined by a single drop of blood. Genetic-test evidence is circular: if everyone who claims to be X has a particular genetic marker, then everyone with the marker is likely to be X. This would be flawed reasoning in any area, but what makes it bad science is that it reinforces the belief in the existence of X—in this case, race as a biological category... Warren... has allowed herself to be dragged into a conversation based on an outdated, harmful concept of racial blood—one that promotes the pernicious idea of biological differences among people—and she has pulled her supporters right along with her."

From "Elizabeth Warren Falls for Trump’s Trap—and Promotes Insidious Ideas About Race and DNA" by Masha Gessen (The New Yorker).