‘Mayor Pete’ Gets Married, Then Takes His Husband to a Parade

Though Cupid appears in many guises it is safe to say he has seldom taken the form of a hard-boiled, deep-fried, sausage-wrapped cholesterol depth charge called a Scotch egg. Yet there, on their first real-time date in September 2015, at the Fiddler’s Hearth pub in South Bend, Indiana, were Peter Buttigieg, 36, and Chasten Glezman, 28, and there, alongside a pint of Irish cider and an icy draft Guinness, not the usual pretzels or beer nuts but an order of Buttigieg’s favorite bar snack.

“He said, “You’ve got to try these,'” said Glezman, a junior high school teacher at a Montessori Academy in nearby Mishawaka, Indiana. “It was a kind of magical moment. I mean, sure, it’s a fried ball of meat with an egg in the middle, but when it came to the table my little Midwestern heart leapt.”

The Scotch egg turned out to be an early indicator of compatibility for the couple.

“Once I saw he was down for the Scotch egg, I knew it had a shot,” said Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend.

Far from being just the out-gay mayor of a scrappy rebounding Rust Belt city, Buttigieg is a singular politician: a Democrat in a Republican stronghold; a high school valedictorian who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard and who also attended Oxford as a Rhodes scholar; a political comer who, after winning election at 29, quickly set about reversing an economic decline in this northern Indiana city, where the last Studebaker rolled off a South Bend assembly line in 1963; a Navy veteran who, in 2014, took an unusual leave-of-absence from his civic day job to serve a tour of duty in Afghanistan.

He is also one of a handful of Democrats that, in a New Yorker article, were cited by President Barack Obama as the future of the Democratic Party, an anointing whose potential ramped up this spring when, with an eye on the 2020 race, Buttigieg’s political action committee began supporting legislative races in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Colorado and Ohio. “Yes, he knows it’s ridiculous to think about jumping from a City Hall for 101,000 people to the White House,” Politico wrote of a relative novice who has yet to hold federal office, while also noting Obama was far from the only heavyweight urging the young mayor to aim high.

“Pete’s going to be a force in the Democratic Party,” David Axelrod, the political strategist credited with helping propel Obama to the nation’s highest office, told Politico. “The question is just whether that’s as a candidate for president, or something else.”

It would be easy enough, scanning Buttigieg’s professional résumé, to see in it a steady progression of red-letter milestones, and yet the way forward was not always easy, as Buttigieg made clear in a coming-out essay written in 2015 for The South Bend Tribune. The mayor’s public declaration was motivated in part by, as he said, “a need to have a personal life,” but also by a religious freedom bill signed by Mike Pence, the state’s governor then, that its critics claimed would give businesses the ability to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.

“I was well into adulthood before I was prepared to acknowledge the simple fact that I am gay,” Buttigieg (pronounced BOOT-edge-edge) wrote at the time, adding that the acceptance taken for granted by gay people in certain parts of the country has been slow in coming to the small college town where he was raised, a child of two Notre Dame academics: “South Bend isn’t exactly the land of change.”

Still, if coming out was a challenge it was equally perplexing to figure out a way to wade into the dating pool in a city of just over 100,000, one in which most everyone on the street greets Buttigieg as “Mayor Pete.”

“How does a sitting mayor in Indiana who’s gay find a date?” Buttigieg said.

The solution was as close as the nearest keyboard, as Glezman was also discovering 95 miles away in Chicago, where he was then starting a master’s degree in education at DePaul University while working as a substitute teacher in Illinois public schools. “I had been in a couple of relationships and was a couple years out of my last,” Glezman said. “I wanted to meet someone to actually go on a date with, the goal being a long-term relationship,” he said of his decision to download Hinge, an app that distances itself from those oriented toward what Glezman politely terms “other goals.”

“Pete came out in May of 2015, and he and I met in August,” Glezman said. Buttigieg’s modest aim at the time was “dating a little outside the television viewing area of South Bend.” Glezman joined Hinge because, he said: “I wanted a platform where you’re not necessarily inundated with hookup culture and sex.”

Meeting at first for a series of long-distance beer dates on FaceTime, the two men slowly uncovered other’s quiddities (Glezman loves Skee-Ball and does improv comedy; Buttigieg has a weakness for claw-vending machines); explored their divergent personalities (Buttigieg is, by his own account, uncommonly introverted for a politician; shy in relationships, Glezman in public is a natural performer); and values derived from their shared Midwestern upbringings.

Their individual coming-out narratives became a further point of connection for the two in the early days of a burgeoning relationship, which by the end of 2016 had grown serious enough for Glezman to move in with the mayor, commuting to Chicago three days a week to complete his degree. “I had already been out, but only to a handful of close friends,” Buttigieg said. And, while Glezman had been openly gay for more than a decade before the men met, he encountered real obstacles on the road to visibility. “I decided at 18 that I needed to come out,” said Glezman, the youngest of three brothers raised in a conservative Roman Catholic family in Traverse City, Michigan. “And I don’t recall my parents specifically saying I couldn’t live at home anymore, but I was made to believe I needed to leave.”

Glezman left home soon after disclosing his sexuality to his parents, and couch surfed with friends for a time and lived out of his car.

“I don’t want to say we were shocked,” said Glezman’s mother, Sherri, who operates a family-owned landscaping business with her husband, Terry. “But, from our perspective, I was sad for him that, having two brothers that were into every sport, as roughneck as it comes, Chasten would be afraid of being perceived as different, or not as much of a man.”

Glezman tended to prefer putting on plays in his basement to breaking down an engine; or reading Hardy Boys mysteries to playing touch football; or binge-watching old movies to freezing in duck blinds and deer stands. What he found in a partner was someone who relieves the pressure on him of conforming to conventional masculine stereotypes like shouldering a shotgun when the guys in the family put on camo gear and go hunting on Thanksgiving Day.

And so, on June 16, a 90-degree day — dressed in three-piece Ted Baker suits from Nordstrom of differing but complementary shades of blue and matching socks — Glezman and Buttigieg were married by the Rev. Brian G. Grantz at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. James before 200 guests from their newly blended families and divergent worlds. In a nod to the significance of the event, the 30-minute ceremony, which was livestreamed on YouTube, featured a reading from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark 2015 case that granted marriage equality to same-sex couples in the United States.

After the ceremony, the newlyweds were driven in the back of a cherry red 1961 Studebaker Lark VIII to stop briefly at a South Bend Gay Pride Week block party, where the beaming couple donned rainbow-colored beads, greeted the crowd and took photos with joyful attendees.

They then joined 200 more friends for a reception at LangLab, an arts- and co-working space in a former furniture factory that is a prime example of the revitalized city Buttigieg helped transform. Under soft indigo lights on the concrete floor, Buttigeg and Glezman danced for the first time as a couple while the band David Wax Museum played a slow-tempo, soulful cover of the 1988 song “When You Say Nothing At All.” “There are so many things about the community we have a chance to feature,” Buttigieg said. And in fact the reception was so communitarian that it felt almost crowdsourced: tacos from the Rico Suave food truck; sliders from South Bend’s the Beard & the Boss (even the pork was local, provided by Gunthorp Farms, a fourth-generation Indiana operation); beer from South Bend Brew Works; an assortment of regional cheeses from Oh Mamma’s deli; salads from Cafe Navarre; lattes and coffee from Zen Cafe, housed inside LangLab; artisanal chocolates from local Violet Sky chocolatier; specially created ice cream from the Outside Scoop, flavored with honey harvested from community gardens or whiskey from an Indiana distillery.

“We have a lot of people coming from other places, and we wanted to give them a window and a glimpse into this really cool city,” said Glezman, who, after relocating to South Bend, moved with Buttigieg to an old frame fixer-upper they share with a skittish rescue mutt they named Truman.

“People think Indiana must be a drab place to be,” said Glezman, adding that almost from the outset, serendipity has colored his experience of the old industrial city on the St. Joseph River — a town that, if the pundits have it right, the couple may someday leave behind for Washington.

“On our first date, we went to see the South Bend Cubs play the Great Lakes Loons,” he said, referring to two Class A minor league teams. Afterward, the couple toured the downtown on foot and walked along the St. Joseph River to view interactive illuminated sculptures there known as River Lights. As they headed back to the stadium and their parked cars, they tentatively took each other’s hands for the first time just as postgame fireworks lighted up the night sky.

“Literally, there were fireworks on our first date,” Glezman said. “It was kind of ridiculous, I know, but I was hooked.”

—