Chasten Buttigieg to speak in South Bend about new memoir and backlash to LGBTQ authors

SOUTH BEND — Chasten Buttigieg said he’s written the book that he wishes had been available to an 8th-grader named Chasten Glezman, a theater kid who nervously molded himself to the social mores of small-town boyhood.

During his formative years in Traverse City, Mich., he raised a steer in 4-H. He bowled six days a week. He put a George W. Bush bumper sticker on his car. He fished and shot guns with his father, who owned a landscaping business, and his two older brothers, born hunters who became top athletes.

But what young Chasten could not do until he was 18 caused years of internal strife. He could not utter the words that are his new memoir’s title: “I Have Something to Tell You.”

“I was always afraid that my parents’ love was conditional,” he told The Tribune in an interview, “that once they found out I was gay, then I would lose it.”

In his new memoir tailored to young adults, the former theater teacher and LGBTQ advocate — known first in this city as the boyfriend, and now husband, of former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg — writes about overcoming the isolation and shame he felt as a teenager who knew he was gay but long kept it secret.

On Aug. 31, Chasten will speak about the book in South Bend. (Buy tickets online at https://brainlairbooks.com/events/27638.) He published another version of the memoir in 2020 for a general audience.

The tour comes as similar LGBTQ titles are facing conservative backlash nationwide. Two books for teens challenged earlier this year by patrons of the St. Joseph County Library system, according to library spokeswoman Marissa Gebhard, are “This Book is Gay” by Juno Dawson and “Flamer” by Mike Curato. Like Chasten, both authors explore what it means to come of age as a gay person in a heteronormative culture.

Similarly, a new Indiana law requires Indiana teachers and school staff to alert the parents of students who ask to be called by a different name or set of pronouns.

During this tour, Chasten said, he’s encountered exhaustion among fellow educators. Many long for an increased focus on curbing gun violence, regularly a leading cause of death among American children and teens. Many feel dismayed by LGBTQ teens’ hopelessness and heightened risk of depression, he said. So the focus on books feels cruel.

“Teachers and librarians and students are just exhausted with the rhetoric, exhausted with politics, exhausted that leaders are focused on things like attacking their peers or attacking their own identity and banning books,” Chasten told The Tribune, “rather than focusing on making sure that they have a teacher in the first place or that they’re safe at a school where teachers have the resources and the pay that they deserve.”

Chasten Buttigieg's path to coming out

Though Chasten’s memoir tells a story that’s often painful, he balances it with the snappy wit that won him affection during Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. As the partner of the first openly gay cabinet secretary, Chasten’s own profile has soared alongside his husband’s.

“Very early on, I just made this decision, like, I’m just gonna be myself,” he said. “Because if you twist yourself into knots trying to just be somebody you think the country wants you to be, then who are you at the end of the day?”

But his self-assured candor follows troubled years in which he was a couch-surfing community college student, reeling after he came out in his hometown.

The “giant, glittered, fanged beast” that couldn’t be tamed inside of teenage Chasten had pushed him to spend his senior year of high school in Germany. Buoyed by the forward-looking culture he encountered there, he told a friend he’d made that he was gay.

He writes of the experience: “I breathed into lungs that felt like they were letting go of every breath they had held for the last seventeen years.”

Yet he couldn’t bring himself to say the words to his parents when he came home to Traverse City.

One day, he packed a bag full of clothes and other belongings and shakily handed his mom a letter. She read it and began to cry. He kept repeating how sorry he was. Then he left the house in tears, not kicked out but too ashamed to stay.

He spent the next couple of months adrift, sleeping in friends’ spare rooms or in the back of his car. He enrolled in the local community college and worked full time, sometimes not at all sure why he kept on living, he said.

Then came a moment of grace. His mom called and said to him: “Just come home and we’ll figure this out, Bubby.”

In small towns and conservative states this summer, Chasten has emphasized “how important it is to have these foundational conversations with our kids from a young age — that they are loved unconditionally,” he told The Tribune.

Eventually, Chasten met a mayor with an odd last name who led a small Indiana city. He’d find out the mayor is an “insufferable optimist,” he writes.

Chasten married the mayor, who came out publicly in this newspaper with a column called “Why Coming Out Matters. He became the city’s first First Gentleman. He taught middle-school drama and humanities at The Montessori Academy at Edison Lakes in Mishawaka.

And this week he’ll make his first visit to South Bend since the Buttigieg family moved to Washington, after Mayor Pete became Secretary of Transportation Pete in 2021. The next year, the couple bought a home in Traverse City, where their 2-year-old twins now enjoy the caretaking of Chasten’s parents.

Chasten wants his words to find anyone who feels stuck in hiding, he said, and to raise an alarm in the community of people they’re turning away from.

He thinks of young people who feel torn up inside, denying an identity they didn’t choose. But he also thinks of the grown adults who met him during presidential campaign stops, leaning in to say it was still too risky for them to be out in their town, but they were grateful for him and Pete.

“It’s completely freeing to know that sometimes,” he said, “just by virtue of being yourself in a room, you can be life-changing for somebody.”

IF YOU GO

What: In partnership with Brain Lair Books, Chasten Buttigieg will speak about his memoir, adapted for young adults and published this May, titled, "I Have Something to Tell You." Tickets are $25.

Where: The St. Joseph County Library Leighton Auditorium, 305 S. Michigan St., South Bend

When: Thursday, Aug. 31, from 7:00 to 8 p.m.

Email South Bend Tribune city reporter Jordan Smith at JTsmith@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter: @jordantsmith09

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Chasten Buttigieg to speak on memoir and LGBTQ backlash in South Bend