Remember Dale Peck’s horrid recent New Republic article about Pete Buttigieg’s sex life? The one that was almost immediately taken offline, got the magazine dropped from a climate change summit and allegedly got its gay author death threats? Yeah, another gay writer says we’re all reading it wrong and it’s not actually homophobic, it’s just an example of gay “reading” (calling out someone’s flaws in a catty way).
In a recently published article by longtime gay journalist and cultural critic Rich Juzwiak, he remains “utterly unconvinced” that the piece is actually homophobic. Rather, he calls it a piece of “gay-on-gay bitchery” that didn’t read to him as “an act of homophobia, but one of expert gayness.”
It’s important to note that most people didn’t read the full article — which is archived here. Most merely saw its most outrageous excerpts and declared it trash.
Juzwiak summarizes that Peck’s piece “eviscerated Buttigieg’s” neoliberal belief that an improved capitalist market will lift all Americans up. He says Peck also “distractingly” focuses on Buttigieg’s presentation as a gay man who came out barely four years ago in an op-ed. Hence, Peck thinks Buttigieg “still has his gay adolescence to pass through” and is “too uptight to take a d*ck” and will thus be distracted as President by what his life could’ve been like while embracing a “gay parody of heteronormative bourgeois domesticity.”
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“It’s an example of what the gays call reading,” Juzwiak writes. Juzwiak says Peck doesn’t mock Buttigieg for being gay (which would be homophobic) but reads Buttigieg for the kind of gay he is: namely one who’d never display more than one nude male torso in any room of his house.
Juzwiak understands that gay men may find Peck’s article and its approach toxic, nasty, bad writing or racially problematic because he calls Buttigieg an Uncle Tom, a term for a black sellout. But Juzwiak doesn’t see it as homophobic.
Rather than lambast Peck for his tasteless approach, Juzwiak thinks Peck is making a larger lamentation on how the gay rights movement became largely sexless, conservative and assimilationist after HIV killed off our most radical and civically engaged artists, thinkers and activists. This left the survivors to trade off “our lofty ideals … [for] the potentially civilizing effect” of state-sanctioned marriage.
“As if a community risking their lives to care for their own in the face of church and government condemnation was not the very highest manifestation of civilized behavior,” writes queer author Fenton Johnson.
Ultimately, Juzwiak found “The New Republic’s decision to remove the piece stupid and infuriating,” stating, “The New Republic exposed the wider culture to a facet of gay culture with particularly rough edges and when people found it unsightly, they did their best to make it unseen.”
Hdtex
Total bullshit of an “”article”. Of COURSE Peck’s piece was homophobic in addition to being horrendously poorly written.
rikard_pearson
i tried to read the entire piece, but couldn’t stop laughing that it opened with Peck plugging his only notable book before moving on to tell a story about himself that illustrates his cruelty and self loathing. when he describes Gar as a potato i realized that was the judgement i had made of Peck, obviously the one he makes about himself. it is one i have made about myself too. it is sad and funny that Peck still refuses to admit that Gar pursued him because they look alike. aside from frizzy ginger hair and possibly height his description of Gar is a match for Peck. i had a friend who told me to get over the boyfriend i was trying to be in love with because “he acts like a mormon housewife”. it is the kind of quality Pete B has that makes a vicious homo like Peck resent him. he is the corn fed, corny, buck toothed nerdy boy next door, who jumped up to fold the flag in boy scouts, who studied too much and partied too little, who would never fall in love with a bitter homo like me or Peck. the biggest problem with the outrage over this piece is that Peck will love the attention and will have so much more to say about it. i’m tired of him already.
NotSoFast
Exactly. I came to a similar conclusion about Peck only after reading his entire essay – initially I only saw and was equally disgusted with the sex part of his essay, not realizing that there was more to the piece. I don’t find Peck to be homophobic after reading it all, but rather I see him as the kind of gay that finds other gays who don’t fit into his narrow definition of how gays should live their lives, namely urban radical, to be his real issue. Pete and his apparently non-radical-homo-domestic life is a perfect target for someone like Peck who is a specific product of the Republican/AIDS/gay oppressive 80s and 90s, and unless you lived through that period as an openly gay person, it’s hard to understand what fuels his contempt for someone like Pete.
That period was *hardly* easy for gays and many if not most of us were angry, rightly so. Lots of that anger turned into radical anger, take it to the streets and the AMA, and it worked as well as it could have. But many of us, including my now husband and myself, also lived homo-domestic lives after the battles – setting up house, cooking dinner, watching tv and getting to bed early for work the next day as we had bills to pay. We wanted a future together, and it included a calmer life with a house and a saving account outside of the fighting. But we looked too hetro-domestic for people like Peck, and I’ve known many of Pecks in my life, and they’d let us know that we were sellouts, copying the straights, not radical enough, not gay enough. Of course their judgements were never stated directly, but rather “is that your grandmothers china” “love your polo shirt” here and there, but I knew exactly what they were implying – that unless we were in your face angry 24/7 with a queer identity as they defined it to be, we didn’t count and were to be made fun of by the “real” gays – just like Peck does to Pete. So here we are, still together 34 years later, and I often wonder what became of all of those Pecks I knew in the 80s.
PinkoOfTheGange
Peck’s rant belonged on his personal blog, not at TNR.
madtown52761
When Peck “reads” Kamala for being bi racial; Elizabeth for being near-sighted; Bernie for being a septuagenarian; Corey for being bald; and Kristin for being a woman — THEN I’ll believe the piece wasn’t homophobic. Until then he’s just someone who attacked — I mean read — one Democratic candidate based on his sexuality, an immutable part of who he is.
Rock-N-RollHS
You mean Corey for still being in the closet.
thomes
I can’t wait till they publish a piece by a straight male writer wondering if Elizabeth Warren is too uptight to be a good president. And question whether she has taken it up the ass. After all, that’s how straight men talk, it’s their culture and we should accept without question. And obviously a magazine with a large viewership is the perfect place to ask those questions. That’s essentially what he’s arguing, yes?
Billy12345
Of course it was homophobic and amd poorly written….BUT mostly it was an unnecessary, unfounded, shallow speculation on a subject which would have nothing to do with Buttigieg functioning as President.
Polaro
It was vile and mean.
jjose712
I can’t stand Juzwiak so i couldn’t care less about anything he says.
Maybe the article was simply bitching but it was bitching fueled by homophobia and probably some self hate
sheogoroth
Screw Dale Peck for writing it, screw Juzwiak for defending it, and screw you, Queerty, for giving either of them any attention. You need to be better for our community.
anotheroldgay
You can’t unring a bell in cyberspace. Plenty of links to Peck’s archived opinion piece have sprouted up over the past few days. Good. I also understand that the editors of a once-respected publication had the right to remove his self-involved rant, in an attempt to salvage what’s left of their reputation.
However, I hope that many, many more will read this diatribe from start to finish. Then, I hope they read it again and share it with all of their friends and peers.
I am a year older than Dale Peck and also lived in NYC in the 90’s. We frequented the same East Village hangouts. I don’t recall meeting him and I am glad I didn’t. I’ve met enough of his kind… angry poisonous snakes… ready to strike at anyone who invades their space or does not fit their definition of gay. I wonder how many people of our generation unwittingly stepped into these snake pits, escaped and then scurried right back into the closet.
When I was 18 and naive, I believed and hoped that once I came out I would find myself among brothers (and sisters) who would be there to provide love, acceptance and refuge. Nothing could have been further from the case. Several decades later, I can only say that it’s heartening that so many straight people have voiced their outrage over Peck’s venomous tirade. Thank you for defending us and, more importantly, reminding us that we also have a right to self-respect and dignity.
Speaking of poison… after several reads I cannot help but wonder if Peck should have laid off the Bloody Mary(s) before sending this off to the editors.
designdude
Queerty degrades itself over and over again with this type analysis. Making news out of unsanctioned and mean spirited and unsubstantiated facts/profiles/articles.
As a group of persons that care about the LBGTQ progression, perhaps some would take their imagination and write a novel and leave our community leaders alone.
Loki
A str8 male couldn’t have gotten away with ending a hit piece on Kirsten Gillibrand by saying, “Still, I wouldn’t kick her out of bed.” It would’ve been deemed sexist and promptly taken down. I wonder if Juzwiak would have a problem with that…
jrh311
Maybe just quit this “reading” BS and be an ally. Life has enough problems. No need to add bitchy, shallow criticisms from our own community.
Thad
Well, this certainly started a conversation.
I must say post comments on Queerty are the best…often well considered and coming from reality.. Thank you.
Aromaeus
If it was a condemnation of Buttigieg being a neoliberal politician who actually has no real concrete policy positions or ideas then yes it woud have had merit. However it was not that.
Gotchanoone
The gay culture is what created a person like Dale Peck so I don’t know why most in the gay community are shocked and surprised by his comments and commentaries.
yah_sure_youbetcha
If we’ve learned nothing from RuPaul’s Drag Race, it’s that not every queen has a talent for reading. Reading is an art form requiring a keen sense of irony, humor, attention to detail, and truth. When it’s right, it’s glorious. When it’s not, and often it’s really not, it’s just b*tchy and boring.
BetterLateThan
Peck was absolutely correct. Buttigieg is a perfect example of the straight-acting pretty white A-Gay who achieves great success only because he stays firmly in the closet until circumstances force him out , who then goes on to be Mr Super Gay —- once he is prosperous and safely-established in his chosen career. He HAS been out for only a heartbeat, and he DID marry almost the very first guy he even dated. He has NOT established his gay credentials, and I have always seriously disliked his type, because they are essentially hypocrites. They want all the benefits of being out NOW but they have spent their entire lives enjoying material gains and social acceptance by lying and dissociating themselves from the real world struggles of all the gay men and women who live honestly. Mayor Pete is a little too late to the party for me to trust him.
J W G
I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again; the most homophobic people I’ve met were gay themselves. I’ve watched gay men have other gay men fired from jobs, cruelly and inappropriately outed for no other reason then self hatred and cruelty. If gay men (I don’t see women act like this) attack other gay men, passing it off as bitchy it’s self hatred, it’s self demeaning, it gives the straight world a Punch and Judy show and once again we are reduced to caricatures of ourselves in little more than freak entertainment, like mud wrestling, like midget tossing not to be taken seriously, an amusing curiosity for an indifferent hetero world.
salex
WHAT’S interesting is the article was written by one of us. I accepted something comparable to appear closer to November, 2000. Also, guess what, certainly a Trumpeter would be behind it other than Pence.
Better that this creative writing appears now. Once that group finds it necessary to reintroduce it, we can always say…”THAT’S BEEN SAID BEFORE…IT’S OLD STUFF, or how’s about, “SO WHAT WRONG WITH THAT, EVERYONE HAS A SEX LIFE..”