Mayor Pete & Husband Cover TIME Magazine "First Family"

Openly gay White House hopeful Mayor Pete Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, cover TIME Magazine with the caption "First Family."

Mayor Pete and Chasten are the first gay couple to be featured on the cover since 2013.

From the profile:

Buttigieg is a gay Episcopalian veteran in a party torn between identity politics and heartland appeals. He’s also a fresh face in a year when millennials are poised to become the largest eligible voting bloc. Many Democrats are hungry for generational change, and the two front runners are more than twice his age.

But Buttigieg’s greatest political asset may be his ear for languages. He speaks eight, including Norwegian and Arabic, but he’s particularly fluent in the dialect of the neglected industrial Midwest. Buttigieg is a master of redefinition, a translator for a party that has found it increasingly difficult to speak to the voters who elected President Donald Trump.

The son of an English professor and a scholar of linguistics, he roots his campaign in an effort to reframe progressive ideas in conservative language. “If the substance of your ideas is progressive but there’s mistrust about them among conservatives, you have three choices,” Buttigieg tells TIME, sitting on his living-room couch in South Bend.

“One is to just change your ideas and make them more conservative. The second is to sort of be sneaky and try to make it seem like your ideas are more conservative than they are. And the third, the approach that I favor, is to stick to your ideas, but explain why conservatives shouldn’t be afraid of them.”

[snip]

Some of Buttigieg’s fellow officers who had used gay as an epithet in his presence reached out to express their support. “I bet some of them still go back and tell gay jokes because that’s their habit, you know?” he says. “Bad habits and bad instincts is not the same as people being bad people.”

All this informs his belief that it’s still possible to reach across America’s political divide.

“We’ve got to get away from this kill-switch mentality that we see on Twitter,” he says.

He has seen once disapproving parents dance at their gay son’s wedding and homophobic military officers take back their words, and so he believes in the power of redemption and forgiveness.

“This idea that we just sort people into baskets of good and evil ignores the central fact of human existence, which is that each of us is a basket of good and evil,” he says. “The job of politics is to summon the good and beat back the evil.”

It's a terrific read. Definitely click over and learn a bit more about Mayor Pete.

TIME's new cover: Mayor Pete Buttigieg's unlikely, untested, unprecedented presidential campaign https://t.co/kMRow7D4sM pic.twitter.com/xmrZaAW7y4

— TIME (@TIME) May 2, 2019

The historical importance of such representation for the LGBTQ community can't be overstated.

What this means to me now is one thing. But oh, what it would have meant to me at nineteen. Twelve. Four.

We’re not there yet, but wow, how far we’ve come. https://t.co/fVbnqrk1bB

— Jeremy Hooper (@goodasyou) May 2, 2019

US presidential hopeful 'Mayor Pete' and his husband Chasten Buttigieg made the cover of TIME. Regardless of which Democratic candidate you support for president, this is historic and awesome! 👏 👏https://t.co/qtbKqoRJwJ

— Jon Cooper (@joncoopertweets) May 2, 2019

A serious US presidential candidate and his husband (Mayor Pete & Chasten Buttigieg) on Time Magazine cover. I wish I could go back in time and show baby gay me this. pic.twitter.com/kKueRbeIzh

— Kade Boehme (@kaderadenurface) May 2, 2019