If not for the deployment, I might never have found my way to Chasten. Before going overseas, I had felt comfortable being more than one person, as we all sometimes must, according to the roles we are called to play. I knew how to toggle between mayor mode, officer mode, friend mode, and so on. But something about exposure to danger impresses upon you that a life is not only fragile but single, with one beginning and one end. It heightens the desire for your life to make sense as a whole, not just from certain angles. And with this comes renewed pressure for internal contradictions to be resolved, one way or another. For me, that meant sudden urgency around a question that had lingered unanswered for all of adulthood: how to reconcile my professional life with the fact that I am gay.
In the years after I had figured this fact out for myself, but before I was ready to be open about it, dating seemed completely off the table. Even if I had sought to have a romantic life before coming out, I’m not sure I could have figured out how to pull it off. My friends and peers were all busy dating, coupling, marrying. But sitting out never felt like a huge sacrifice to me, because keeping up with my studies and work was consuming all the energy I had, especially once I was elected; the city was a jealous bride.
But that effect started to wear off as I got older. I had always wanted to have a family, and crossing into my thirties made clear that the vague and distant future in which I expected that to happen couldn’t remain vague and distant forever. If I really wanted a family, sooner or later I would need to take some actual steps in that direction. The problem was that there is no way to raise a child—or in my case, go on a date in your own city—unless you are prepared to live openly.
Steadily, with each close friend’s wedding or emailed baby news, the force of this simple truth gained ground against my awareness of the professional peril holding me back. But that peril was real. My military career was theoretically safe, now that the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy had been repealed. I no longer stood to lose my commission as an officer merely for living openly. But what about my civilian job? South Bend had an ordinance forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation—I myself had signed it into law in 2012 after it passed in our council—but it was not exactly applicable in my case. As an elected official, your boss is the people of the city. If the people fire you for being gay, it might be discrimination, but it’s not like you can sue them. I was also not eager to become a poster child for LGBT issues; I had strongly supported these causes from the beginning, but did not want to be defined by them.
So I might have kept dragging my feet through my thirties, too, if it hadn’t been for the deployment. But preparing the letter on my last day before leaving home, sealing it in an envelope marked “just in case” and setting it gently in the desk drawer, had required as much of me as the hardest day of training. It forced me to think about the cohesion, or lack thereof, in my life. I had packed my bags reflecting on the possibility that I might get killed in action, thirty-two years old, single for basically all my adult life. From then on it was obvious that if I did come home all right, I needed to come out so I could get on with some kind of personal life. After I safely returned, it was simply a matter of when.
BEFORE EXPLAINING IT TO THE WORLD, I had to explain it to some people in my life. For every important step you take, certainly in politics but in life more generally, there is a “do not surprise” list. In my case, the top of the list was Mom and Dad. I felt they would be supportive, but for some reason I had not found the courage to include them in the tiny number of friends I had told. And so, at my parents’ dinner table one Sunday evening in January of 2015, I found myself, a grown man and the mayor of a sizable city, sweating through my palms and pushing remnants of ice cream around with a spoon while working up the will to change the subject of conversation from an upcoming council meeting to the fact that their son, their only child, was attracted to men.
“I wanted to tell you something,” I finally managed to begin.
“Okay,” Dad said, both of them subtly and quietly bracing. Announcements, of any kind, are not typical at this dinner table.
Then, after a short preamble consisting of what I’m sure were a few convoluted sentences about moving ahead in life and being transparent with those around me, I made my way to the phrase that had to be said out loud: I’m gay.
They weren’t terribly surprised. I hadn’t brought a girlfriend home in more than a decade, and I think they understood what to make of my not mentioning any kind of romantic life in the years since. The close friends I had told included some who were surprised, some who were not, and some who had assumed as time went by that I was more or less asexual. But simply by virtue of being my parents, they probably understood all this long before I did. Both made it clear it didn’t change anything in our relationship as a family.
If any disappointment surfaced at the table that night, it came after Mom looked at me, with a little light in her eyes, and asked, “Is there someone?” Only after answering no, and seeing the light fade a little, did I realize that the tone of her question had been one of hope. As moms go, she had been pretty sparing with any pressure to produce grandchildren, but I still knew that nothing would bring more joy to her life. Her hopeful question, and my disappointing answer, made for one more reason that I had to figure out a way to go public, so I could begin adding this dimension to my life. No, there wasn’t someone at the moment. But I wished there were, and if I could figure out the process of coming out publicly, then one day there would be.
SOMEDAY, POLITICIANS WON’T HAVE TO come out as gay any more than one “comes out” as straight. Someone like me would just show up at a social function with a date who was of the same sex, and everyone would figure it out and shrug. Maybe it’s already getting to be like that, in some coastal cities. But not in Indiana, especially not after the “Religious Freedom” debacle exploded that same spring of 2015. The very season when I was asking friends for advice on how to approach coming out publicly was the spring in which my state became nationally infamous for one of the most visible backward lurches on LGBT equality. Coming out was supposed to be a personal hurdle for me to clear, not a political statement, but doing so now meant it would be even more freighted with the complications of being openly gay in Mike Pence’s Indiana.