Analytical by nature, I surprised even myself with the emotional tenor of my words to the crowd that night. But I was moved by the support at the polls, which felt not only like a mandate for my administration’s work, but also an affirmation of my relationship with the city that had produced me, welcomed me home, and accepted my sometimes novel way of doing business. A close observer might also have detected an additional influence on my tone and words that night. Most would see only the effusiveness you’d expect in a candidate relishing an overwhelming electoral margin. But those who knew me best would recognize something new in my countenance that night—the proverbial glow of a young man in love.
17
Becoming Whole
If you saw Chasten next to me at a restaurant or a party, with his tortoiseshell round glasses and gingham shirt with rolled-up sleeves tucked into a pair of jeans, you might assume he was in politics, too, or a young lawyer, perhaps. You might guess that he and I met at Harvard, or that he was finishing up his doctorate at Notre Dame. You wouldn’t realize, at first, that you were seeing an avatar of Middle America and of the challenges of millennial life. You wouldn’t know that you were looking at a 4-H boy turned theater kid, a small-town product who found his way alone to Germany as an exchange student, or that he was the first in his family to complete college and move on to cannily survive alone in a big city, a graduate student with top grades whose teenage years had included a period of homelessness in Michigan. I hadn’t seen any of that, either; I just saw a nice-looking guy on an app, and wanted to meet the man behind the big smile and blue eyes in the photo of him by the lakeshore. So I tapped the box on the right.
Chasten (pronounced to rhyme with “fast in”) was living at the time in Chicago, pushing through coursework for a master’s in education at DePaul and paying his way by working as a substitute teacher in Chicago public schools, sometimes crashing on a friend’s couch while letting out his apartment on Airbnb for extra income. I was a mayor, newly out of the closet and ready, at long last, to start dating, prepared that summer of 2015 to begin to experience the thrills and setbacks that most of my friends had gone through fifteen years earlier.
I had come out of the closet in order to make it possible, at last, to create a meaningful personal life. I was already well into my thirties, and hoping, as I’ve described, to have a family someday. The politics were what they were. Now that I didn’t have to worry about being spotted or outed, it was time to start dating. But how? How is a gay mayor—or any mayor—supposed to go about getting a date?
The closer to home I looked, the harder it seemed. It could be an ethical minefield; a mayor in his own city can certainly get his calls returned, but there’s also the risk that someone will completely misunderstand why you’re inviting them to meet for a coffee at Chicory Café or a pint at Fiddler’s Hearth. Farther afield, friends from college were willing and eager to introduce me to people they knew. But most of the eligible guys in question lived in New York or Washington. To most of them, I was lost in the expanse of “flyover country,” probably even more remote than if I were overseas. Since I wasn’t moving anytime soon, I was going to have to think closer to home.
But when it came to South Bend, it wasn’t even clear where to look. I thought of the countless local doctors and business leaders of my parents’ generation who had seemed intent over the years on fixing me up with their bright and lovely daughters. Where were these would-be matchmakers now, and how was it that not one of them had a son or nephew that they wanted me to meet? My city had never felt so small.
In the military, sometimes they talk about “training age” to describe the difference between longevity and experience. For example, if you are a forty-year-old major trained in field artillery and then switch to intelligence, you might have the same training age as a private first-class twenty years your junior when it came to a specific skill like cryptography.
That’s how I felt about dating and romance: I was in my thirties, but my training age, so to speak, was practically zero. On my thirty-third birthday, I was starting my fourth year as the mayor of a sizable city. I had served in a foreign war and dined with senators and governors. I had seen Red Square and the Great Pyramids of Giza, knew how to order a sandwich in seven languages, and was the owner of a large historic home on the St. Joseph River. But I had absolutely no idea what it was like to be in love.
I’M FAR FROM THE FIRST PERSON to find himself in that kind of strange and embarrassing position—years in the closet have done that to millions of people—but my situation was still more unusual. In fact, it was unique: the scenario of a thirty-something mayor, single, gay, interested in a long-term relationship, and looking for a date in Indiana must have been a first. Luckily, for this twenty-first-century problem, my generation had invented a ready solution: a proliferation of websites and apps promised to connect me to datable guys within any radius I chose.
I was young enough to try it, but also just old enough to consider it newfangled and a little risky. I wasn’t immune to a previous generation’s stigma when it comes to online dating. But I was living through the tipping point when it was becoming clear that many, perhaps most, new long-term relationships and even marriages had begun online. So I logged on. Now came another set of puzzles. What do you put down for “occupation”? What do you do if the best photos you have of yourself depict you in a suit with people standing around clapping? The pictures on my phone all looked great for politics, terrible for dating. Ribbon cuttings. Groundbreakings. Graduation speeches. Do you hide that you’re a politician? Maybe, but you need to tell someone your name in order to date them. Then what? People have Google, and they’re not stupid. Coming out as gay had been a hard thing to do in the political world; coming out as a politician in the online dating world was even more perplexing.
Confronted with the puzzle of how to describe my day job, I went for a middle ground—not to conceal that I was an elected official, but not to lead with it, either. Friends helped me pick out the right photos for a profile—most of them doing something social and looking casual, but one giving a speech, an obligatory one from a beach, and, of course, one in uniform. (Anyone who claims to be above using military service for dating purposes is lying.) I looked mostly for people in Chicago, near enough to drive but far enough to be outside the viewing area of our TV stations, where most people had never heard of me. After setting up accounts one by one on websites and apps like OkCupid and Match.com, I started matching with people. A few chats led nowhere, then I found some guys who actually seemed promising, and started arranging dates.