The Atlantic: Mel Boozer said what Pete Buttigieg can't.

[femmedem]

Mel Boozer grew up in a series of homes without electricity. Graduating second in the 1963 class of Dunbar High, the school of choice for Washington, D.C.’s most high-achieving black students, he won a scholarship to Dartmouth, where he was one of only three African Americans in the freshman class. His roommate, rather than share a room with a person of color, moved out. After completing fieldwork in Brazil and earning a Ph.D. in sociology at Yale, Boozer moved back to his hometown, where he became active in politics as president of the Gay Activists Alliance, Washington director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and founder of the Langston Hughes–Eleanor Roosevelt Democratic Club for gay and lesbian blacks.

Boozer’s prominence in the mostly white milieu of D.C.’s early gay-rights movement was unusual, not least because of his local roots. Four decades ago, it took considerably more courage for a D.C. native to come out as a gay activist; most gay people (like most straight people) in the District were transplants. “It’s a lot easier to come out and be politically active in the gay community when you don’t live near your family than when you do,” Boozer told The Advocate magazine.

On the surface, Mel Boozer might seem to have little in common with Pete Buttigieg, Rhodes Scholar, McKinsey consultant, veteran, son of college professors, and mayor of South Bend, Indiana. But the first openly gay presidential candidate to mount a serious campaign for the presidency follows in the footsteps of Boozer, the first openly gay person to be nominated for a major-party presidential ticket.

On August 14, 1980, Boozer rose before the delegates of the Democratic National Convention in New York City. His name had been entered into nomination for the vice presidency not to challenge the incumbent, Walter Mondale, but as a means of drawing visibility to the emergent gay-rights cause. Although Boozer and the 77 men and women of the gay and lesbian caucus who canvassed Madison Square Garden that week ultimately obtained the necessary signatures to place him on the ballot, the reaction to their effort from fellow Democrats was not wholly positive. “Why don’t you just shut up,” one delegate told Boozer. “You wouldn’t get fired from your jobs if you just shut up.”

More: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/mel-boozer-pete-buttigieg/604144/

[judeling]

1. Mayor Pete is playing this aspect of his resume wrong and it hurts him.

It is never apparent that he acknowledges his place is the result of the struggle and those who came before and gave their lives to it.

Within the community there is a great sense of pride in what he represents, reactions to him are much, much more mixed because of how he uses that aspect of his resume.