He was trying to get away from everything for most of his childhood, ever since he was in middle school and knew he was gay. He was relentlessly bullied in school and lived in terror of being flung around in the locker room by his backpack, which happened at least once. After the hike, he recalled being nine-years-old when Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old student at the University of Wyoming, was tied to a fence in Laramie, beaten and left for dead. “Two dudes took him in a truck and tied him to a fence post and I grew up surrounded by trucks and fence posts,” Chasten said. “That was the biggest signal to me, like you’ll die. Like, there’s a good chance that you could be murdered.”
They say you can never go home again, but now, after more than 13 years, he’s back in the town of a little more than 15,000 people where he once worried for his life. He bought a home here with his husband in 2020 after Pete dropped out of the presidential race. They still spend most of their time in D.C., where their almost-two-year-old twins, Penelope Rose and Joseph August “Gus” Buttigieg, attend daycare. But they are in Traverse City as often as they can be — weekends, weeks off, holidays. Here, Chasten’s family can help take care of the kids and they can enjoy some of the trappings of small-town life.
Of course, there’s been plenty of speculation about other motivations behind this move: Chasten’s hometown happens to be in a swing-y but leaning blue industrial Midwest state, the kind of place Pete could launch a successful gubernatorial bid one day, unlike the more Republican friendly Indiana. Those close to Pete downplay such machinations, but he did do surrogate work here for Democrats ahead of the 2022 midterms. “We’ll make decisions as a family in the future, but I think it’s really important to just stay grounded in what’s in front of us,” Chasten said when I asked him if he’d be up for another presidential run in, say, 2028.
For now, Pete is happy here, Chasten said. “He fell in love with it right away.” But, for Chasten, the feelings are more complicated. This is home. Here, he is “Terry’s boy,” the son of a beloved local landscaper, the local boy made good. As I walked the city later that day with him, no fewer than five people greeted him on the street in the space of an hour, including the spouse of his elementary school teacher. It’s home to the first gay bar he ever went to: Side Traxx.
But Traverse City is also the place he ran away from at age 18, convinced he might never come back. Here, he was sexually assaulted by a friend of a friend at a party. (That story is left out of the recently released young-adult adaptation of his 2020 memoir I Have Something to Tell You, Chasten told me, because he “didn’t want to be the one to make that decision for other families.”) When he was growing up, the area surrounding Traverse City was staunchly Republican, a place where he felt the pressure to have a George W. Bush campaign sticker on his 1992 Mitsubishi Expo. “Being a Republican was a political position I’d always held because the idea of questioning it (or even figuring out what it meant!) had never come up,” he writes in his book.