When he first started working on the young adult adaptation of his new book, Chasten had no idea it would land amid today’s pitched public school culture wars, “Don’t Say Gay” bills and public school book bans. Still, some of that old atmosphere he found alienating when he was growing up remains. Gretchen Whitmer even flipped the county in 2022. Back in 2016, a rainbow-painted rock at his own high school, Traverse City West, turned up painted over, with the word “Trump” now emblazoned on it.īut over the last decade, the city has seen an influx of college educated residents relocate there, as well as moneyed folks with summer homes, which has made it more liberal, a blue-ish city surrounded by a red region. There was the time a group of seniors surrounded him in the locker room, taunting him: You like what you see, faggot? Stop staring at me, faggot. But his identity wasn’t exactly a secret before that. He didn’t come out until the summer of 2007, after graduating from high school. When Chasten was growing up here, it was a deep-red place where being gay was taboo. The other reason Little Chasten didn’t see this coming was because Little Chasten was miserable. Today, Chasten is something of a political celebrity in his own right, someone who makes appearances on MSNBC, rubs shoulders with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on a presidential delegation and has more than half a million followers. But those staffers miscalculated how Pete’s fans would respond to Chasten, who also built a loyal following on the campaign trail. That November, when I met Chasten for the first time at Fiddler’s Hearth - the Irish pub in South Bend, Indiana where he and Pete spent a portion of their first date - he was a middle school teacher with about 2,000 Twitter followers.īack in 2020, the campaign had told him that the campaign had only one star - something that wasn’t immediately apparent to Chasten, a theater kid who relished time on the stage holding a mic. A few months after the wedding, he was plotting a presidential campaign with his husband. His old life was upended five years ago when he married Pete in June of 2018 after dating for three years. “Little Chasten did not see this coming,” he told me as we drove around Traverse City. As they basked in their new home, a woman came up to them to offer a simple message. He told the Opera House crowd that he was once “a lonely kid that thought Traverse City wasn’t ready for me yet.” But now, both he and the city have changed.Īs we walked around downtown, he told me a story about last New Year’s Eve, when he and Pete sat in the lounge on the 10th floor of the Park Place Hotel in downtown looking out over the Grand Traverse Bay, Pete nursing a whiskey and Chasten a negroni. The former middle school teacher-turned-campaign spouse-turned memoirist shared the stage with actor and former Obama White House aide Kal Penn, Chasten’s interviewer that night (who also joined us for our morning hike through the dunes). That night, he sold out the Traverse City Opera House, hosting a crowd of about 600 people on the second day of a 15-stop, 12-day book tour. “No, they were much too popular for me,” he replied. “I went to high school with them,” he said to no one in particular. When he was signing copies downtown at Horizon Books, a buyer’s name stopped him in his tracks. The adaptation became an instant New York Times bestseller. “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.Īfter our morning hike, Chasten had a busy day promoting the young adult version of his memoir, which chronicles his experience growing up, coming out and running away from this Northern Michigan town. Bush campaign sticker on his 1992 Mitsubishi Expo. (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. Here, he was sexually assaulted by a friend of a friend at a party. It’s home to the first gay bar he ever went to: Side Traxx.īut Traverse City is also the place he ran away from at age 18, convinced he might never come back. 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. Here, he is “Terry’s boy,” the son of a beloved local landscaper, the local boy made good. “He fell in love with it right away.” But, for Chasten, the feelings are more complicated. In Traverse City, Buttigieg is “Terry’s boy,” the son of a beloved local landscaper.įor now, Pete is happy here, Chasten said. Buttigieg gets a hug from his dad, Terry Glezman.
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