Pete Buttigieg

Pete Buttigieg is homosexual. In June 2015, he publicly announced his sexual orientation through an essay. He is also the first executive in Indiana to be openly gay.

He is a Christian and attends Sunday services at the Episcopal Church.

He had given a TEDx talk on urban innovation in South Bend, which was quite appreciated.

Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg was born on 19th January 1982 in South Bend, Indiana, to Joseph A Buttigieg and Jennifer Ann Montgomery.

He studied at St. Joseph school, where during his senior year he was honored by former President JF Kennedy’s family members for a prize-winning essay he wrote, at the JFK Profiles in Courage Essay Contest. He was also selected as an Indiana delegate to the United States Senate Youth Program. He graduated in the year 2000.

He later went to Harvard University where he was elected the president of the Harvard Institute of Politics Student Advisory Committee. He got his BA in Literature and History in 2004. He also received a first class Honors degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford in 2007.

After his graduation, Pete Buttigieg started working at WMAQ-TV as an investigative intern. He had also worked as an intern for Jill Long Thompson’s 2002 congressional campaign and served as an adviser on her 2008 gubernatorial campaign. From 2004 to 2005, he worked as a conference director for the international strategic consulting firm of William Cohen, former US Secretary of Defense.

He then worked as a consultant at McKinsey and Company, a management strategy consulting firm, from 2007 to 2010. He was a candidate from the Democratic Party in 2010 for the State Treasurer of Indiana.

Buttigieg also served in the military for a few years, after being commissioned in 2009 as a Naval Intelligence Officer in the Naval Reserves. He was deployed in Afghanistan in 2013 for seven months, after which he returned to South Bend.

He was elected Mayor of South Bend on 8th November 2011. He assumed office the following year on 1st January, becoming the youngest Mayor of any US city with at least 100,000 residents.

He is known for making redevelopment a top priority during his administration. One of his signature programs is the ‘1000 Properties in 1000 Days.’ It was a project to repair or demolish targeted properties across the cities. The goal was eventually completed by the scheduled end date. During the time he served in Afghanistan as a lieutenant in the Navy Reserves, Deputy Mayor Mark Neal took over his responsibilities.

Buttigieg first kindled a controversy after he demoted Darryl Boykins, the first African American police chief of South Bend, along with police communications director Karen DePaepe, as they were found to be involved in a case of tapped telephone conversations between four white police officers which supposedly contained racist content.

In 2016, his handling of a civil rights case gained national attention. The case involved three police officers of South Bend assaulting an African American teen for a crime the latter did not commit. Though Buttigieg’s administration offered the boy’s family an amount of $15,000 for settlement, the family rejected the offer. The case went to trial, where the officers were found guilty by the jury.

His ‘Smart Streets project’ also gained controversy after the death of a young 11-year-old boy named Tristan Moore in an accident; he had been hit by a car while going to school. Buttigieg, however, denied that the project had anything to do with the accident.