Inside the Extremely Vanilla World of Pete Buttigieg Fanfiction

Glezman—a human Warby Parker ad—is as conventionally attractive as Buttigieg, but his backstory is in deep contrast to Buttigieg’s golden boy story of successes: He was the oddball “reading Harry Potter or singing Celine Dion” while his brothers and father went out to chop wood. While he wasn’t out, his high school classmates assumed he was gay and bullied him accordingly. A high school exchange program in Germany made him feel like he could be open about his sexuality for the first time, but that too became was a period rife with challenges. He was sexually assaulted at a house party not long after he came out, and when he came out to his family back home in Traverse City, Michigan, they were dismayed. He left home, slept on friends’ couches and even in his own car in empty parking lots. He eventually reconciled with his parents, but he never restored his relationship with his brothers. Chasten became the first of his family to go to college and worked at a youth theater academy while hustling part-time work at a Starbucks to score health insurance.

On their first date, Chasten and Pete—men of very different backgrounds, very different personalities, very different experiences of what it’s like to be gay—both greeted each other by saying “Howdy” at the same time. The meet-cute burns. “So gross,” Chasten told the Washington Post. but his “heart fluttered” all the same.

But it’s these details that capture the imagination of their most ardent fanfic admirers, and turns these fics into gay Hallmark movie scripts with a side of Pornhub. And like every Hallmark movie or predictable porno, there are a set of tropes that one can expect in Pete/Chasten fanfic that are impossible to ignore.

Chasten Is the Fun One

Chasten can sometimes feel like the manic pixie dreamgirl of the Buttigieg expanded universe. He’s often depicted as usually spontaneous and campy, eager to pull straight-laced, type-A Pete—or, as he likes to call him, “Peter”—into some unexpected adventure. This is evident in fics both tame and incredibly horny: I read one story in which Chasten dressed up as a JFK to impress Pete; I read another in which Chasten donned a pilot’s hat in the bedchambers of Air Force One, urging a frazzled Pete to join the mile high club in the story unfortunately titled “High Hopes.” But my favorite was the one where Chasten—impish grin gracing his face, as always—convinces Pete to fuck him on the infamous Resolute Desk in the Oval Office (he does).

He stalks to the desk and pins Chasten to it, pushing his husband back against the ancient timbers. He could recite the whole history of its wood, the ship and the marks in the grand piece of furniture, usually, but right now all he cares about is how Chasten moans when he pushes just a little harder.

One reviewer thanked the author for not only writing such a “smoking hot” fic, but managing, however temporarily, to banish some of their negative associations with the Oval Office, likely referring to its current occupant. Another reviewer replied, “We gonna have to deep-Clorox that desk before our favs can do what they gotta do.” A third added, “Clorox the desk and do an exorcism.”

Lis Smith Is the Living Embodiment of Girlboss Feminism

Smith, an alumnus of the Obama 2012 re-election campaign and Buttigieg’s current senior communications advisor, makes an appearance in some of the better-researched Pete/Chasten fics. She is a primary character of the most popular Pete/Chasten fic on AO3, a work in progress fic that is already over 70,000 words and is home to over 209 comments and 106 “kudos” (the AO3 version of “likes.”) Her sharp bob, red lips, and potty mouth are written as aspirational badass quirks, but I find myself unable to get over the fact that there are people who actually stan a communications advisor.

Lis burst through the hotel’s revolving door, words tumbling from her perfectly outlined scarlet lips. “Say, I’m hearing we’re on the fourth floor!” she yelled toward the front desk, unable to wait the few seconds it would take to cross the lobby before initiating conversation. “We specifically requested a floor as high as possible, and I know it’s not you personally trying to fuck us over, but I think maybe your bosses are.”

If Smith is meant to be wildly aloof and brusque to hotel employees and other underlings, I’ll allow that characterization with open arms, because it’s done quite well! But this author calls Smith a “goddess” in the fic tags, so I’m assuming the above moment was supposed to be funny, not charmless.

Pete Is Usually the Top

One of the funniest things about fandoms is when something becomes “fanon,” as in, it becomes “canon” because the fans agreed upon it. The Pete/Chasten fandom has not created firm fanon in regards to who tops, though most have Pete topping, which I assume is attributed to his seriousness and the association between topping and traditionally masculine traits.

There were a few notable exceptions, including one which imagines that a candid video of Pete and Chasten is leaked on Reddit and 4chan. In this story, we discover that the scandal isn’t quite that the couple is gay but rather that Pete is not a top; as he exasperatedly says to Smith, “I bottom, Lis, who gives a fuck?” (“‘That’s not a bad line, actually,’ Lis says pensively. ‘Not for you, obviously, totally off-brand and Beto’s got the market cornered on profanity, but it’s not a bad line…’”). Additionally, there exists a dynamic in which Chasten’s relative experience compared to Pete’s inexperience is enough to grant him the duties of a top as he guides Pete through a late-in-life sexual awakening.

I find myself unable to get over the fact that there are people who actually stan a communications advisor

The purpose that fanfiction serves its readers is completely subjective; some use it as a way to correct a source material that has wronged them, others as a way to simply explore characters and plots that went unexplored in the original book, movie, or TV show. RPF generally serves as pure, unadulterated wish fulfillment, but unlike most RPF, Pete and Chasten are actually a couple, not some imaginary pairing that only exists in the mind of a 15-year-old girl who watches two of her favorite members of a boy band smile at each other and makes a fanvid dedicated to their flirty moments. Instead, writers glean details from the facts and then make Buttigieg into the candidate, and the person, they fantasize him to be: A gentle lover and deeply humble politician. His bland brand of centrism is virtually non-existent in the world of fic—and why should it be, when these fics are mostly fluff?

Politics already resembles both the petulant toxicity of a shipping war and the fabricated urgency of a sports event, and those who approach politics as more of a hobby than a marker of survival can be blinded to the material conditions that are actually at stake. Treating politics like fandom is what gives us wild Twitter threads imagining Elizabeth Warren baking us cookies after our abortion. But as strange as it sounds, Pete Buttigieg fanfiction is one of the more harmless ways of projecting onto a politician and sharing their fantasies, political or otherwise. It’s certainly healthier than reading the Politico PLAYBOOK every day.