Author : Pete Buttigieg

I was in high school when Columbine happened. – Pete Buttigieg

My high school in South Bend had nearly a thousand students. Statistically, that means that several dozen were gay or lesbian. Yet, when I graduated in 2000, I had yet to encounter a single openly LGBT student there. – Pete Buttigieg

By high school, I had traded my oversized, thick glasses for contact lenses, but my eyesight was getting worse every year, smothering my childhood aspiration of becoming an astronaut or, at least, a pilot. – Pete Buttigieg

When I was fourteen, Mom and Dad sent me to St. Joseph High School, the Catholic school up the hill from our place, housed in a 1950s-era tan brick building sometimes confused for a light industrial structure due to the surprisingly high smokestack of its old incinerator. – Pete Buttigieg