So, how did Mayor Pete end up hitting so many milestones in his mayoral career? At age 29, Buttigieg was elected as the youngest mayor of a city of 100,000 or more people — and he won the election with a 74% majority vote. Taking office in 2012, he still wasn’t open about his sexuality, and didn’t come to terms with publicizing it until he was deployed to Afghanistan until 2014. According to his interview, that’s when he realized how “untenable the situation was,” and felt he needed to come to terms with his identity in a more public way. “I wasn’t coming back to a family. More than that, I had no idea what it was like to be in love, and the idea that here I am, I’m a grown-ass man, I own a home, I’m the mayor of my city, I’m a military officer and if I get killed over there I will go to my grave not knowing what it’s like to be in love,” Buttigieg says. That’s what finally pushed the needle.