Openly Gay South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg Unveils His 2020 Presidential Exploratory Committee [VIDEO]

ABC News reports:



Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old, two-term Democratic mayor of South Bend, Indiana, took a significant step toward a run for the White House on Wednesday, announcing that he is forming a presidential exploratory committee, the precursor to an official campaign.

He was commissioned as a Navy intelligence officer in 2009 and in 2013, while serving as mayor, he was deployed to Afghanistan for seven months. A graduate of Harvard University and Oxford, Buttigieg is also the first openly-gay executive in Indiana history.

Buttigieg (whose name is of Maltese origin and pronounced “boot-edge-edge”) made the announcement in a video posted to his social media accounts. He came out publicly in a 2015 essay in the South Bend Tribune, less than two weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationally in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges.