2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg counseled a nine-year-old boy on how to come out as gay Saturday night at a campaign event.
The former South Bend, Indiana mayor spoke at a Denver, Colorado campaign event where a young supporter, nine-year-old Zachary Ro, asked Buttigieg to help him come out as gay.
“Would you help me tell the world I’m gay, too? I want to be brave like you,” Ro asked through a submitted question.
Buttigieg brought the child up onto the stage with him, where Ro gave Buttigieg a bracelet. The child was attending the campaign event with his parents, CNN reports. (RELATED: DC Parents Bring Children As Young As 9 Months To Adams Morgan Drag Queen Story Hour)
“I don’t think you need a lot of advice for me on bravery. You seem pretty strong to me,” Buttigieg told the nine-year-old.
“It took me a long time to figure out how to tell even my best friend that I was gay, let alone to go out there and tell the world and to see you willing to come to terms with who you are in a room full of 1,000 people, thousands of people you’ve never met that’s, that’s really something.”
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The 2020 presidential candidate also gave the child advice on “a couple things that might be useful” to him.
“The first thing is that it won’t always be easy, but that’s okay, because you know who you are,” he told Ro.
“And that’s really important, because when you know who you are, you have a center of gravity that can hold you together when all kinds of chaos is happening around you.”
Buttigieg also reminded Ro to remember that there are those who will take their lead from him and decide “that they can be a little braver because you have been brave.”
“When I was trying to figure out who I was, I was afraid that who I was might mean that I could never make a difference,” he said.
“And what wound up happening instead is that it’s a huge part of the difference I get to make. I never could have seen that coming, and you’ll never know whose life you might be affecting right now, just by standing here.”
“There’s a lot of power in that,” he added.
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The Buttigieg campaign did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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