Though Cupid appears in many guises it is safe to say he has seldom taken the form of a hard-boiled, deep-fried, sausage-wrapped cholesterol depth charge called a Scotch egg. Yet there, on their first real-time date in September 2015, at the Fiddler’s Hearth pub in South Bend, Ind., were Peter Buttigieg, 36, and Chasten Glezman, 28, and there, alongside a pint of Irish cider and an icy draft Guinness, not the usual pretzels or beer nuts but an order of Mr. Buttigieg’s favorite bar snack.
“He said, “You’ve got to try these,’” said Mr. Glezman, a junior high school teacher at a Montessori Academy in nearby Mishawaka, Ind. “It was a kind of magical moment. I mean, sure, it’s a fried ball of meat with an egg in the middle, but when it came to the table my little Midwestern heart leapt.”
The Scotch egg turned out to be an early indicator of compatibility for the couple.
“Once I saw he was down for the Scotch egg, I knew it had a shot,” said Mr. Buttigieg, who is the mayor of South Bend.
Far from being just the out-gay mayor of a scrappy rebounding Rust Belt city, Mr. Buttigieg is a singular politician: a Democrat in a Republican stronghold; a high school valedictorian who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard and who also attended Oxford as a Rhodes scholar; a political comer who, after winning election at 29, quickly set about reversing an economic decline in this northern Indiana city, where the last Studebaker rolled off a South Bend assembly line in 1963; a Navy veteran who, in 2014, took an unusual leave-of-absence from his civic day job to serve a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
He is also one of a handful of Democrats that, in a New Yorker article, were cited by President Barack Obama as the future of the Democratic Party, an anointing whose potential ramped up this spring when, with an eye on the 2020 race, Mr. Buttigieg’s own political action committee began supporting legislative races in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Colorado and Ohio.
“Yes, he knows it’s ridiculous to think about jumping from a City Hall for 101,000 people to the White House,” Politico wrote of a relative novice who has yet to hold federal office, while also noting Mr. Obama was far from the only heavyweight urging the young mayor to aim high.
“Pete’s going to be a force in the Democratic Party,” David Axelrod, the political strategist credited with helping propel Mr. Obama to the nation’s highest office, told Politico. “The question is just whether that’s as a candidate for president, or something else.”
It would be easy enough, scanning Mr. Buttigieg’s professional résumé, to see in it a steady progression of red-letter milestones, and yet the way forward was not always easy, as Mr. Buttigieg made clear in a coming-out essay written in 2015 for The South Bend Tribune. The mayor’s public declaration was motivated in part by, as he said, “a need to have a personal life,” but also by a religious freedom bill signed by Mike Pence, the state’s governor then, that its critics claimed would give businesses the ability to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.
“I was well into adulthood before I was prepared to acknowledge the simple fact that I am gay,” Mr. Buttigieg (pronounced BOOT-edge-edge) wrote at the time, adding that the acceptance taken for granted by gay people in certain parts of the country has been slow in coming to the small college town where he was raised, a child of two Notre Dame academics: “South Bend isn’t exactly the land of change.”