On a sticky August Friday afternoon on Fire Island, New York City’s second most illustrious summer weekend destination, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and First Secretary of Transportation Gentleman Chasten Buttigieg held the most successful fundraiser in the island’s history, according to event co-chair and former 18-year treasurer of the Democratic National Committee Andrew Tobias. He said the fundraiser brought in $321,000, beating the $200,000 haul for an event Cher showed up to in 2016.
The inherent contrasts of the 2024 campaign — prosecutor vs. criminal, future vs. past, and, as the event’s host Marius Meland pointed out, woman vs. man — were embodied by the environs. The event took place in the Pines, a historically gay neighborhood that served as the setting for the 2022 romantic comedy Fire Island. En route to the event, secret service agents appeared to waylay hunks in bikini cut swimsuits to smuggle Emhoff on and off the island. (“We can’t walk on the boardwalk because someone’s getting on a boat?” said an annoyed man holding what looked to be a to-go cocktail.) Hanging over the entrance of Meland and his partner Eng Kian Ooi’s home was a large painting of an unusually sexy Narcissus. The house, designed by Studio 54 architecture firm Bromley Caldari, was purchased with a fortune made from the sale of Law360 to LexisNexis and from Meland’s current work in AI. Buttigieg and Emhoff were dressed formally — “Business casual on a Friday on Fire Island…thanks, team!” said Emhoff with affectionate sarcasm — while the well tanned and polo-shirted crowd cheered. A campaign staffer bridged the divide in an increasingly damp linen suit worn over a tank top.
Attendees paid between $250 and $10,000 to be there, according to marketing executive Barry Lowenthal. (The floor for a photo with Emhoff and Buttigieg: $5,000, Lowenthal told VF.) Though President Biden was referred to with gratitude — “Look what he just did!” someone said of the hostage exchange that freed Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich — everyone Vanity Fair spoke with expressed great enthusiasm over the change in ticket. Nowhere was this vibe shift more evident than in attendance: the event had initially been conceived as an event to raise money for President Biden, but after Vice President Kamala Harris declared her candidacy, the event was rejiggered—and it sold out.
Kian Ooi confessed he and Meland were titillated by the thought of the event as a test run for Emhoff and Buttigieg as, respectively, First and Second Gentlemen, if Buttigieg’s husband Pete were chosen as Harris’s running mate. But the consensus of attendees was that any of the reported finalists — Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, or Buttigieg — would be great. “People think decisions like this are like choosing betweens doors, and behind one is a dragon and the other is a million dollars,” Tobias said. “But usually it’s like $800,000 is behind one door and €800,000 is behind the other.”
The VP contender who came up the most was Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, even though she has withdrawn herself from contention. Ninety-eight-year-old Jack Kabin (who made the fortuitous real estate purchase of a $22,000 home in the Pines in 1972), said, “Of course I want it to be Pete. But America isn’t ready for a gay Vice President.” The undeniable intrusion of identity politics into the election has been both negative (Former President Donald Trump suggesting HBCU alumnus and AKA member Harris “happened to turn Black”) and positive (the millions of dollars raised in Zoom fundraisers like “Black Men for Harris” and “White Women for Harris”). Lowenthal suggested a theme for this event: “Gays for Harris.”
For Lowenthal and other donors, the stakes of the election and choice to support Harris are clear; when Lowenthal went to Florida for the winter, someone shouted the f-slur at him. At the event on Fire Island, Buttigieg told a story of the 24-hour notice he and Pete had before finding out they were going to adopt their twins: While their son Gus was on a ventilator in the first hours of his life, Emhoff and Vice President Harris FaceTimed into the children’s hospital to talk to the the Buttigieges. The spouses became close during the 2020 primary despite being on opposite sides of Team Pete and the KHive, and Harris ended up administering the oath of office to Pete Buttigieg for his cabinet appointment in 2021. Emhoff reminded the crowd he practiced law for 30 years and that a threat to Griswold and its promise of right to privacy — and attendant right to “to do what you want in your home with who you love,” as Emhoff put it, including be married to them—have been forecasted in the concurring decision on Dobbs written by Justice Clarence Thomas.