When it comes to “coming out” as kinky, no one wants it to happen the way it happened to Chris Gallant, the gay 37-year-old helicopter pilot for the Army National Guard turned Democratic candidate for U.S. Congress. Once he won the primary for his district in Long Island, someone who supports his opponent dug into internet archives and found photos of Gallant, taken when he was 20 years old, wearing kink gear for the catalog of a San Francisco leather company.
The photos appeared in the New York Post in mid-September and one might expect it would have immediately killed his campaign. Yet, Gallant flipped the situation on its head by embracing his kink identity and refusing to be shamed. Here is an excerpt from his interview with the The New York Times:
“All my friends know I’m kinky” as hell, he said, using a saltier word. “I make Christian Grey look like amateur hour.” It was his first in-depth interview since the images were widely shared.
He wanted to make clear that he — like his outfits in those pics — had little to hide.
Then, his social media team posted a new ad of him in a tight black T-shirt that showed off his Marvel-worthy biceps. The slogan running across it read, “Make Politics Sexy Again.”
Sexiness, the ad went on to say, includes his plans for improving the lives of the voters in his district, including support for veterans and lowering the cost of living on Long Island.
One option for Gallant? Lean further into his image as a fit guy enjoying his sexuality, Reinish argued. “The Democrats have been librarians for too long.”
In the interview at his home, Gallant seemed to be contemplating just that kind of playbook. At least, he was not wringing his hands over photos from 2010.
“My most difficult thing was always getting my name out there or trying to improve that,” he said. “And there’s definitely been a name-recognition increase on the world stage.” He noted that “The Daily Show” had covered his modeling: The first joke told was that Gallant was getting his butt beaten, “but not in the polls.”
Gallant’s approach paid off; he made national news not only for his lack of regret for having modelled for the photos but also for declining to be embarrassed by his sexual predilections. “I am not ashamed or shy of who I am,” Gallant told CBS News.
His statement was not the shameless shrugging-off done by Donald Trump, the Pussy-Grabber-In-Chief, who bragged of sexually assaulting women without their consent. This was the unashamed stance of someone who has engaged in nothing but consensual activities. As Salon described the issue:
The photographs are the most innocent thing in this entire story. They were made by consenting adults, with a partner, for a purpose Gallant chose, and they lived in the open for years. There is no victim in them.
The violation came later, and it belongs entirely to whoever pulled those images out of their context to use them as a political weapon.
That is the nonconsensual act in this story. That is the thing we should be clutching our pearls about. Someone took a man’s consensual expression of his own desire and weaponized it to try to drive him out of public life, and the media coverage of it largely treated the man in the leather as the problem.
Indeed, Gallant taking the moral high ground in the face of right-wing finger-wagging about BDSM (“Most Americans are Normal People and they are rightly creeped out by this stuff,” wrote a pundit in Breitbart), has won him increased donations to his fund-raising efforts as well as a bump in the polls. Prediction markets in late October have given him a 21 percent chance to win a solidly red seat previously considered close to impossible for a Democrat to win.
Pundits have been trying to understand this unexpected outcome—or as the NYT described it, “The Sex Scandal That Wasn’t”— in what even recently would have been a campaign-wrecking reveal. Some have suggested its because younger people who grew up in the digital age are accustomed to shrugging off racy photos that pop up from someone’s past. Others guess he is facing so little blowback because he is white, male and so handsome that no one can say he doesn’t look “hot” in the photos. (Seriously, would a black female candidate be allowed to brush off photos of an equivalent nature?) Or, maybe it is just because he is simply a stellar candidate with an honorable military past that included two stints in Kuwait, as well as his work as an air traffic controller, union leader and volunteer fireman.
Whatever the reason neither the public nor his party has demanded he bow out of the race, Gallant has remained outspoken in standing by his kinky nature. He has also made the salient point that he needs to stay in the race in order to start making space for other potentially excellent candidates in his generation who might want to run for office but are hesitant because they feel they may have overly exposed themselves on social media in their younger, more carefree years. “I’ve seen a lot of really good people too afraid to get into the political world. If this is the groundbreaking moment that we need to embrace … so be it,” said Gallant.
Still another writer for Instinct magazine congratulated Gallant for “taking back the narrative” and insisting that the “unexpected” revelation about his private life shouldn’t “cancel out his accomplishments or define his entire character.” Although, that writer might be slightly off base about exactly what Gallant has been doing. Gallant hasn’t taken the position that this one supposedly unsavory thing about him shouldn’t be allowed to define him; instead, his position has been that there is nothing at all unsavory about being kinky. Rather than something that needs to be overlooked to vote for him, those photos, he says, are an irrelevant “distraction” that has nothing to do with his character, his qualifications for office or his ability to serve his country, exactly as his record has proven. The better take, I think, is captured by a headline in The PinkNews. “Congressional candidate modelled BDSM gear before turning to politics – and honestly, good for him.”
Oh, how I wish I could vote for him. But, whether he wins or loses his race, he remains a hero of the people who he has inspired, including me. Since learning about Gallant and his unembarrassed public embrace of his kinky side, I have switched out the avatar I once used for the BDSM Advocate profile on FetLife and put a picture of my own happy, smiling kinky self.
