It wasn’t all that long ago that if The New York Post published photographs of an aspiring congressman wearing a leather collar and a chain-link leash, his campaign would have immediately been over. Yet that doesn’t seem to be the case for Chris Gallant, the gay, gun-toting former Black Hawk pilot who’s running for Congress on eastern Long Island. He still may not win, but these photos alone haven’t sunk his chances.
When he was 20, Mr. Gallant modeled for promotional photos for Mr. S Leather, a San Francisco fetish brand; many of the photos, which capture Mr. Gallant engaged in sex acts with other men, were too explicit for even a tabloid to publish. Instead of apologizing or withdrawing his candidacy in disgrace, Mr. Gallant has embraced his naughty brand, running ads that urge voters to “Make Politics Sexy Again.” “I mean, all my friends know I’m kinky,” he said in an interview with The Times. “I make Christian Grey look like amateur hour.”
His approach raises a question: Has our historically prurient politics finally gone post-shame?
In 2007, I started my first media job at Gawker Media, where there was no hot gossip or leaked photo of a public figure that was considered too salacious to publish. Sometimes, our muckraking turned seemingly promising political candidates — like the Democratic congressional candidate Krystal Ball, who made headlines after bloggers leaked a photo of her as a sexy Santa with a dildo-nosed Rudolph at her side — into sideshows; in other cases, like the anonymous confession of a one-night stand with the Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, it further weakened an already rickety campaign.
But it always felt as if we were publishing on borrowed time. Our Gen X founder, Nick Denton, would often muse that Millennials like me who’d come of age on Facebook would reshape notions of what was newsworthy. How could a saucy photo be seen as shocking when sexting, online porn and the anything-goes era of the internet and early social media had inoculated an entire generation to much worse? Then, I firmly believed that this “post-shame” era was just around the corner. Every time I posted a celebrity’s leaked photo on Gawker’s sex blog, Fleshbot, I told myself that I was helping to destigmatize taking sexy selfies with an X-rated take on “Stars — They’re Just Like Us!”
My cohort grew up, and that stigma didn’t subside. In 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had been in Congress for less than a week when she became the subject of a nude photo scandal. Though the alleged photo of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez turned out to be fake, the implication that such a photo would be shameful was real. Later that year, Katie Hill resigned from the House of Representatives after her real nude photos were leaked to the press. Ms. Hill may not have been ashamed of the adventurous sex life those photos depicted, but that hardly mattered when it came to holding on to her political career.
So what, exactly, has changed?
Millennials and Gen Z now make up nearly half of the electorate. These generations have grown up online, documenting a wide range of formerly private moments in public. Being tagged in embarrassing photos has become a rite of passage; it’s hard to work up outrage when someone else’s erotic exploits wind up in the tabloids.
These generations have also been exposed to significantly more ideas about once-taboo topics like sexuality and drugs, turning moments that might once have ended careers into total shrugs. Attitudes toward sexuality, in particular, have become increasingly laissez-faire, thanks in part to the L.G.B.T.Q. people, kink and fetish aficionados, and sex workers who’ve found community and cultivated online fans. Catchphrases like “sex work is work” and “don’t kink shame” may, at times, be nothing more than empty posturing, but they also illustrate a burgeoning values shift. In a world where OnlyFans is increasingly seen — among young people at least — as a wholly legitimate occupation, it’s hard to get worked up over someone else’s nudes. So what if a politician once modeled for a saucy advertisement?
In an earlier era, there was a plausible argument that a member of Congress who was engaging in so-called sexual deviance could pose a national security risk. What better way for foreign actors to blackmail a government official than by threatening to reveal sexual secrets? But as people have lived more openly, social mores have become more accepting. What better defense against having your secrets exploited than refusing to have any secrets at all?
In Mr. Gallant’s case, it’s refreshing to see a gay politician openly embrace the more outré (but relatively common) aspects of queer culture, particularly after stories like Pete Buttigieg’s alleged refusal to campaign in a gay bar with a “dancer pole” on the premises. At a time when “authenticity” is a buzzword in political circles, being willing to admit that queer life isn’t always a monogamous, suburban lifestyle, perfectly calibrated to offend the fewest people, feels genuine.
However, I’m hesitant to take Mr. Gallant’s example as a sure sign that our society has changed for good. Handsome white men are often more indulged, whatever their proclivities. His masculine profile and military bona fides make it easy to imagine him fitting comfortably within the halls of power. It’s notable that Mr. Gallant referred to Christian Grey — a fictional character mainstream enough to be idolized by millions of women across America — rather than a gay subcultural figure like Robert Mapplethorpe. Women voters, in particular, might be less shocked than titillated by it all.
It is harder to imagine a relatively unknown woman of color being able to bounce back from bondage photos leaking to the press. Being seen as a sexual being is still treated as a black mark on a woman’s record. Not because it makes her more susceptible to blackmail, but because, unlike a BDSM dominant like Christian Grey, sexual women still aren’t seen as powerful, capable leaders, but rather as submissive objects who can’t be taken seriously.
Hopefully, we can one day achieve a world where all of us are post-shame. But in order to arrive there, we’ll need to fully grasp that there’s nothing demeaning about consensually enjoying sex, leashed or not.
Lux Alptraum was an editor in chief of Fleshbot, a blog about sex and adult entertainment, and is the author of “Faking It: The Lies Women Tell About Sex — and the Truths They Reveal.”
Source photograph by PapaBear/Getty Images
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