It was a Friday night in an ornate New Hampshire opera house, and Representative Chris Pappas, the Democratic candidate for Senate here, had nearly finished his finely tuned stump speech.
He had slammed Washington corruption, promised to fight for affordable health care and lamented high prices, hewing to the message that Democrats across the country believe will win them back control of the Senate.
Mr. Pappas didn’t mention the man in plaid, standing amid the voters on the creaking wooden floor, who may nevertheless represent the most remarkable aspect of his candidacy: his husband.
Mr. Pappas, 46, is running a closer-than-expected campaign against former Senator John E. Sununu, a Republican, a race that both parties view as critical. If he wins, he will be the first openly gay man to serve in the Senate — but this is not something he’s made central to his campaign.
“I’m not thinking much about history right now,” Mr. Pappas said in an interview. “I’m really thinking every day about the struggles of New Hampshire.”
His low-key approach to breaking a barrier mirrors that of some other Democratic Senate candidates this year, as a party burned by losses in cycles past backs away from identity politics. Former Representative Mary Peltola of Alaska talks little about the fact that she would be the first — or tied for the first — Native American female senator. In Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s Muslim faith has become the target of political attacks. But on the trail, he talks more about how he would be the first Democratic doctor elected to the Senate in decades than the fact that he would be the first Muslim in the chamber.
Mr. Pappas’s understated approach to his potential pathbreaking reflects his generation as well as the way that his state, with its libertarian leanings, has become more accepting of gay rights over the course of his decades-long political career. Mr. Sununu has left the matter alone.
But it also comes at a fraught national moment, as some gay rights activists warn of the potential for backsliding. Just last week, Vice President JD Vance made fun of James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas, by suggesting falsely that he was gay.
“We are seeing some incredibly cynical attacks on the L.G.B.T.Q. community today that have been mainstreamed in our politics, and people in the community are scared for where this country is headed,” Mr. Pappas said in an interview.
Still, he said, his constituents have been broadly accepting.
“Our state motto is ‘Live Free or Die,’ ” he said. “I think people, regardless of their politics, really just want their neighbors to be able to be themselves.”
Fighting an ‘anti-gay bill’ — in 2004
If there is one thing New Hampshire voters know about Chris Pappas, it’s probably not the fact that he’s gay. It’s the chicken tenders.
He grew up in Manchester, where he was a fixture at the Puritan Backroom, the longstanding Pappas family restaurant where his grandfather is said to have invented the chicken tender. It has been a regular campaign stop for candidates for Congress and the White House for years. (Mr. Pappas is a co-owner of the business today.)
Mr. Pappas, who attended one of the state’s largest public high schools, wasn’t sure he would ever be embraced by his community as a gay man. There was no gay-straight alliance there, nor a single out student, as far as he knew.
“I’m living a reality today that I didn’t think was possible when I was growing up just a few decades ago,” he said.
But he came out at Harvard, and wove his identity into a political career that began when he came home and ran for state representative at the age of 22. “It’s not like I put a bullet point on my palm card, but I was very open about who I was,” Mr. Pappas said. Kathy Sullivan, the former chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, said Mr. Pappas’s sexual orientation has rarely become much of an issue in his campaigns.
“I can’t tell you there was a moment when I went, ‘Oh, Chris Pappas is a gay man,’” she said. “It’s just not a big deal.”
“People who knew, knew,” Mr. Pappas said. “And then I think as the battles kind of raged on issues around equality, I found my voice and was regularly speaking out on those issues.”
Pushing for gay rights became a key theme in his career.
In those years — the mid-aughts — New Hampshire was reckoning with gay marriage, which the highest court in Massachusetts, just over the border, had just deemed legal. Mr. Pappas delivered his first floor speech in 2004, when the state Legislature took up a bill to ban the recognition of those marriages.
“Everyone must see this bill for what it is,” Mr. Pappas said then. “It’s an anti-gay bill, plain and simple. No matter how it’s dressed up. No matter how it’s portrayed. No matter how it’s amended.”
That bill passed. By 2007, though, Gov. John Lynch had signed legislation legalizing civil unions — making New Hampshire the first state to do so without a court order or a pending lawsuit. In 2009, six years before it was legal nationwide, Mr. Lynch signed gay marriage into law in New Hampshire. By then, Mr. Pappas was treasurer of Hillsborough County. He lost re-election in 2010, before he was elected to the state’s Executive Council in 2012 and then to Congress in 2018.
In Washington, where he has served four terms in the House, he became co-chair of the Equality Caucus and has, over the years, sponsored or supported several gay rights measures, including one that would expand federal civil rights protections for gay and transgender Americans, and another that would protect benefits for gay, lesbian or transgender veterans discharged from the military because of their sexual orientation or their gender identity.
He is now running to replace Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the three-term Democrat who is not seeking re-election. His understated style mirrors hers.
‘I have a cat’
In 2020, Mr. Pappas was running for re-election to Congress when his Republican opponent, Matt Mowers, used the debate stage to lob one of the biggest attacks of that campaign: Mr. Pappas, he said, had been dating an Amazon lobbyist while voting on bills that Amazon had lobbied on.
“That’s not true,” Mr. Pappas said, shaking his head.
Mr. Mowers did not mention the fact that the lobbyist in question, Vann Bentley, was a man, but Mr. Pappas and some gay rights organizations suggested the attack was rooted in homophobia.
Six years on, that exchange is a fixture of attack ads by Republicans’ main Senate super PAC against Mr. Pappas in this campaign. At least one ad shows images of Mr. Bentley, who is now Mr. Pappas’s husband; another never makes it clear that Mr. Pappas is in a same-sex relationship.
“My husband’s work has always been separate from mine,” Mr. Pappas said, accusing “dark money groups” of trying to “muddy the waters.”
(There is no evidence that Mr. Pappas lied about the existence of the relationship; the bills in question, which Amazon supported, were sweeping measures like government funding and defense measures, and Mr. Pappas’s votes lined up with much of his caucus’s.)
At times, Mr. Pappas has tried to neutralize personal attacks with wry humor. In September, the National Republican Senatorial Committee included a photo of Mr. Pappas and his cat, Dorothy, in a photo collage it posted on social media that also contained an image of Dr. El-Sayed dressed up as a character from “Blue’s Clues,” and Troy Jackson, the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, drinking bubble tea.
“How does the left keep finding such normal men?” the post asked.
“I have a cat,” Mr. Pappas responded, “and John Sununu’s name is in the Epstein files.” (In a 2010 email, the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein suggested that an associate meet up with “john sununu, has good stories.” It is unclear whether that was a reference to Mr. Sununu or his father, John H. Sununu, the former New Hampshire governor. Mr. Sununu’s campaign said neither man ever communicated with Mr. Epstein or with the associate.)
A quiet milestone
Barney Frank of Massachusetts had been in the House of Representatives for six years when, in 1987, he became the first member of Congress to voluntarily come out, shortly after a closeted colleague died of AIDS.
It would be another quarter century before an openly gay candidate was elected to the Senate: Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, in 2012. (Since then, Kyrsten Sinema, who is bisexual, and Laphonza Butler, who is gay, have joined and left the chamber.)
So, to gay rights advocates across the nation, the election of Mr. Pappas would represent a major milestone.
“It feels like something you’d want to sing from the rooftops,” said Mayor Matt Gerding of Somersworth, N.H., who said he is the state’s second out gay mayor. But he said he understood why Mr. Pappas’s campaign doesn’t.
“I think they know that, New Hampshire and many people in New Hampshire, aren’t looking for a candidate to necessarily check boxes and make history,” Mr. Gerding said. “They’re looking for a candidate that is honest, and putting their interests first.”
Mr. Pappas was joined this month on the campaign trail by Pete Buttigieg, who is perhaps the nation’s most prominent gay politician. (The two overlapped at Harvard for two years, although Mr. Buttigieg did not come out until later in life, when he was 33.)
But at a packed campaign office and again at the opera house, they assailed national Republicans while leaving it to young organizers who took the stage before or after them to spell out the history they could make.
“It’s because of Secretary Buttigieg and Congressman Pappas that I came out to my family and friends and discovered that the people around me truly loved me for who I was,” one organizer, Calvin Wood, said in Manchester.
In an interview, Mr. Buttigieg said it would be meaningful if Mr. Pappas breaks a barrier. But it wouldn’t be the point of his campaign.
“I think every campaign is about the voters much more than it’s about the candidate,” Mr. Buttigieg said. “And the most important thing about the candidate is: Are they prepared to stand up for what the voters most want?”
Michael Kruse contributed reporting, and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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