The candidate who refuses to be humiliated by his bondage photos: have we stopped caring about politicians’ sex lives?

When the U.S. tabloid The New York Post published images showing Democratic congressional candidate Christopher Gallant wearing various bondage accessories, his lawyer, Sara Azari, rushed to clarify that the photos “were taken during a private, consensual photo session involving Chris and his then-partner, with whom he was in a committed four-year relationship.” The accessories included a leather face mask and a collar fastened with a padlock. In some shots he was also pictured inside a cage, participating in an intimate encounter on all fours. Azari said that because Gallant was friends with the owner of the bondage apparel shop Mr. S Leather, he took part in a session intended to be “fun and personal, with the understanding that Mr. S could use select images in connection with certain products.”

After the necessary clarifications and after Gallant himself acknowledged, head held high, that he was the person in the photos, Azari said the politician “remains fully committed to his campaign and to earning the trust of the people he seeks to represent.” While Suffolk County conservatives, where Gallant is running, have seized on the images to attack the candidate (“Is this who you want to represent us in Washington DC?” they asked on Facebook), a notable number of people are expressing support. “Republicans think we have a problem with sex. They don’t understand that what matters is consent and the age of those involved,” one user wrote. “Oh yes, the scandal of a consensual photoshoot!” another added sarcastically.

Azari said that when Gallant began considering a career in public service he requested that the photos stop being used and be removed from the company website. The Democratid candidate wrote on his social media that he does not regret his past and refuses to let consensual photographs stand in his way. “Let’s be clear about what this is: a coordinated political hit meant to drive me out of this race. This represents everything that is wrong with our politics today. The establishment clinging to power, mudslinging as a means of skirting accountability at the ballot box,” he wrote on social media. “I’m proud of who I am. I won’t be shamed into silence – and I won’t allow my private life to be distorted and weaponized against me.”

Last week, British Labour councillor Paul O’Neill of Rochdale received praise for his response after his Grindr profile — including a picture of him wearing a leather harness — was leaked on social media. “It’s been brought to my attention that two people have decided to visit a gay men’s dating app I’m a member of, create an account for themselves, and then find my profile, screen shot it, and share it on social media, complete with some rather unpleasant comments,” he replied. “I am not remotely ashamed to have a social and dating life, and it obviously affects not a jot my work as a proud ward councillor for the brilliant people of North Heywood. If you think I’m rubbish at being a councillor, that’s fine. But it isn’t because, like millions of other people, straight, gay and everything else, I have a profile on a dating app.”

Shame switches sides

Contrary to what those seeking to humiliate opponents to avoid a debate of ideas would want, journalist Christina Cauterucci reflected in a column in Slate that voters increasingly care less about the sexual lives of their elected representatives. “Voters don’t seem to care as much about the sex lives of their elected representatives as they used to. When politicians resign or get booted from office for sex reasons these days, it’s usually because they did something immoral, like have an affair with a staffer or make a habit of sexual harassment. Even that kind of bad behavior doesn’t always make an impact: Certain Republicans can repeatedly cheat on their wives or be found liable for sexual assault and stubbornly stick it out in office,” she wrote.

There are many cases of politicians who were forced to abandon their careers after explicit photos or videos were leaked. Congressman Joe Barton was at the center of a 2017 scandal when intimate images circulated online. He apologized and, after the uproar continued, decided not to seek re-election. Congressman Anthony Weiner also resigned in 2011 after a far-right website claimed to have photos of the same kind that Weiner had sent to various women. Harry J. Enten argued in The Guardian that despite what happened, the media might place far more importance on sex than voters do. As cases like O’Neill’s and Gallant’s show, stepping off the political train because of leaked obscene images is becoming less frequent. Of course, had the subjects been women, the consequences would likely have been very different.

Voters are choosing a politician, not a pope. And they know it

Ken Klippenstein

The sociologist Marta Paz does not believe people have stopped judging the private lives of public figures, but she says sexual norms and the criteria that turn that privacy into a political problem have changed. “Sexuality has never been solely a private or individual matter; it has also served as a historical mechanism of classification, control and social regulation. What a society regards as ‘normal’ or ‘respectable’ sexuality is not immutable — it changes over time and, especially, according to power relations. That is why something that in another context might have been a genuine political scandal today may, at most, produce a few days of headlines, memes and comments on social media,” she says, while noting that in this case cancel culture is a multifactorial phenomenon combining public sanction, emotions and the logic of digital platforms. “Social networks have not eliminated moral surveillance mechanisms; they have transformed them and, in a way, democratized them. Today anyone can take part in building or destroying someone’s public reputation.”

Backlash

Journalist Jake Whitney, for his part, believes it is time to admit that politicians’ carnal indulgences are irrelevant to their duties, even though people with a public profile are still judged for them. “Voters are choosing a politician, not a pope. And they know it,” says Ken Klippenstein, a U.S. investigative reporter specializing in national security, politics and leaked documents. “People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly. I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be,” he writes on his website. Think of the telegenic types like Gavin Newsom who never have a strand of hair out of place or much of anything to say (certainly not against the establishment).”

For Marta Paz, sexual scandals still generate outrage and are used to build narratives against certain people, but what appears to have changed is their social meaning. “We have not stopped having a sexual morality nor have we stopped socially sanctioning. What we have done is slowly shift the boundary between the private and the politically relevant,” she says.

As the ‘scandal’ involving Hasan Piker — the left-wing activist whose underwear photos were projected on giant screens at a Republican convention — demonstrated, attacks often backfire and generate growing sympathy for those the opposing side sought to destroy. Justin Kralemann, an influencer and progressive activist known online as The Red Ginger, also reflected on Gallant’s case, noting that the latter is getting a huge amount of free publicity for his campaign. “While Republicans feign outrage claiming family values, what they’re really trying to do is shame LGBTQIA+ people into silence,” he said.

As the journalist Christina Cauterucci pointed out, a handsome servicemember can have some consensual, unashamed sexual experiences in his wild twenties and retain a good public reputation, no matter how inconceivable that may seem to conservative voices. “He certainly wasn’t calculating an eventual run for federal office when he posed for those pictures, and there’s nothing about them that raises questions about his values. If anything, they suggest that Gallant might have the maturity and self-confidence necessary to negotiate a consensual BDSM scene. That’s the kind of Congress-ready skillset you won’t develop at McKinsey.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition