Say what you will about the first and second couples at the heart of “The Diplomat” – and by now they’ve generated plenty of gossip fodder – but nobody would question the resilience of their unions. Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) and her husband, Hal (Rufus Sewell), have certainly had their ups and downs; the series begins with them contemplating divorce just as Kate is thrust into an ambassadorship to Britain.

The more politically seasoned Hal manipulates Kate into staying with him, kicking off a multi-season barrage of wheedling and scheming that culminates in President Grace Hagen Penn (Allison Janney) picking him as her vice president.

Over four seasons of Debora Cahn’s transatlantic political drama, Kate has been instrumental in keeping the highly tenuous special relationship between Britain and America from crumbling, even as her boss and husband insist on taking jackhammers to it.

Grace is indubitably corrupt, and yet her devotion to her husband Todd (Bradley Whitford) is nevertheless true. Sure, occasionally Todd must scream underwater to keep his head from exploding. And yes, a fourth-season subplot finds the first gentleman hightailing to London to find some purpose beyond perusing wallpaper swatches. Well, that and placing some distance between him and his wife’s unnerving autocratic behavior.

Even so, during their daily check-ins, Grace and Todd still call each other babe and exchange declarations of love. When Grace finally sets all of America’s alliances aflame, Todd remains standing by her side.

It’s a miserable political and marital state of affairs when a Netflix hit’s radioactive relationships make a person nostalgic for eras when first and second Ladies were intellectual forces respected by their husbands. Neither Dr. Jill Biden nor Michelle Obama dimmed their light to appease right-wing sexists bent on characterizing their professional achievements and eloquence as emasculating.

In that respect, Hillary Clinton showed them and us the way: When her husband Bill won office, the first lady chaired a task force that delivered a massive health reform proposal doomed from the jump. We will never know if we’d have universal healthcare by now if a man had run the task force, but Republicans taught voters to distrust any first lady who aspired to do more for Americans than bake cookies and tend the roses in the White House garden.

( Clifton Prescod/Netflix © 2026)

Contrast those misty memories with Monday’s connubial proof-of-life photo-op featuring Donald Trump and his oft-absentee wife, Melania, signing an executive order creating a task force on women’s health. This was a rare appearance for the first lady, who many assume can’t stand her husband. One can’t imagine why.

“Look at her. You think she’s easy? She’s not so easy, but she’s very smart,” the president assured assembled reporters before signing the order and remarking, “I don’t know if her signature means anything,” while handing the pen to his wife.

When he tried to seal the moment with a kiss, the first lady turned her head, leaving him to lip-lock her hair instead. He then patted her hand, mumbling, “Good job.”

And Kate? All she does is clean up her husband’s messes. Following his advice to blackmail a loose-cannon Prime Minister into resigning causes her reflux to erupt with a vengeance. Hal’s part in a secret plot to purloin a Russian doomsday weapon from a sunken sub and her efforts to keep the enemy from finding out trap her in a perpetual cycle of dashing to bathrooms. America’s president named Kate to be her sin eater, and occasionally she has to barf up her guilt to keep her prevarications straight.

Working for the Penn administration is an ambassador’s nightmare and hell on the esophagus. Without a partner, it would be untenable. Without Kate, Hal and the stalwart staff surrounding them, our international relations may very well be in tatters.

The Penn administration will never be confused for Kennedy’s Camelot, and nobody in their right mind would characterize the Clintons’ or the Wylers’ marriages as ideal.  

Like Bill and Hillary, Kate and Hal are working on their relationship despite Kate’s extramarital flings and Hal’s penchant for skullduggery. Their marriage is on thin ice. But their shared devotion is more plausible than whatever deal the Trumps have struck.

To watch these real and fictional partnerships play out without doubting their credibility is… I don’t know, is uplifting the word? Soothing, maybe.

It makes us fondly recall a past when first ladies competently delivered coherent speeches from podiums and made strong policy advocates. When presidents reached for their wives’ hands and their spouses responded in kind. It was a nicer, smarter time.

(Netflix © 2026)

Yet Kate and Hal’s working partnership earns them few points with Grace and Todd. The thing is, Todd isn’t stupid. He’s malleable and clueless about a lot of things, including whether it’s appropriate to interpret a female colleague’s nervous vomiting as an indicator that she’s pregnant. But when Grace survives an assassination attempt, Todd is genuinely shaken. When the president requires an emotional backstop and perhaps a bit of reining in, the first gentleman exercises his own version of diplomacy. When it suits him.

Hal’s mastery of persuasive dark arts makes him a perfect partner for a president who surreptitiously and proudly moves to upend the international power structure. Still, Todd doesn’t like the way Hal and Grace giggle together in secret.  

We’re attracted to “The Diplomat” for many of the same reasons Aaron Sorkin’s “The West Wing” kept liberal viewers rapt during the George W. Bush years. The Penn administration has none of the idealism or conscience that drove Martin Sheen’s Jed Bartlet, whose vision Janney’s press secretary, C.J. Cregg, and Whitford’s deputy chief of staff, Josh Lyman, worked to preserve as best as they could.

Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.
Sign up here

It’s both entertaining and frightening to see the same actors portray an effective marital alliance devoted to trashing norms and weaponizing American exceptionalism.

But that’s also why this show works. In real life, the political class favors men like Hal much more than women like Kate, although (and because) Kate is truly Hal’s better half, morally speaking. In Britain, the charismatic Todd embraces his special envoy status with verve even as he suspects he’s out of his depth.

As America watches the president’s wife treat him with the same disdain he shows the rest of the world, a competent political union, however strained, is somehow reassuring. If the Wylers can survive the nightmare of American politics, maybe we have a chance too.

“The Diplomat” is streaming on Netflix.

The post “The Diplomat” reminds us that political couples used to be smart appeared first on Salon.com.

You’re no one in this business until the Vatican has condemned you. For British filmmaker Ken Russell, that denunciation from the Catholic Church’s highest post came swiftly and relatively early, just a handful of feature films into his storied, controversial career. Known and loved for his sweeping, ostentatious romanticism and flair for dramatics of every kind, Russell’s films weave artistry into the human experience, making the two inextricable. In his eyes, beauty takes all forms, morphing into the grotesque and outrageous before transforming again into a light, airy meringue, generously portioned atop life’s dense realities. Russell’s filmography has something for everyone — and, until this year, something for no one: his controversial 1971 religious epic “The Devils,” a film as heavily censored as it was widely banned. 

Part historical horror, part holy sacrament, all tragically delicious blasphemy, “The Devils” revisits the downfall of 17th-century Catholic priest, Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed), in the provincial French city of Loudun. Grandier’s sexual exploits result in accusations of sorcery when a convent of nuns, led by Sister Agnes (Vanessa Redgrave), shed their habits — both the religious garb and the daily formalities — in fits of sexually repressed obsession. 

In Russell’s typically flamboyant manner, the film features extended sequences of nudity, sacrilege, lust and bloody violence, often all rolled into one. Warner Bros. demanded Russell pare down the film’s most intense scenes yet still slapped it with an X rating in the U.S. and U.K., while other countries banned it outright. Though an uncensored director’s cut premiered in 2002, it was never formally released on home media, and “The Devils” remained difficult to find outside of low-quality, choppily edited releases and torrents for decades. 

(Warner Bros. ) Ken Russell’s “The Devils”

But such a notorious reputation could do nothing but persist. After long denying “The Devils” a proper release based on the film’s “distasteful tonality,” Warner Bros. did something right (for once), commissioning a restoration and theatrical rerelease of Russell’s original director’s cut under its new boutique imprint, Clockwork, for one week only. (A limited second-week run was announced at the time of writing.) Like the nuns in Sister Agnes’ convent, the once-sheltered public responded with animalistic haste, selling out screenings nationwide. Far from the average word-of-mouth excitement, the restoration of “The Devils” and its massively effusive response point to a robust new era in moviegoing, one that looks different than anything this century has seen so far. At a moment when the art of film and the film business are so at odds, “The Devils” — that banned, blasphemous frolic through Hell — might just be cinema’s salvation.

At Chicago’s Music Box Theater, one of metropolitan America’s premier destinations for arthouse cinema, screenings sold out in a flash, accounting for the second largest share of the restoration’s opening-weekend box office. Kyle Cubr, the Music Box’s senior operations manager and assistant general manager, likens the excitement to mischief. “Patrons were abuzz around me waiting for it to start,” he says. “It’s almost like when you’re a kid, and you know you’re getting away with doing something bad — you shouldn’t be watching this, but it feels so good.” 

As fellow Chicago resident Max Newfield exited the Music Box after his own sold-out screening, chatting with a friend who went in blind and listening to a crowd that was “alive with excitement,” he saw the line for the 9:30 p.m. show snaking down the block. “At one point,” Newfield says, “a woman from my screening walked down the line and yelled: ‘It’s worth the wait!’”

Cubr’s experience echoes countless others who made their way to “The Devils” in its first week. When I started looking for people to chat with for this piece, I expected to find only a handful interested. After all, finding time to answer even a few questions can be difficult these days. And with cinema more ephemeral than ever, and “The Devils” stacked against new theatrical heavy-hitters, there was no guarantee that anyone who had seen the film would actually want to talk about it.

Within hours, my inbox was flooded with people from across the country, eager to talk about the film and their experiences seeing the film. Really, “flooded” doesn’t begin to quantify the deluge. While I spoke with 20 people for this piece, I received 178 individual responses of all kinds, ranging from shock and awe to relative disappointment to distinctly modern moviegoing gripes. But overall, the prevailing narrative was that seeing “The Devils,” in this format and with a full crowd of fervent patrons, was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. As New York’s Ben Sundwall tells me: “A guy started snoring halfway through. A girl was ripping her vape. It was magical.”

Despite the polite crowd at my screening, I wondered if questionable theater etiquette came into play elsewhere. Bafflingly, repertory screenings are where I’ve run into some of the worst offenders. But for an intentionally outrageous film like “The Devils,” where Reed hurls a plastic crocodile out of a window, rules can be relaxed. Naima Warsame, a program manager and chief of staff in New York, told me she thoroughly enjoyed the film but that her screening “wasn’t without its drama.”

“As the credits were rolling, a man in the middle of the fourth row stood up, pointed at a woman in the second row, and yelled, ‘Lady, yeah, you: F*ck you. You had your phone out the whole time!”’ Warsame recalls. “We thought it would end there, but he kept going . . . the movie was already intense, and before we could catch our breath, this conflict made the whole experience overwhelming.” But Warsame isn’t deterred, seeing “at least two movies a week” and hoping for more rereleases of studio films and midnight movies of all kinds. “Nothing beats the theatrical experience,” she says. 

Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.
Sign up here

Josh Svetz, a writer and music consultant based in Washington D.C., shared a similar experience, noting laughter during both the film’s intentionally humorous moments and chuckles that drowned out moments of discomfort. But Svetz relishes the chance to see the film nonetheless, and views the enthusiasm for the rerelease as evidence that moviegoing is becoming more intentionally experiential. 

“People want to time travel and experience works of art as they were intended,” Svetz says about the restoration. “I don’t think the theater experience will ever completely die because there’s this singularity, this feeling in your chest, this speechlessness that comes over you when you see something great. It’s rare, but chasing that dragon? It’s worth it.”

More than the extraordinary experience of seeing “The Devils” on the silver screen, the most moving throughline I encountered in talking with people about their screenings — one that seemed to be present in some form across every person I talked to — was the sense of community. It’s not only the chance to see something rare, well-made and lovingly preserved that’s driving people to the movies; it’s the opportunity to make a memory. 

Stephen, a New Yorker who works in financial services, savored the chance to see the film at the AMC in Manhattan’s Kips Bay neighborhood, which is scheduled to close by the end of the year. “Every single seat was filled,” he says. “Seeing that for a film released in 1971 is pretty special.” So special, in fact, that he went a second time. And for those who didn’t go alone, finding a buddy was half the fun. Several people shared stories about convincing their spouses, friends, or family to come along — some more successfully than others. For many, seeing “The Devils” was a unique chance to close a loop or strengthen family ties, the kind of event that reminds us of all the small things that make cinema such a large part of our lives.

For Bay Area journalist Bojana Cvijic, “The Devils” began as grainy screenshots on her Tumblr dashboard and a low-quality “yet still awe-inspiring” torrent sent over by a friend. Keen to catch the rerelease, she bought tickets with her AMC A-List membership and roped in two friends for a screening that boasted a mixture of laughs, shock, and dead silence. “I realized there are people here who have no idea what this movie is,” Cvijic said, laughing. Making a full-circle jump from her laptop screen to the multiplex, Cvijic waxes poetic. “We don’t get to experience movies like this on big theater screens anymore.”

Cvijic’s first encounter mirrors so many others, notably Nikhil, a 31-year-old SEO specialist who tells me he first saw “The Devils” after building a PC with his dad as a teenager and using it to foster his love of movies. When Nikhil first heard about the restoration, he says it was a “no-brainer,” and that his dad needed no convincing to come along. “I feel quite lucky to have a father who is equipped to respond to and appreciate films as he does,” Nikhil says, “because watching and discussing films together has blossomed into a shared experience that has helped both of us chart our tastes toward art — but more importantly, deepened our relationship with one another . . . Due to my excellent company and my personal relationship with [‘The Devils’], it’s a theatrical experience I will remember forever.”

When I hop on the phone with Juanchi Roca-Paisley, a member of a Miami non-profit financing affordable housing, he excitedly regales me with his experience seeing the movie with his mom, who walked out of “The Devils” when she saw it at a screening in the ’80s. This time, however, his mom stuck around — though she did warn him that she’d give him a tap if she wanted to leave. “I think she found the imagery very cool,” Roca-Paisley says. “To share it with her was so great. But my other mom also said, ‘I kind of want to see that.’ Now I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, am I going to repeat this?’”

With the film entering its second week, don’t be surprised if you head to the movies in the coming days and see moms, dads, teenagers, or grandparents waiting for their chance to witness what no one could for so many years. It’s easy to dismiss “The Devils” as a rerelease geared toward older cinephiles. But that’s far from the truth. Part of what’s so remarkable about the gushing response to Clockwork’s restoration is that it had no guarantee of doing so well. Josh Svetz puts it perfectly in our conversation, saying, “The theatrical experience is a choice now rather than a necessity.” 

Svetz cites camrips and microscopic theatrical windows as factors that have both hindered cinema and strengthened its unique selling points, and he’s completely right. In an era when anyone can watch just about anything with a few clicks of a trackpad or taps of a finger, moviegoing has become more intentional than ever, especially with rising ticket prices. That people recognize the value in patronizing a faithfully restored work like this — when studios like Warner Bros., having just succumbed to an unholy monopolistic merger with Paramount, need to know that audiences crave great art, old and new — is critically important. It’s also a great relief.

But it’s not only that people of all ages are turning out for “The Devils” that I find heartening; it’s their passion for the entire shebang — for moviegoing, and for all its wonderful, absurd and timeless rituals. There’s no question that we live in a uniquely difficult age, where reprieve is a hot commodity. But as sensational as it is, “The Devils” doesn’t exactly offer ease. The film’s historical context holds as many parallels to today as it did in 1971, arguably even more: suppression of all kinds, brutality in the name of politics and religion, innocence tainted by unnerving sights no one should ever witness. 

“It’s brutal, but necessary,” says Taylor Owen, a Chicago-based artist who caught the film at an AMC after the Music Box sold out. “Our world is unfortunately not so different from the world the nuns of Loudon were living in. I have never seen a film like this before. I don’t think I ever will again. ‘The Devils,’ in the way it was meant to be seen, is one of the most important pieces of art ever created.”

The post Clockwork’s “The Devils” rerelease reignites NC-17 passion appeared first on Salon.com.

In March, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was fired after it was revealed she and her assistant, Corey Lewandowski, had been funneling multi-million dollar contracts to a political ally for self-serving TV advertisements. On Oct. 13, U.S. ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle resigned under pressure from the administration when it was reported she had shaken down a donor for $100,000 to pay her American Express bill. This week, Alina Habba, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and the former acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey, said, “Hold my beer, ladies,” when The New York Times reported she had been given a $50 million personal contract in exchange for securing a presidential pardon. 

Habba is the perfect example of the Trump insider. A graduate of Widener University Commonwealth Law School, she practiced law at her first husband’s firm and served as general counsel for a parking garage company owned by her second husband. A New Jersey local, she apparently caught the president’s eye after she joined his golf club in Bedminster, which was near her small private law firm. She began appearing on Fox News as a Trump defender, and in September 2021, Trump hired her for his legal team. One of her first actions was to file a $100 million lawsuit against The New York Times and Mary Trump, the president’s niece, and take over defending Trump in a defamation case brought by a former contestant on “The Apprentice” after several veteran lawyers withdrew. The Times case was dismissed for “fail[ing] as a matter of constitutional law.” The former “Apprentice” contestant dropped her case after Habba countersued her for trying to “stifle Donald Trump’s free speech.”

Habba was part of the team that represented Trump in the fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, where Habba’s main contribution appeared to be mimicking Trump’s patented mugshot glower before the cameras. She served as lead attorney in E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit against Trump, during which the judge admonished her repeatedly for her poor legal skills. The case ended up with a jury awarding Carroll $83.3 million in damages. 

But Habba’s most infamous case as the president’s personal lawyer was one brought in the Southern District of Florida in May 2022. Trump sued the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Jake Sullivan, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and others for allegedly perpetrating “a calculated scheme to defraud the news media, law enforcement, and counterintelligence officials for the purpose of proliferating a false narrative of collusion between Trump and Russia.” 

U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks was not amused. Four months later, he dismissed the case, saying it was inadequate in all respects. In January 2023 he sanctioned Trump and Habba to the tune of nearly $1 million, writing, “Here, we are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose.”

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

Naturally, Trump appealed, but the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling. Earlier this month, the sorest loser appealed the case to the Supreme Court. 

Habba’s record as the president’s personal attorney speaks for itself. She didn’t fail upward quite as spectacularly as U.S. Circuit Judge Emil Bove and Attorney General Todd Blanche, but Trump did bring her into the White House as counselor to the president and later nominated her to be U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey. 

As interim U.S. attorney, Habba immediately began to cause chaos. Like Noem, she cosplayed as a U.S. marshal and announced she would pursue political prosecutions of prominent New Jersey Democrats, including the governor. A panel of judges, following the law, refused to allow Habba to serve in an interim capacity, forcing Trump to withdraw her name from consideration for the job, designating her acting U.S. attorney instead. Eventually, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found that Habba was not lawfully appointed to that post as well, disqualifying her from the position.

She was then hired to a Justice Department post clearly made up on the fly, pending a reversal of the opinion, in which case she would be reappointed as U.S. attorney. That never came about, and according to what we learned from the explosive New York Times report, Habba had other plans anyway. 

As it happens, right around that time a Venezuelan billionaire banker named Julio Herrera Velutini wanted a pardon. He had already been given a very generous deal by Trump’s Justice Department, which had reduced felony bribery charges to a misdemeanor, but he wanted his record cleared completely. He hired Christopher Kice, another of Trump’s former personal lawyers, to help him grease the skids. To sweeten the pot, Herrera’s daughter, who holds U.S. citizenship, had contributed $3.5 million to Trump’s super PAC. But by fall 2025, nothing had happened, so the Herrera family decided to hire someone with a little more juice. They tapped Habba, who was still working at the Justice Department, and allegedly offered her $10 million a year for four years and at least $10 million in bonuses. 

They created a company, Concord Partners, which has no known business dealings, and in January 2026 Habba signed on as its general counsel. Days after she took the position, Trump granted Herrera the pardon.

This is the most egregious case involving the sale of pardons under Trump that we’ve heard about. According to various reports, procuring presidential pardons has apparently become a cottage industry among many MAGA insiders, who are becoming wealthy trading on their access to Trump. For his part, the president appears to be handing them out to Republicans like Hershey bars on Halloween. The grift has become so blatant that the public has finally started to notice — and they don’t like what they see.

Habba apparently hasn’t yet collected her fee, and this revelation may just end up depriving her of most of it. But she needn’t worry. She just married a much younger Turkish billionaire named Turhan Mildon in a reported $10 million wedding attended by fellow Trump officials including Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel and civil rights division head Harmeet Dhillon. Habba has no financial worries, and there will almost certainly be no legal ramifications for this flagrant conflict of interest and pay-to-play scheme. 

But she is embroiled in yet another convoluted scandal involving her new husband, in which he supposedly sent $17 million to Richard Grenell, Trump’s former envoy to Venezuela, who at the time was director of the embattled John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. This donation, later determined to have actually been sent from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Mildon has many business dealings, went to a Texas defense contractor. Habba is alleging that the portion meant for the Kennedy Center — an obvious sop to Trump after he took it over — never made it there.

The full contours of this dispute are not yet clear, and Grenell has denied any knowledge of the matter. But never fear: The White House is on it. Trump assigned Will Scharf, the White House counsel, to look into the matter, and no doubt Habba was pleased. After all, Scharf was one of the honored guests at her wedding. It’s nice to keep it all in the family.

CORRECTION: This column has been updated to clarify Richard Grenell’s tenure at the Kennedy Center, which ended in March 2026.

The post Alina Habba’s $50 million scandal exposes MAGA pardon racket appeared first on Salon.com.

For the better part of its final decade, Rawhide was my bar. The old leather place on Eighth Avenue in Chelsea was dark in the way that mattered, a judgment-free room where the only thing anyone asked of you was that you be yourself. There was the Eagle down the street, a bigger playground, but Rawhide was rawer, closer to the bone, and it happened to sit practically next to my apartment, which made it the place I dropped into on my way home or to kick off a night. 

Most nights I was a simple man at the end of the bar, taking in the spectacle, listening, watching. On slow nights, when the crowd thinned, the bartender would let me put on a few of my own songs and we would all jam to them, and it felt less like a scandalous den than like Cheers with a twist, everybody knowing your name, nobody needing you to explain yourself. Then it closed, and the space became, of all things, a lingerie shop, which tells you most of what you need to know about what New York City decided those rooms were worth.

I bring it up because I recognized something the instant I saw the photographs of Chris Gallant.

Gallant is the 37-year-old openly gay Democrat running for Congress in New York’s first congressional district, out on eastern Long Island, against the Republican incumbent Nick LaLota. A few weeks ago, the New York Post surfaced a set of images from a 2010 photo shoot: Gallant, younger and gorgeous, in bondage gear, pictures taken with a then-partner for the fetish retailer Mr. S Leather. The photos lived openly on the company’s website for most of a decade, and then disappeared. Perhaps inevitably, someone dug them up, handed them to a tabloid and waited for the man to crumble.

Gallant didn’t. In an interview with the New York Times, the military pilot, union leader and firefighter called it his “Kim Kardashian moment,” said his friends have always known he is kinky and refused, flatly, to perform the shame he was supposed to perform. I have rarely been prouder of a stranger.

But I want to be precise about what is actually scandalous here, because everyone keeps aiming at the wrong target. I spend my working life as a trauma-informed violence-prevention educator, which means I spend it on a single distinction: the difference between what is done with your consent and what is done to you without it. By that measure, 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. 

We have the true obscenity backward. The scandal isn’t the leather. It’s the leak.

Gallant’s refusal to grovel is the correct answer — the only answer. For most of my life, the price of a seat at any table was a quiet agreement to be a less vivid version of yourself, to sand down whatever might frighten the neighbors, to apologize in advance for existing. The men I stood shoulder to shoulder with at Rawhide mostly paid that tax their whole lives. So when a candidate looks at the oldest trick in the book — here is evidence that you are a deviant — and simply declines to be ashamed, he is doing something the boy I was could not have imagined. Be queer. Be masculine. Be unafraid, authentic, bold, believable. That is the whole platform, and it is a good one.

Here is where I step off the easy celebration everyone else is writing, though not in the direction you might expect. Gallant is making his stand in a district Donald Trump carried in 2024 and that the Cook Political Report currently rates as Solid Republican. He may well lose. But losing would not make his candidacy a mistake. Every barrier broken is a notch in a glass ceiling, and the ceiling does not care much whether the person who cracked it got to walk all the way through. An out, unapologetic gay man refusing to be shamed off the ballot in Trump Country is exactly the kind of barrier that, once broken, cannot be unbroken.

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

There is an asymmetry worth naming. A straight candidate with an old racy photo shoot — such as former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, a Republican who posed nude for a Cosmopolitan photo spread in the 1980s — gets a wink and a news cycle. A gay man with the same gets a referendum on his fitness to serve. But you do not retire a double standard by hiding from it. You retire it by having enough people walk straight into it, unbowed, that it stops working. Gallant just made it work a little less well.

What I actually worry about is not whether Gallant wins. It is whether the next one runs. Look at how the field is being remade right now, by democratic-socialist insurgents, by former military officers and ex-intelligence officials trading their clearances for yard signs — whole new kinds of candidates deciding the work is too important to sit out. So where are the out, unapologetic queer candidates? 

My fear is that a young gay man with a few consensual images somewhere on the internet, and there are a great many of us, watches what is being done to Gallant and quietly decides it is not worth it. My hope is the opposite: that he watches a man refuse to be ashamed and thinks, if he can take that and keep his head up, so can I.

Because that is the thing this moment cannot be allowed to become: a warning. Instead, it has to be an invitation. A seat at the table is too important to cede to whoever is willing to leak a photograph.

Gallant did nothing wrong. He took some beautiful photographs with a partner a long time ago, and he has declined to be sorry about it. The shame in this story was never his, and it was never ours. It belongs, every ounce of it, to the people who went looking for a way to make a good man disappear.

My hope, for the next queer person weighing whether to step into the arena carrying a past and a future both, is that they look at Chris Gallant standing in his own light and decide to run anyway. We need them there.

The post The Democrat congressional candidate who won’t be kink-shamed appeared first on Salon.com.