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.

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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.

The nationwide “No Kings” protest movement took its opposition to President Donald Trump from the streets to the ballot box Saturday, holding rallies across the country to encourage early voting ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

Organizers billed the latest demonstrations as a nonpartisan effort to increase voter participation and protect election integrity, marking a shift from the massive anti-Trump marches that have defined the movement since his return to the White House.

In Washington, demonstrators gathered at the Lincoln Memorial carrying signs reading “VOTE EARLY” and “HANDS OFF MY VOTE!” Similar events took place in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and communities across the country.

At an Atlanta rally, City Councilman Michael Julian Bond urged participants to recognize the power of their ballots.

“You don’t see Superman giving up his power,” Bond told the crowd, according to The Associated Press. “You don’t see Black Panther giving up his power.”

But the movement’s officially nonpartisan message did not prevent some demonstrators from explicitly advocating Democratic victories.

In Alexandria, Virginia, protesters told Fox News Digital they wanted Democrats to win control of Congress, despite national organizers’ instructions against endorsing candidates or political parties.

“We got to take the power away from Trump, from the Republicans,” one participant said.

No Kings spokesperson Eunic Epstein-Ortiz defended the movement as a peaceful, nonpartisan coalition. Individual protesters’ political statements do not, by themselves, establish that organizers violated election laws.

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The rallies also came amid escalating disputes over voting access. On Thursday, the Trump administration sued California election officials over mail ballots from people federal authorities identified as potential noncitizens. The Justice Department subsequently warned local election officials about possible criminal investigations involving such ballots.

With Election Day approaching, the movement’s latest demonstrations reflected a new emphasis: turning public opposition to Trump’s administration into participation at the polls.

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Newly released NYPD body-camera footage showing the aftermath of an immigration enforcement shooting in New York City has intensified scrutiny of federal agents who shot a man with his 5-year-old son in the car.

The footage shows officers arriving Thursday in Marble Hill to find Oscar Belgal, 28, wounded, handcuffed and seated on the ground. NYPD officers rendered aid and rushed him to a hospital. Police later located his unharmed son with a family member.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the shooting in an initial social media post, saying Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had shot a New Yorker while his child was in the vehicle.

This afternoon in Marble Hill, a New Yorker was shot by an ICE agent in a residential neighborhood. Early reports indicate agents surrounded him and a 5-year-old child in his car before firing multiple rounds. We believe the child was physically unharmed.

This is an unconscionable and incredibly serious situation. I have called the President; when we speak I will demand that he ends all ICE enforcement actions in our city. I will not stand by while ICE agents terrorize our communities.

Our thoughts are with the injured New Yorker and his family tonight. We are praying for his recovery.

Get ICE out of our neighborhoods. Get ICE out of our hospitals. Get ICE off our streets. Get ICE away from our children.

Abolish ICE.

— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) October 8, 2026

ICE defended the operation, alleging that Belgal, a Dominican national with a criminal record, accelerated his vehicle toward federal agents who feared for their lives. The agency also accused him of gang involvement.

On October 8, at approximately 4:00 PM ET, ICE officers were conducting a targeted enforcement operation in the Bronx, New York, to arrest a criminal illegal alien from the Dominican Republic with a prior criminal conviction for grand larceny, and multiple prior arrests for assault, robbery, possession of drugs, and weapons possession. He has associations to the Trinitarios gang, the same gang who brutally shot a CBP officer last year.

This criminal illegal alien was arrested by the NYPD on December 7, 2023, but was released into the community a few days later by reckless Democrat sanctuary policies that put American lives at risk.

During the incident, an ICE officer discharged his weapon and the criminal illegal alien was injured.

ICE officers immediately rendered aid. The individual is alive and at a local hospital. The FBI and HSI are on the scene. The incident remains under investigation. More information will be shared as it becomes available.

When dangerous illegal aliens are released back onto the streets by radical sanctuary politicians, our officers are forced to make arrests at large in the community in unpredictable and dangerous environments. Our officers should not have to risk their lives, and innocent Americans should not have to face unnecessary danger, because sanctuary politicians refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement.

— U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (@ICEgov) October 9, 2026

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at least one federal agent fired seven rounds, striking Belgal in the neck. Surveillance footage shows armed, plainclothes officers approaching his vehicle but does not capture the shooting itself.

The incident sparked demonstrations across the city, including a Friday march from Foley Square to federal immigration offices in Manhattan.

Mamdani said he unsuccessfully appealed to President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to release Belgal. He subsequently called for ICE’s abolition.

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Belgal’s attorneys said he was transferred to New Jersey after the shooting before being returned to federal detention in Brooklyn. A judge has restricted his transfer and temporarily blocked his deportation while his legal challenge proceeds.

New York Attorney General Letitia James called for a “full and transparent investigation conducted without fear or favor.”

The Bronx district attorney’s office is investigating. ICE has not publicly released its own body-camera footage of the shooting.

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