Gay candidates won where it was supposed to be impossible

On Tuesday night, two things happened at once, and the country will be tempted to remember only one of them.

The first made me go quiet at my kitchen table. Chris Pappas won election to the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire, becoming the first openly gay man ever sent to that chamber, and part of the margin that handed Democrats the Senate. In Indiana, J.D. Ford, the first openly gay person ever elected to that state’s legislature, unseated a Republican incumbent and is headed to the House. In Texas, of all places, James Talarico beat Ken Paxton to become the first Democrat to win statewide in more than thirty years, after a campaign in which anti-LGBTQ+ messaging was reportedly Paxton’s single largest category of advertising, and in which the vice president of the United States stood on a stage and used “gay” as a punchline against him. Talarico is straight, and he won anyway.

And on Long Island, in a district Donald Trump carried, a gay Democrat named Chris Gallant, whose private photographs were leaked against him precisely because someone believed that seeing him would be enough to end him, came within about two points of flipping a seat the forecasters had rated safely Republican. He conceded the election on Wednesday, down by roughly 6,700 votes in the closest race of the incumbent Republican Nick LaLota’s career. In the same breath, Gallant called LaLota a brother in arms and told the district he was still their neighbor, which is to say he refused the shame he was supposed to feel from the photo leak to the very end. Whatever that is, it is not the story of a man sunk by leather. It is the story of a man who nearly won the unwinnable while carrying the exact weight that was supposed to be disqualifying.

Put those results next to one another and a sentence forms that would have been unimaginable a decade ago: In 2026, you cannot reliably win an American election by making a man’s gayness, real or invented, the center of your campaign. Republicans tried it in Texas and lost the whole state. They tried it on Long Island and watched a red seat nearly flip. The oldest weapon in the drawer — the one that raised me, the one that could empty a lunch table in the 1990s — is losing its edge at the ballot box. Voters keep looking at the openly gay candidate and sending him to Washington.

That is the headline, and it is real, and I am not going to let anyone talk me out of being moved by it.

But here is the second thing that happened Tuesday night. In the same hours, often on the same ballots, and it is the part the rainbow-wave coverage is already rushing past. In Arizona and Nebraska, voters approved measures to bar transgender girls from girls’ sports. In Colorado, two measures aimed at transgender young people, one on sports and one restricting certain surgical care for minors, are narrowly passing. In Washington State, an initiative to keep transgender girls out of girls’ sports passed comfortably. The same electorate that refused to punish a Senate candidate for being gay reached down the ballot and punished trans kids for existing.

This is the thing I need people to see before the celebration hardens into a story we tell ourselves. The contempt did not disappear on Tuesday. It relocated. A political movement that has learned it can no longer win by hating gay men has not given up the strategy. It has updated the target. The MAGA machine that aired the Paxton ads and laughed at Vance’s joke is the same one now writing ballot measures about 11-year-olds, because cruelty still tests well when it is aimed at the group with the least power to answer back. Gays are simply the part of the community that got powerful enough to be left alone.

I know this pattern in my body, because I have watched it my whole life. The fear moves. First it was the plague, then it was the gay man as predator, then it was marriage as the end of the world, and each time the broader culture eventually got bored or ashamed and the fear went looking for a new address. Right now the address is a trans child in a locker room. The people who found that child did not arrive by accident. They are the same people, running the same play, because it is the only play they have ever had.

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So I want to be careful about the victory lap, even as I take one. It is a genuine and hard-won thing that Chris Pappas will be a senator and J.D. Ford will be a congressman, and that a straight man in Texas could not be destroyed by being called gay. Those wins are not small, and the people who did the work to make them real earned every bit of the joy. 

But a movement does not get to accept its own seats at the table while the youngest and most defenseless members of its own community are voted off the field in four states on the same night. This is not a win we get to keep cleanly. It is a split screen, and if we only look at our half of it, we become exactly the kind of people who could be bought off with a little representation while someone else pays the bill.

The refusal to be ashamed won some rooms on Tuesday. I felt it. The task now is to extend that refusal to the people the machine has decided to hunt next, to say as loudly for trans kids what the voters of New Hampshire and Indiana and Texas just said for us: that you do not get to make a person’s existence a punchline, or a wedge, or a ballot measure. We learned that lesson about gay men the slow and brutal way. The whole point of learning it is to spare the next group from learning it alone.

Chris Gallant did not quite win. But he came close enough to prove the old weapon is dulling. The question Tuesday really asked is whether we will hand the people wielding it a new one, or finally take the thing out of their hands.