It was a sleepy, off-season Friday night in Bridgehampton in early October, but at the French bistro Almond, a rowdy crowd of East End gay guys were drinking, swaying to George Michael, and thirsting over Chris Gallant, the 37-year-old Democrat currently running to represent them in Congress. He arrived shortly before 9 p.m. wearing blue jeans and a plaid button-up that accentuated his biceps, ordered a dirty Hendrick’s martini, and quickly got to work, shaking hands, kissing cheeks, and posing for photographs with his would-be constituents. It was his eighth event of the day, but he didn’t seem tired, even as his presence turned the restaurant into a hot and bothered gay petting zoo. When he finally sat down, he almost immediately had to get up again. “Before I go, can I get a picture? For my website? I mean, my Instagram page?” a silver-haired gay in a Hawaiian shirt, apparently a local politician from Southampton, asked him. Soon after, the restaurant’s owner, who met Gallant on Fire Island, came over to show him a text he’d just received: “When is that sexy helicopter daddy going to be there?” Word about his presence had spread on social media. Gallant blushed and waved him away. “I never imagined I would be international news,” he told me, a little bashfully. “I hate some of those pictures of me. But the world thought it was hot as shit.”

It’s been a particularly dramatic few weeks for Gallant, a first-time candidate for public office. In mid-September, the New York Post ran a story about his “secret BDSM past,” revealing the existence of a number of “racy” images of him that had surfaced on the internet. It was a relatively PG way to characterize the photos, which had been taken in San Francisco in 2010. In some, Gallant can be seen posing in his tighty-whities and mugging for the camera in a “posture collar” and a leather harness; in others, he’s performing oral sex, receiving oral sex, and, somewhat impressively, seemingly performing oral sex on himself. Almost everyone at Almond seemed to have seen them — and definitely enjoyed them. “If he looked bad in the photos, this might be a different story,” one admirer at the bar told me. “Oh, he’s hot. Let’s vote for him.”

But horny gays aren’t the only voters in New York’s First Congressional District, a reliably Republican stretch of Long Island that hasn’t been represented by a Democrat in over a decade. Before the photos came out, Gallant had seemed a promising candidate — centrist and clean-cut enough to face off against the current representative, Nick LaLota, a Republican who handily beat the former CNN pundit John Avlon in 2024. When Gallant launched his campaign last August, he introduced himself to voters as a proud gun owner and former air-traffic controller, union leader, volunteer firefighter, and military man who joined the National Guard as a teenager after 9/11 and later flew a Black Hawk helicopter in Kuwait. “I literally signed a blank check that was up to and including my life for this country,” he told me at one point, as if he were out stumping on the trail. After Gallant won his primary in June, against a 25-year-old, pro-Palestine progressive, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee labeled the race as “in play.”

In his campaign ads, Gallant came across as your standard Long Island bro: They showed him driving motorcycles, grilling steaks, drinking beer, riding around in a fire truck, and posing in front of American........

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