A few weeks ago, political newcomer and U.S. Senate candidate from Maine, Graham Platner, captured the affection of the online left. Former military-turned-boutique oyster farm owner, he has a gruff style, criticizes pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC, and peppers curse words between leftist lingo like “oligarchy.”

To many, he was the answer to the left’s woes. He seemed like a salt-of-the-earth working-class hero, the kind of authentic voice of the people who didn’t sound like everything he said was focus-grouped within an inch of its life.

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He’s also white, male, married to a woman, and stereotypically masculine.

Then, last week, his not-that-old sexist, racist, and homophobic internet comments were discovered. He dropped swear words but also blamed rape victims for getting “so f**ked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to” and dropped “fa**ot” and gay-as-an-insult a few times.

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Then the news broke about his Nazi tattoo. Platner has a tattoo on his chest – which everyone learned about by watching a video of him dancing in his underwear at his brother’s wedding – of a “Totenkopf,” a symbol worn by the SS. Platner denied knowing what it was and said that he got it when he was drunk. His friends, though, are telling CNN that, as a military history buff, he knew exactly what it was.

Some people made excuses: The comments were from a long time ago (2021 is apparently ancient history); working-class guys are just casually homophobic and sexist, his words don’t reflect what he’ll do in office; and people who were in the military have all sorts of tattoos!

He even said on a podcast that he is “not a secret Nazi.” What more do you want from him?

Platner’s supporters last week could be succinctly summarized with this much-shared post on X, where a user sincerely argued that Pete Buttigieg, in a military uniform from his stint in Afghanistan, made him look “lab grown,” while Platner’s drunk Nazi tattoo wedding video showed that he is “free range.”

My first thought when seeing that post was: Why is Pete catching strays here? He’s not running against Platner. He’s not running for anything at the moment. He didn’t say anything about Platner. What was the point in bringing Buttigieg into this discussion?

Why is Buttigieg, the first gay man to win a state’s primary contest in a major party’s presidential primary, the first out LGBTQ+ Cabinet secretary in history, being brought – seemingly randomly – into a discussion about a politician he has nothing to do with?

This column is not about the Maine Senate primary. Democrats in that state can decide for themselves between the Nazi tattoo guy, their 78-year-old governor, or any of the other half-dozen candidates in that race (or more – the filing deadline isn’t until March).

What interests me is the role that homophobia and sexism play in politics in determining who possesses seemingly neutral qualities like “authenticity.”

I was only vaguely aware of Platner before his campaign imploded. I had seen clips of his speeches shared on social media for the past couple of months, and frankly, he seemed phony to me, trying too hard to show his rough edges, dropping a few too many “f**ks.” But, well, that wasn’t that important in and of itself: Most people in politics are putting on a show, and maybe that’s the kind of show that works in Maine.

Buttigieg, though, is someone who I have been writing about for years and someone who has constantly been called inauthentic by the online left for no discernible reason. Is it because he went to Harvard University, like so many other political leaders did? Because he worked for McKinsey & Company for a couple of years in the late 2000s, leaving since, as he put it, he just plain didn’t care about their work? Which is understandable? Because he hid his sexual orientation for the first part of his political career?

Shortly after he announced his presidential campaign in 2019, I remember someone (who was LGBTQ+) on Twitter raising a stink about how Buttigieg didn’t start one of his rallies with a land acknowledgment. They said he shouldn’t call himself a progressive, despite the policies he was supporting, if he wasn’t going to follow through and acknowledge that the land his rally was being held on was unjustly taken from Native Americans. The other Democrats in that race weren’t doing land acknowledgments at their rallies either, but that didn’t bother this person. It was just Buttigieg who was the fake progressive.

That person didn’t have much influence on the national dialogue, but they did get me to notice how some people just wouldn’t like him and would try to invent a reason if they couldn’t quite put their finger on it. And they chose to immediately go to “fake.”

Which is probably why his detractors keep bringing up his supposed inauthenticity. It’s a word with no solid meaning. Whether someone is “authentic” or not is completely subjective. It can’t even be described. It has no shape and no rules. There is no statement of the form, “Someone is authentic if they do X,” because the moment it’s articulated, someone else could fake it, making X inauthentic.

Perceived authenticity is a feeling. Not even a feeling, more a judgment deployed when someone either can’t or doesn’t want to be more specific.

Because, to me, someone like Buttigieg reads as authentic. I’m from a similar background – a gay man from Indiana, the child of a middle-class immigrant and teacher whose parents valued education over career, roughly the same age – so while my life is very different from his, I can see how he got to be the person he is. And my position is also probably why someone like Platner comes across as phony to me – I grew up surrounded by straight boys who were trying very hard to perform masculinity, so all the gruffness and carefully chosen “slumming it” clothes (the grandson of a famous architect and the son of a restaurant owner and a lawyer, Platner comes from a wealth) seem like a big act.

Another way to put it is if anyone were to grow a Democratic candidate in a lab, as the X user above suggests, I doubt they would make them a gay man with limited political experience who made exactly zero effort to hide his sexuality or his husband on the campaign trail. The straight, white, male small-business owner seems like a more obvious archetype for an insurgent candidate.

Because in the 21st century, saying “f**k” is hardly a risk for a politician. Kissing someone of the same sex still is. People are still sharing a fake picture of Buttigieg breastfeeding and getting mad at it as if it’s real, because to be a gay man is to inherently not be a man and definitely not masculine, and masculinity is still valued over actual qualifications by many across the political spectrum.

Which might be a big part of why the left, in 2025, really wants to believe in Platner, not just as a candidate but as the anti-Buttigieg, the anti-Kamala Harris. Democrats lost the presidential election last year with a woman at the top of the ticket to a man who is known for his hatred of women but who is also lauded for his supposed authenticity. It’s inevitable that some left-of-center people would think that a path to victory would pass through that same kind of authenticity, which they think requires male chauvinism to attract back male voters who supported the current president.

Misogyny and anti-establishment sentiment are often intertwined. Sexist attacks on the corporate management class have become very common, and that class is not only inauthentic but also a symbol of capitalism and, in pop culture’s imagination, women. Add to that the ideological far-left’s longstanding distrust of gay men as inherently counterrevolutionary (because homosexuality was seen as part and parcel with the decadence of capitalism), and there’s a formula allowing a certain kind of left-populist to long for any politician with a beard and tattoos who can work the phrase “military-industrial complex” into a sentence while calling someone a fa***t.

One issue with both masculinity and authenticity is the same: the least masculine thing a person can do is be seen as trying to be a man, just as the least authentic thing someone can do is try to be authentic. So it would be best for left-of-center voters to focus on finding candidates who can simply live, sell, and implement the left’s values – and leave determining who is truly authentic to the theater critics.

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