Democratic Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner admitted on Wednesday to authoring a series of antigay Reddit posts and called his past comments “indefensible.”
“I have no reason to deny [that the posts are mine],” Platner said in a Zoom interview with The Advocate, the LGBT news magazine that first reported on the controversial posts on Wednesday.
“I made a lot of comments over the years and talked a lot of s— on the internet. I have no reason to doubt that at some point I used language that I would not be using today,” the military veteran and oyster farmer continued.
“It’s indefensible,” he added.
The Advocate this week obtained the past Reddit comments, posted under the handle P-Hustle between 2016 and 2021, in which Platner used antigay slurs and frequently used the word “gay” as an insult.
“Betcha not a single downvoter is a real combat vet. Feel free to back it up with facts,” Platner reportedly wrote on Reddit in August 2018, adding an antigay slur to address his fellow Reddit user.
“This was the gayest (not in the fun d— sucking way) thing I’ve ever seen. This dude is literally everything I hate all rolled into one,” Platner wrote in March 2020, according to The Advocate.
In June 2016, he reportedly described a job someone else’s job as “gay” as he lamented the difficult life on military guard duty.
“No, seriously. Flog that f—er as often as possible … write gay poetry about how gay your current job is … Congratulations! You’ve made it through one shift! Now do it all again in 12 hours. Welcome to the world of standing post, where sanity is a sliding scale,” he reportedly wrote at the time.
He mocked military officers in December 2019, reportedly writing, “Officers are gay. Army or navy, I really don’t give a f— about your frat.”
Platner, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, recounted an explicit scene of what he reportedly described as a “gay off” between U.S. Marines and British sailors in Bahrain.
“Pull into Bahrain in ’07 on a MEU, a Royal Navy submarine happens to be in port at the same time. … Before we even realize what’s going on, the other weird bastard just leans down and licks the damn thing from the bottom of the ballsack all the way up to the top of the d—. Stands up, looks dead at us and yells ‘BEAT THAT!’ … I proudly withdrew our team on the grounds that one cannot play gay chicken if one is actually gay,” he wrote in March 2018.
The last post The Advocate reported came from June 2021, nearly a decade after he left the Army in 2012. He discussed “pranks” in the military.
“I like how our gay antics make him so uncomfortable he hates us, ” he reportedly wrote. “I’m doubling down on gay chicken next time in honor of this Air Force p—-.”
In the Wednesday interview with The Advocate, Platner apologized for using that language, saying he no longer does so and finds the slurs he used in his posts “abhorrent.”
“These were words that I used for a long time in ways that I did not take seriously,” he said in the interview. “Because of personal relationships that I’ve developed over the years, I do not use [them] now and find [them] to be quite offensive. I stopped using that specific kind of language a while ago … and today I find that stuff abhorrent. And I am sorry that I ever used it.”
Platner said he “had a number of very close gay friends” when he lived in Washington, D.C. and became friends with “a number of trans people” when he moved back to Maine, which “really opened my eyes.”
“Even though I thought I was open-minded,” Platner said, “there were elements to their existence that I had been entirely unaware of. That was when I began to really take far more seriously the damaging nature of language, the damaging nature of even just discussing whether people exist or not.”
Platner’s campaign referred The Hill to his interview with The Advocate when asked for further comment.
The military veteran has come under fire recently for reports exposing past posts he made on Reddit years ago in which he called police officers “bastards,” described himself as a “communist” and insulted some Reddit users as “retarded.”
“I don’t want people to see me for who I was in my worst internet comment — or even frankly who I was in my best internet comment … I don’t think any of that is indicative of who I am today, really,” Platner told CNN’s KFile in an interview published last week.
Platner also faced fresh scrutiny this week after the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm on Tuesday accused Platner of donning a “Nazi tattoo.” The tattoo resembles a Totenkopf, which is German for “death’s head” and was a symbol adopted by Adolf Hitler’s troops in Nazi Germany, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s website.
Platner defended himself in an interview on the liberal “Pod Save America” podcast, saying he didn’t know of the Nazi link when he got the tattoo: “I’m not a secret Nazi.”
The left-leaning candidate has since gotten the tattoo covered up with another tattoo. He earlier had said he planned to remove it entirely but said options were limited in rural Maine, and, “I wanted this thing off my body.”
He didn’t provide details about the new tattoo, but offered to send The Associated Press a photo of it at a later point.
Platner is running a populist campaign and has been backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Democratic youth-focused groups and multiple labor unions.
He is part of a crowded Democratic field, with Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) becoming the highest-profile candidate when she entered the race last week. Republican incumbent Susan Collins has expressed interest in a sixth term in the upper chamber.
