Coming out of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, the two top contenders for the Democratic nomination are Bernie Sanders, a straight white guy pushing 80 years old, and Pete Buttigieg, an openly gay man 40 years his junior.

Despite their ages, the candidates don’t represent conventional wisdom on how age begets conservative thinking, and their support reflects that. Younger likely voters who are Democrats prefer Sanders by wide margins to Buttigieg, who is so much closer to their age. And age isn’t the only demographic where who supports these dueling Democrats might be surprising; Democratic likely voters who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender also prefer the old heterosexual white guy to the gay candidate.

Just before the Iowa caucuses, a Morning Consult national poll found that Sanders was the leading choice among LGBTQ+ Democratic primary voters with 34% of queer support, compared to Joe Biden’s 29% and Senator Elizabeth Warren’s 19%. Pete Buttigieg — the only openly gay candidate running (and first to have this level of success) — got a scant 12%. And as the New York Times reported on the day of the Iowa Caucuses, an AP/NORC poll found that of Iowa primary voters who identified as LGBT, 42% were behind Sanders, while Buttigieg had only about half that at 22%, putting him in third place, behind Warren.

Why the voters’ queer eye for the straight guy? It’s because while many candidates have LGBTQ+ platforms, Sanders has the strongest queer political agenda. That agenda will benefit the entire 99% and in the process will aid vulnerable LGBTQ+ 99-percenters in particular.

It’s not just that Sanders has supported issues important to the LGBTQ+ community for years, though he has done that. When President Bill Clinton led efforts for the antigay, so-called Defense of Marriage Act, Sanders voted against it. He also voted against the antigay “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military service policy in 1993. In Congress back in the ’90s, he was a vocal supporter of gay soldiers.

But the potential implications of Sanders’s political revolution for queer liberation are much bigger than marriage and the military by themselves, two fundamentally conservative institutions. His policies don’t mandate that any of us need to be in traditional families or have to serve in the military in order to access the most basic needs of life, creating new kinds of opportunity for people who are gay, straight, bi, pan, cis, trans, and gender-nonconforming.

To understand these possibilities, you have to know that, too often, politicians and the media frame LGBTQ+ people in the domain of what the scholar Roderick A. Ferguson calls the “one-dimensional queer.” That is, we’re viewed as people who are defined only in terms of our sexuality and/or gender identity. One-dimensional-queer thinking doesn’t acknowledge how the construction of our identities is inseparable from economic, racial, and colonial formations. Nor does this kind of thinking find fault in partnering with polluting, militaristic, union-busting corporations as “pro-gay” — as if we LGBTQ+ people don’t need clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, economic stability to thrive, and peace to prosper!

Conversely, Sanders’s plans can be considered, ultimately, multidimensionally queer. Indeed, while his call for universal basic goods — like tuition-free, publicly financed “college for all” (and the eradication of student debt); a national rent control standard; Medicare for all; and freedom from state violence — would benefit everyone, each of these initiatives would help LGBTQ+ people more than most by virtue of how our communities are more vulnerable to the injustices created by our current systems.