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.

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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.

First, consider the queer need for free public higher education. Under our current system, an 18-year-old can be recruited from poverty by the military and sent to war to die, and their parents can't stop it. The 18-year-old is considered an autonomous adult by the armed forces.

Yet at the very same time, under the current education system that shapes our young people’s futures (and under the one Buttigieg has proposed), if the very same 18-year-old wants to go to college, they might have to rely on their parents. Just applying for federal student aid requires getting their parents’ financial data. Where does that leave LGBTQ+ young people who are estranged from unsupportive or outright spiteful parents? What does it mean for students whose parents threaten them if they major in queer studies? Everyone deserves a taxpayer-funded, tuition-free college education as an autonomous adult. That Sanders wants to liberate LGBTQ+ young people from the prohibitive strictures of the current system may explain his high levels of support from young people.

Then there’s Sanders's plan for “housing for all.” While the U.S. homeless crisis affects everyone, LGBTQ+ people are particularly vulnerable. As the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law has found, “LGBT people collectively have a poverty rate of 21.6%, which is much higher than the rate for cisgender straight people of 15.7%” and “transgender people have especially high rates of poverty — 29.4%.”

Too many of us in the LGBTQ+ community experience housing and food insecurity, and even worse, we’re often subjected to legal forms of housing discrimination. Experts believe LGBTQ+ people may represent 40 percent of homeless youth despite being no more than 10% of the population at large. Sanders’s plan for aggressively fighting homelessness — including by instating a national rent control standard to combat evictions — would address a nationwide scourge that is already disproportionately harming our young queer and trans people.

Universal health care would also particularly help LGBTQ+ people. As I’ve written for BuzzFeed News and the New York Times, a damaging form of addressing HIV/AIDS has become the prosecution of those living with the virus and exposing others to it. This is a foolhardy way to punish vulnerable people, despite a lack of evidence that such laws are helpful in any way.

But what would help reduce HIV/AIDS among LGBTQ+ people of color and among rural-dwelling people who are newly at risk in the rural U.S.? Truly public, universal, everyone-in, nobody-left-out health care — not "Medicare for All Who Want It,” as Buttigieg phrases a watering-down of one of Sanders’s signature proposals. Real universal health care could be a system in which people are tested regularly for HIV and can be prescribed life-changing medication immediately, protecting them and their partners.

While his campaign has an ambitious approach for addressing HIV, Sanders didn’t invent a universal health care solution to the ongoing AIDS crisis, of course; we owe a great debt for this to queer and trans activists of the 1980s. Some members of ACT UP, the AIDS activist group that changed modern medicine, argued decades ago, at the dawn of the epidemic, that our nation needed universal health care without the strings attached to employment (or to marriage to someone with a job that provided spousal health care), like in the system of their era and ours. And they knew that divorcing health care from the necessities of marriage (a legal impossibility for same-sex couples at the time) or employment (an area where LGBTQ+ people still lack discrimination protections in much of the country) would mean everyone — queer people included — could get lifesaving care much easier. Like Senator Sanders, they wanted queer liberation for everyone.

Right now, the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) says people who are 18 can stay on their parents’ health insurance until they’re 26. But what if their parents have kicked them out of the house for being gay? What if that trans-affirming care isn’t covered by parental insurance? What if parents threaten their transgender adult children with retribution if they use the family’s plan to get hormones or gender-affirming surgery? Again, the 18-year-old who can be sent to war to kill or be killed also deserves health care to stay alive, full stop. Sanders’s plan for Medicare for all offers a form of queer and trans liberation from health-care-via-your-parents-if-they-have-it.

Finally, Senator Sanders is calling for reductions to and liberation from state violence, a threat to LGBTQ+ life that has been central to the struggle for liberation since before one in a series of repetitive police raids kicked off the Stonewall uprising. Sanders wants to reduce state violence by addressing police violence and overhauling our criminal justice system, something that is of grave concern to many LGBTQ+ people. The public has come a long way in understanding the racial injustices of police violence, and these injustices intersect in particular ways with LGBTQ+ lives. By ending cash bail, mandatory minimum sentences, and the war on drugs, the Sanders plan would end many of the ways LGBTQ people come into dangerous and sometimes lethal contact with the criminal justice system.

The campaign for Pete Buttigieg has done a lot for the political visibility of gay representation. But representation without economic, educational, medical, and carceral justice does little for queer liberation. And that’s why so many queer and trans people are going for the old straight white man: He has a vision for our future as a nation that creates a possibility for queer liberation. If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could encourage Latinx people to vote for their ally “Tío Bernie,” perhaps queer Democratic voters can be convinced to get behind “Silver Daddy” Sanders.

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