Maine Dem Senate candidate Platner apologizes for online, anti-gay slurs, latest campaign setback

Maine Democratic Senate candidate and oyster farmer Graham Platner has apologized for his past online comments that included anti-gay slurs, calling them "indefensible."

Platner, who's competing in the 2026 state Democratic Party primary for the opportunity to challenge long-time GOP Sen. Susan Collins, wrote several Reddit posts between 2016 and 2021 in which he made several anti-LGBTQ+ jokes, The Advocate reported.

“I have no reason to deny" that the posts are mine," Platner told the media outlet on Wednesday. "I made a lot of comments over the years and talked a lot of sh-t on the Internet. I have no reason to doubt that at some point I used language that I would not be using today.”

He also called the posts "indefensible.”

Platner, a political newcomer, is a 41-year-old former Marine and combat veteran and made several online anti-gay jokes regarding his military service.

“Betcha not a single downvoter is a real combat vet. Feel free to back it up with facts, fags," he posted on Reddit in 2018 while arguing online with another user.

He also mocked military officers in 2019, writing: “Officers are gay. Army or navy, I really don’t give a f-ck about your frat.”

In 2021, Platner posted about military “pranks,” writing, “I like how our gay antics make him so uncomfortable he hates us. I’m doubling down on gay chicken next time in honor of this Air Force p-ssy.”

The posts were all written years after Platner left the Army in 2012.

Platner told The Advocate that he no longer uses the slurs that were in the posts.

“These were words that I used for a long time in ways that I did not take seriously,” he said. “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 also said, “When I lived in Washington, D.C., I had a number of very close gay friends,” with whom he often “attended showtunes night at JR’s,” a gay bar near Dupont Circle. “It was only later, when I moved back to Maine, that I became friends with a number of trans people, and that really opened my eyes.”

The posts follow Platner recently admitting to having a tattoo resembling the Totenkopf, a skull-and-crossbones emblem used by Nazi SS units, which he has since had altered. He told Pod Save America’s Tommy Vietor that he got the tattoo in 2007 while on leave in Croatia and “didn’t know” of its association with Nazis until this month.

“Maybe he didn’t know it when he got it, but he got it years ago, and he should have had it covered up because he knows d-mn well what it means,” Platner’s former political director, Genevieve McDonald, who recently resigned, posted on Facebook.

“It’s not indicative of things that I’m doing now,“ Platner told the media outlet regarding his recent controversies. “People are digging through my entire life because I, frankly, am running for Senate on an anti-establishment platform, and that comes with a lot of scrutiny.”

“I think we need a politics that is reflective of the fact that people can change and they can evolve. I’m very proud of who I am now. I’m very proud of what I’ve become. I only got here because of the struggles along the journey, and I would just like people to judge me off of who I have become throughout all of this, not who I was at a darker point in my life.”

On Thursday, POLITICO reported that Platner wrote several since-deleted Reddit posts in 2018 promoting violence as a necessary means to achieving social change, calling himself a “communist” and saying that “all” police are b-stards.

In two of the since-deleted posts, Platner wrote that if people “expect to fight fascism without a good semi-automatic rifle, they ought to do some reading of history,” and that “an armed working class is a requirement for economic justice.”

Regarding those posts, Platner said, “I was f-cking around on the internet at a time when I felt lost and very disillusioned with our government who sent me overseas to watch my friends die. I made dumb jokes and picked fights. But of course I’m not a socialist. I’m a small business owner, a Marine Corps veteran, and a retired sh-tposter.”

Platner is an Iraq and Afghanistan War veteran and has been endorsed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and three influential labor unions, including the United Auto Workers.