GOP Candidate Opposed To Marriage Equality Once Worked As A Drag Queen

Steve Wiles, GOP state senate candidate in North Carolina
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A Republican state senate candidate who supported North Carolina’s ban on gay marriage once worked as a female impersonator at a gay nightclub, the Winston-Salem Journal reported Saturday.

Real estate agent Steve Wiles, 34, went by “Mona Sinclair” when he worked at the now-closed Club Odyssey in the early 2000s, according to the club’s co-owner and another former employee. Wiles’ former co-workers claim he was gay at the time and was a frequent visitor at the nightclub before he began working there.

Wiles denied that he worked as Mona Sinclair in interviews with the Winston-Salem Journal, and responded “no” when the newspaper asked whether he was gay.

But Wiles also appears as Mona Sinclair in a cached version of the Miss Gay America website. The cached webpage said that Wiles was suspended from the organization for “conduct unbecoming to a promoter of the Miss Gay America pageant system.”

Wiles campaigned for North Carolina’s constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in 2012, according to the Winston Salem-Journal.

The state senate candidate spoke to Business Insider after the Winston-Salem Journal report was published and argued that he doesn’t believe being against gay marriage is equal to being anti-gay.

“I don’t really understand how you can separate the fact that marriage is a religious institution,” he said.

As for whether he considers himself an ex-gay, Wiles told Business Insider he didn’t want to comment on that. He said that he views his past as a drag queen as an “embarrassment,” but told Business Insider that it wouldn’t stop his campaign.

“I learned a lot of lessons, some of them, well most of them, the
hard way,” he told the website. “That’s generally how I learned, but I did
learn from my mistakes. That’s something that I wish I could say for
some of my GOP rivals.”

Image via Facebook

This post has been updated.

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Notable Replies

  1. If it was for the Hasty Pudding Club’s Woman of the Year, that’s considered OK.

  2. Hypocrisy is a very tough row to hoe.

  3. And the Republicon clown car rides on

  4. Avatar for gr gr says:

    OK, so he hung out with a couple of sailors, so what?

  5. This is a distraction, who cares if he was a drag queen or worked at a gay nightclub or was even gay, the issue should be this statement:

    “I don’t really understand how you can separate the fact that marriage is a religious institution,”

    That alone makes him unsuitable for public office as marriage is entirely a legal matter when it comes to personal and civil rights, religion has nothing to do with it as far as anyone in government is concerned. That he doesn’t recognize it as a legal matter is what makes him unfit for office.

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