A Republican candidate for the North
Carolina Senate has denied claims he's gay and once worked as a drag
queen.
Randy Duggins, co-owner of the
now-shuttered Club Odyssey nightclub in Winston-Salem, told reporters
that Steve Wiles was gay when he worked as a female impersonator at
his gay club roughly a decade ago.
“He is Mona Sinclair,” Duggins told
the News
& Record. “That's
definitely him. I have no ax to grind against him. I just think
he's a liar.”
Wiles at first denied both claims,
answering “no” when asked whether he's gay and saying he's not
Mona Sinclair.
With only days to go before the May 6
GOP primary, Wiles, a real estate agent, gave a tacit admission.
“I have already apologized to the
people who matter most to me for the things I did when I was young,”
Wiles said this week without elaborating.
At the website of the Miss Gay America
Pageant, Steven
Wiles is listed as Mona Sinclair on a webpage that has been
removed but is still accessible via Google's cache. According to the
webpage, pageant officials suspended Sinclair for “conduct
unbecoming to a promoter of the Miss Gay America Pageant system.”
In 2012, Wiles advocated for passage of
North Carolina's constitutional amendment defining marriage as a
between a man and a woman. According to the News & Record,
he still supports the ban.