Steve Wiles, a Republican candidate for
the North Carolina Senate, has called his former life as a drag queen
“an embarrassment.”
Wiles at first denied a story that he
worked as a female impersonator at the now-shuttered Club Odyssey
nightclub in Winston-Salem roughly a decade ago.
But with only days to go before the May
6 GOP primary, Wiles, a real estate agent, apologized in a Facebook
post for having “made mistakes.”
“I'd like to apologize to everyone
because, unlike the currently appointed NC Senator in District 31, I
made mistakes,” Wiles wrote in a post that has since been deleted.
“My job was embarrassing – I had to have a job! Nobody died,
leaving me a millionaire capable of living in North Carolina's most
expensive neighborhood.”
In comments to Business
Insider, Wiles explained that he stopped working as Mona
Sinclair because it went against his religious beliefs.
“For me, from a religious standpoint,
just for my life, for me, it just was not something that I wanted to
continue,” Wiles said. “Of course it was an embarrassment, but
you know, you move on.”
When asked whether he's “ex-gay,”
Wiles answered: “No, no, I really won't make any comments on that.”
Wiles also explained his opposition to
marriage equality, saying that he could not understand “how you can
separate the fact that marriage is a religious institution.”
He added that he stopped promoting Miss
Gay America because he objected to the “gay lifestyle.”