Club owner: State Senate candidate against gay marriage was a drag queen


If you're a candidate for state senate in a conservative district and have a skeleton in the closet, make sure that skeleton's not a drag queen named Miss Mona Sinclair.
Randy Duggins, co-owner of the now-closed Club Odyssey in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a former club employee both told the Winston-Salem Journal that Steve Wiles, now competing in a Republican primary in North Carolina's Senate District 31, worked at the gay club as a female impersonator for a few years in the early 2000s. Before becoming Miss Mona Sinclair, he was a frequent patron of the club. "I recognized his picture when I was looking in the paper," Duggins said. "That's definitely him. He has aged some, but that's him. I have no ax to grind against him. I just think he's a liar."
Wiles was a vocal backer of the state's 2012 constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, the Winston-Salem Journal says, and has denied being gay. "I have already apologized to the people who matter most to me for the things I did when I was young," he said, without elaborating. Wiles has told multiple people that he was never a female impersonator, and while his opponents are not discussing publicly this new revelation, an attack ad has run on a social media website, the Winston-Salem Journal said.
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Correction: This article originally included a tweet with a photo showing the wrong drag queen. It has since been removed. We apologize for the error.
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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