There is growing circumstantial suggestion that Omar Mateen, the 29-year-old Florida man who murdered 49 people and wounded 53 others at a gay nightclub in Orlando early Sunday morning, might have been gay himself. Mateen was married to a second wife and had a young child, but his first wife, Sitora Yusufiy, told CNN Tuesday night that she had her doubts about Mateen's sexual orientation.
"He did have a different side to himself that he could not open up to his father about," Yusufiy told CNN's Don Lemon: "The fact that he liked to go to nightclubs, the fact that he loved to drink — these were not things that were welcome in his family structure at all, and especially any indication of homosexuality." "So do you think that he had gay tendencies?" Lemon asked. "I'm not going to lie," Yusufiy said, "I definitely questioned it in my own head when I was with him, and wondered if he is, because he would do a lot of things — little things, you know, but that would definitely make any woman question if he was or not." If you want salacious details, Lemon asked and Yusufiy demurred, giving as an example that he liked to take selfies:
Yusufiy also said that while Mateen was abusive and emotionally unstable during their marriage, she never witnessed any signs of radicalization. "I just hope that people, without making rash judgments on one another, can truly understand that this is one insane person that did such a tragic thing," she told CNN.
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