Another Republican Closet Case-- This One In Tennessee-- Caught With The Meat In His Mouth

But he doesn't look gay. Well... he does "look" gay in a blue state way, but in red states? This is exactly what gay political closet cases look like. Meet Bill Sanderson, a state Rep from Dyer County, in northwest Tennessee, about 80 miles north of Memphis-- a godforsaken area where Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri all meet. There aren't many Democrats in Dyer County anymore. Trump trounced Hillary up there 10,175 (76.6%_ to 2,815 (21.2%). The most famous person from Dyer County was Emmett Kelly, Jr., world famous clown who copied his father's style, Emmett Kelly, Sr. Most people assumed the most famous GOP closet case from the tri-state area was Republican Congressman Jason Smith of southeast Missouri. But now... what's in the water up there that makes people stay closeted?

On Wednesday, Sanderson resigned the HD 77 seat in the Tennessee House. He had never worried about being defeated. In fact, the last time a Democrat even ran against him was in 2012 when that guy "held Sanderson down" to a 66% win. So why did he suddenly resign? Sanderson: "It’s no scandal, no controversy. It’s strictly a family situation, a business situation... It’s just overwhelming. I feel smothered." However...

As for rumors swirling around Capitol Hill that there are incriminating photos or social media posts of him, Sanderson said anything like that would have to be a fabrication.

“I’m a happily married man. I’ve got a wonderful wife,” he said.

One way you can identify a right-wing closet case is by how anti-gay they are. The more anti-gay, the more likely they are to be covering something up. You don't have to take my word for this. Former Maryland GOP raving homophobe and high-up Republican congressman, Bob Bauman, wrote a book about it, The Gentleman from Maryland. And when the de-facto head of the California anti-gay contingent in the state Senate, Roy Ashburn, was outed with a young male prostitute in his car, he did a great deal of introspection and began talking:



Maybe one day Sanderson, a "family values," "Trump-Christian" will too, but now he's in total denial. The LGBT community in Tennessee knows what Sanderson is though: "Since he took office in 2011, Tennessee state Rep. Bill Sanderson (R-Kenton) has voted repeatedly in favor of legislation designed to harm the LGBT community. During that same time period, the 59-year-old Sanderson has also been openly soliciting sex with much younger men on Grindr, a gay hook-up and dating app, both from his home in West Tennessee and in Nashville." Yikes!

Sanderson’s campaign website states he “is proudly pro-life and pro-family … [and] is leading the charge to defend the rights of the unborn and preserve the values that have defined our families for generations,” adding that he “knows that our nation was founded on conservative, Christian values.” His (now-deleted) campaign Facebook page describes Sanderson as a “Family Man, Small Business Man, Farmer, Public Servant” whose favorite activities include running, working in the yard and “spending time with my dear wife, Marjie (the person with the best heart of anyone I have ever, ever met).” (Sanderson has been married to Marjie since the fall of 2012. He has three grown children with his first wife, Valerie; they divorced in 2011.)

His voting record during his four and a half sessions on the hill back up his conservative bonafides. Sanderson introduced legislation to mandate “In God We Trust” on state license plates. He has been a co-sponsor of some of the most extreme anti-abortion legislation, including this year’s heartbill bill (which passed the House but was delayed in the Senate until next year). In 2018, Sanderson, then the chair of the State Government Subcommittee, was widely criticized for helping kill a resolution denouncing Neo-Nazis and opposing a bill to outlaw chain gangs, saying such work was not dehumanizing to prisoners.

And Sanderson has voted in support of almost every anti-LGBT bill that has made it to the House floor. Despite having a gay son with a longterm partner. Despite sending sexually explicit messages and pictures to men almost 40 years his junior.

Sanderson’s extracurricular activities have long been an open secret around the Capitol. I, for one, have known about a set of Grindr communications for three years. But only recently, in the wake of the scandals involving House Speaker Glen Casada and his former chief of staff Cade Cothren, along with the increasing pressure to oust alleged molester Rep. David Byrd (R-Waynesboro), did sources agree to let me write about the messages and encounters.

...Sanderson, during his time in office, has cast many, many votes in support of anti-LGBT legislation. In 2011, Sanderson voted to adopt HB 600, which banned municipalities from adopting ordinances prohibiting anti-LGBT discrimination and overrode and nullified an ordinance that Nashville had adopted. In 2012, Sanderson voted for legislation requiring abstinence-based sex education in public schools, a bill that notably banned discussion of “gateway sexual activity.” (Never mind that premarital abstinence tends to not end up so well.)

In 2016 Sanderson signed onto a resolution denouncing the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing gay marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges. He then voted to defund the University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s Office of Diversity over a controversy surrounding the annual Sex Week and the use of gender neutral pronouns. Sanderson supported HB 1840, the bill that allowed therapists to decline to see patients if they are gay, in violation of the American Counseling Association’s code of ethics. In 2017, he voted for HB 1111, the “natural and ordinary meaning” bill, widely perceived as an effort to attack LGBT parents.

Earlier this year, Sanderson voted in support of HB 1274, which would require the state to defend local school systems from lawsuits if they passed a transgender bathroom ban; in favor of HB 1151, a watered down attempt at a transgender bathroom ban; and for HB 836, which would allow adoption agencies to discriminate against gay couples seeking to adopt. However, when it came up in committee, Sanderson did vote against the adoption bill, and on the floor he abstained from voting on HB 563, a bill the Tennessee Equality Project calls a “Business License to Discriminate.” (HB 1151 has been signed into law; the other three bills await passage in the Senate in 2020. Sanderson also says he has attempted to kill many other anti-LGBT bills in committee, which TEP does confirm.)

During many, if not all, of these votes, Sanderson has been on Grindr (and possibly other apps). In a Grindr profile from 2013, Sanderson, calling himself “Brian,” describes himself as being in an “open relationship.” For all I know, that may be true. As a man born in 1959 who attended the small Methodist Lambuth University in Jackson, Tenn., Sanderson didn’t have the liberty to come out as queer easily as I did at age 19 at Yale in 1996. (Sanderson says he was not in an open relationship and told me that if I published this story it would ruin his marriage. He denied being either bisexual or gay or having ever sexually touched a man.)

Whatever the private reality of Sanderson’s marriage, his public face is extremely at odds with the Grindr and text messages I reviewed. They all include pictures of Sanderson, including one of his naked torso and genitals. That very explicit picture has his face cropped out of it, but Sanderson is wearing the same watch in other photos. (He says the nude photo is faked, and the other pictures were stolen from his Facebook account.)

The Grindr messages that I reviewed, as in the ones posted by The Dirty, instruct the men to text him at a phone number with a 731 area code. If you Google that number, you’ll find page after page connecting that number to either the White Squirrel Winery-- which Sanderson owns-- or sites where it is listed as Sanderson’s cell number. The texts I saw were sent by the same number. It is the same number I used to call Sanderson for comment on this story and have texted him on since. (Again, he claims that the texts were faked.)

Those texts, in addition to including the nude photo, are frequently explicit in terms of discussing sexual activity. I’m not going to quote from the explicit parts, as Sanderson (allegedly) exchanged them with a reasonable expectation of privacy. But I will note that in his 2013 Grindr profile, which could be seen by anyone using the app, he writes, “I’ve seen a lot and done a lot, but I really haven’t had a connection with a guy and I have a burning desire to have that relationship. I like down and dirty guy to guy play too! So, I guess you might say, nothing will be held back …” (Sanderson says he did not write this.)

While some closeted men do use Grindr to sext and get off without ever meeting anyone, the messages sent by Sanderson that I have seen always suggest meeting in person. In one set, Sanderson even mentions having seen the man and his roommate at a restaurant the previous night, before asking, “Want to meet and play?” This man, who was 20 at the time, did not meet up but did exchange explicit texts with Sanderson in 2013.

One former UT Martin student connected with Sanderson on Grindr several years ago when he was 19. In 2016, WKRN-TV recorded an interview with this man but decided later not to run the story. (Sanderson says he pressured the station to kill the story.) I have spoken to multiple people who confirm the man’s account, including a friend who was told about it at the time and shown the corresponding messages and pictures. All, including the former reporter (who is no longer at WKRN), had consistent accounts of the man’s recollections.

The former student says that Sanderson messaged him on Grindr and he agreed to meet with him in person. He was studying political science, and Sanderson was a state legislator; the man says he was hoping Sanderson could offer advice in regards to getting legislative jobs in Nashville after graduation. Although he assumed Sanderson was sexually interested in him, the man says he was not attracted to the legislator because of the massive age difference. After a winery tour, the man says, Sanderson tried to massage his shoulders and otherwise hit on him in a manner that made him feel uncomfortable. Sanderson also served the man wine, despite knowing he was 19, and gave him bottles of wine to take home. (Sanderson says he verifies the identification of everyone to whom he serves wine at White Squirrel.)

The man says that Sanderson’s wife Marjie unexpectedly came home, and that he was pressured by the legislator to make up a story on the fly about why he was on the property. A year later, he says, when he was in Nashville, he received another Grindr message from Sanderson (in town for the legislative session) trying to hook up. The man did not reply.