Former Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum has an explanation for an incident at a Miami hotel that derailed his once promising political career. Despite having a wife and three young children, in his first televised interview since the March 12, 2020, incident he has declared himself “bisexual” to explain him being found naked on the bathroom floor with two other men present.
“This has been a wake-up call for me,” the married father of three said in a written statement at the time. “Since my race for governor ended, I fell into a depression that has led to alcohol abuse.
“I don’t identify as gay, but I do identify as bisexual. That is something that I have never shared publicly before. said Gillum, during an interview aired Monday on the “Tamron Hall Show,” saying,
Gillum’s disclosure is the latest in a string of candid remarks from the once-rising political star whose life took a different direction in 2018 when he lost the election for Florida governor.
After winning the Democratic nomination for governor with 34% of the vote in a five-way primary, Gillum was thrust into the national spotlight in one of the most watched gubernatorial races in the country. Had he won, he would have been the first Black governor of the nation’s largest swing state.
Since that loss, the former mayor of Tallahassee focused his efforts on engaging voters and increasing voter registration, but he’s had a string of embarrassments.
In 2019, the Florida Ethics Commission fined him $5,000 after investigating his getaways to Costa Rica and New York, with lobbyists picking up most of the costs. Gillum’s attorney agreed to a count of accepting a lobbyist’s gift worth more than $100, and that it involved a free boat ride of about an hour-and-a-half for a party of seven around Manhattan.
In a personal post on Instagram in July, he said the depression he felt after his narrowly losing the 2018 race for governor manifested itself in addiction. Gillum didn’t offer any hints as to what he would do next, though he said that he’s writing, for now on a personal level.
Books are often a way for people who’ve had public crises to attempt public redemption and re-enter public life.
In the interview that talked about the spiral of his life after the election, Gillum said he knows what people assume about what he did in that in that hotel room, and he hadn’t consented to the photos. He said much of his recovery has been about “trying to get over shame.”
3 Comments
I’m tired of these downlow black men. Just COME OUT THE CLOSET already. Stop lying to your wives and girlfriends. Stop lying to yourself. Be man enough to admit and be proud of who you are. Quit ruining lives.
Andrew, stop making excuses you got caught.
Andrew “nigga please” Gillum.
If u sucking dick, u gay. Not bisexual.