A conservative North Dakota lawmaker has come out of the closet after lewd texts he sent on a gay dating site were made public this week.
The randy red-state Republican, Rep. Randy Boehning, was outed Monday, more than a month after the Roughrider State legislator sent an unsolicited picture of his penis and several other messages to 21-year-old Bismarck resident Dustin Smith back on March 12 on the gay dating site Grindr, according to multiple reports.
Boehning, a 12-year veteran of North Dakota’s state assembly who has routinely voted against gay rights legislation, charged that the leaked messages were sent to media outlets in retaliation for his vote against Senate Bill 2279, which would have added sexual orientation to the state’s anti-discrimination law. For the third time since 2009, the bill was voted down by conservative North Dakota lawmakers, including Boehning.
But Smith, who first leaked the Grindr messages to The Forum, claims he simply wanted to reveal Boehning’s hypocrisy.
“How can you discriminate against the person you’re trying to pick up?” Smith told the local Bismark-area newspaper on Monday.
Boehning, 52 and unmarried, has been an active member of the site and conducted his affairs under the profile name “Top Man!,” Smith said.
“Seems I haven’t found mister right yet, so need to keep looking for and having fun on the way! Hit me up boys,” Boehning’s Grindr bio reads.
Boehning, a staunch conservative, insistently refused to comment on the allegations for two weeks, but this week finally came forward to admit that he had been using the platform to chat with other men and that he was gay, according to The Forum.
“That’s what gay guys do on gay sites, don’t they?” Boehning said. “That’s how things happen on Grindr. It’s a gay chat site. It’s not the first thing you do on that site. That’s what we do, exchange pics on the site.”
“The 1,000-pound gorilla has been lifted,” he told the Forum. “I have to confront it at some point.”
The incident comes eight years after Republican U.S. Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho was arrested at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport by a plainclothes police officer responding to a report of lewd conduct complaints in a men’s public restroom.
Craig, another conservative lawmaker with a history of voting against gay rights bills, was accused of soliciting an undercover police officer for sexual activity after he reportedly tapped his foot from inside a bathroom stall to signal he was in search of a sexual encounter.
At the time, a spokesman for Craig described the incident as a “he said/he said misunderstanding.” To this day, he insists he was not seeking a sexual encounter.
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