Tennessee state Rep. Bill Sanderson abruptly resigned this week, telling the Tennessean that he wanted to spend more time at his business, a Tennessee winery, and with his family. His son-in-law was recently diagnosed with cancer.
However, Tennessee political reporter Cari Gervin says there is more to the story. She contacted him last week to get comments on a story she was working on for her newsletter reporting that Sanderson had been using the LGBTQ-oriented app Grindr to meet young men. Gervin noted that in the messages and photos from Grindr she’d obtained, Sanderson used his real job title, real telephone number, and real photos of himself in communications with potential dates. Gervin didn’t include the messages, but she did detail what she saw.
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.)
Gervin also noted the sticky ethics of “outing” someone, but since Sanderson was using his real details to communicate on a widely known gay dating site, he outed himself. And, of course, he has a long history of voting for anti-LGBTQ legislation in Tennessee. Gervin did a terrific roundup of his votes on that front:
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.
As recently as this year, Sanderson supported four more anti-LGBTQ bills. Gervin also notes that Nashville station WKRN-TV recorded an interview with a man in 2016 who says he met Sanderson at his winery when he was 19 years old. The political science student says he wanted to get advice about how to break into politics and was instead given a shoulder massage and wine, including bottles of wine to take home, despite being underage.
As of now, Sanderson is denying it all, claiming that he’d been thinking of resigning for months and that it had nothing to do with the story being released this week. Imani Gandy on Twitter said it best: