A Tennessee mayoral candidate who strongly opposes LGBT events in her own city is facing questions about her husband’s scantily clad appearance at Chicago’s Pride Fest.
Gabrielle Hanson, a Republican councilwoman in Franklin, is running for mayor on a MAGA platform after unsuccessfully trying to stop the city’s Pride Festival from being held in a city park.
But a photo published Wednesday by Nashville’s CBS affiliate WTVF shows her husband, Tom Hanson, frolicking in American flag-themed Speedos during Chicago’s annual Pride Parade in 2008.
The outlet also cited an interview Tom gave at the time, which suggested his wife encouraged him to participate in the event.
The latest twist in the campaign comes just a week after Gabrielle Hanson made national headlines for admitting she unknowingly helped run an escort agency in the 1990s.
Gabrielle Hanson, a mayoral candidate in Franklin, Tennessee, opposed her city’s Pride event, but in 2008 her husband bumped into a Speedo during Chicago Pride
Gabrielle Hanson, pictured here with her husband Tom, a real estate agent, has pledged to ‘defend our traditional values’ and voted against licensing an LGBTQ+ pride event in Franklin
Gabrielle Hanson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from DailyMail.com on Wednesday afternoon.
The 2008 photo released Wednesday shows Tom Hanson looking buff at Chicago Pride, wearing only the Speedos, leather sandals, sunglasses and a chain with a small gold cross.
The couple lived in Chicago at the time, and Tom was running as the Republican candidate for Illinois’ 5th Congressional District, a heavily liberal area that includes parts of Chicago’s Northwest Side and suburbs.
In an interview with the Windy city timesTom explained that due to several timing factors, his campaign was launching on the same day as the Pride Parade, and he decided to attend to promote his candidacy.
‘I thought: how am I going to make an impression in the parade? I’m a Republican, no one will listen to me,” he told the newspaper in 2008.
“So it just occurred to me. I said I might wear an American flag Speedo and my wife said, “If you do, I’ll hold you to it.”
Tom and Gabrielle Hanson moved to Franklin in 2012, and although she previously supported Pride events, her views appear to have changed since then.
In April, Gabrielle Hanson, a city councilwoman, strongly opposed a motion to grant a permit for the Franklin Pride Festival.
Hanson, a successful real estate agent and firefighter councilwoman, was a lightning rod for controversy during her mayoral campaign
At a city council meeting, Hanson waved a photo of a drag queen she described eating a “living, bleeding heart” and exclaimed, “This could have happened in our park.”
The motion to grant the permit passed and the Franklin Pride Festival took place without incident, with Hardee’s parent company CKE Restaurants as the title sponsor.
Hanson’s mayoral campaign made national headlines last week after she admitted in a confessional Instagram post that she had accidentally helped run a prostitution ring in the 1990s, an admission that seemingly contradicted her family values platform .
She claims the mix-up occurred after she, as a 30-year-old college student in Dallas, Texas, took a job answering phones for a “modeling agency.”
She explained how she responded to an ad offering $12 an hour to answer phones—about twice as much as other jobs at the time.
She claims she thought she was taking names and dates to use for model bookings for catalogs and advertisements for JC Penney, among others.
But after working there for a year, there was a knock on the door from the police.
Hanson explained, “I didn’t know they also operated a lucrative casting bank. I was shocked, I was devastated.”
She said it should have been a happy time as she was about to graduate from Southern Methodist University.
But she explained: ‘It ended up being the absolute lowest. That wasn’t who I was, but I was in the middle of it.’
With no money to pay for a lawyer, Hanson said she asked police what she could do to get rid of the charges.
She claims she was advised to plead no contest to a charge of promoting prostitution, an offense she compared in terms of severity to a “speeding ticket.”
Her punishment was to leave Dallas for two years, which she accepted because she would be moving to Chicago for a job.
Hanson, a successful real estate agent and firefighter, was a lightning rod for controversy during her mayoral campaign.
In April, Hanson made baseless claims that Covenant School shooter Audrey Hale was in a “love triangle” with school staff, prompting the deadly shooting.
Police said there was never a love triangle in the investigation, and the wild accusation angered grieving parents at the school, some of whom demanded Hanson’s resignation, police said. WSMV TV.
Hanson also came under fire in June for an email citing her official position demanding that Nashville International Airport withdraw its support for a local equality group and the Juneteenth event, prompting ethics complaints .
On Tuesday, the Franklin Board of Mayor and Aldermen met to consider an official censure for Hanson, but decided against it.
Hanson is running against incumbent Mayor Ken Moore, who is also a Republican.
The elections are scheduled for October 24.