Glendale Council candidate: I’m gay

Mike Mohill addressed the City Council Tuesday to reveal he is gay, one week after Councilman John Drayman announced his opponent’s decades-old misdemeanor lewd conduct convictions.

Mohill and Drayman are vying with four other candidates for two spots on the City Council in the April 5 election. He accused the councilman of outing his sexual orientation.

Drayman, in response, said his actions had nothing to do with his interests in Mohill’s personal life. He said his decision to air the arrests came after months of not responding to ethical attacks from Mohill and fellow gadfly Barry Allen.

It was a reference Mohill made during the March 1 City Council meeting to Adolf Hitler, Drayman said, that motivated him to make the arrests public.

Following months of public attacks from Mohill, Drayman last week went public with Mohill’s two convictions for lewd conduct from the 1980s and a more recent trespassing citation.

Mohill was arrested and charged in 1987 and again in 1988 for soliciting or engaging in lewd conduct in a public place, according to Los Angeles County Superior Court records. He pleaded no contest on both counts and was sentenced to pay a fine and serve probation each time.

Mohill, last week, declined to comment on the details surrounding the convictions. But on Tuesday, Mohill said that in both incidents he was citied for lewd conduct with a consenting man.

He said that at the time he revealed his sexual orientation to his wife, adding that they decided to stay together out of their “loving, mutually supportive relationship,” but had not told any of his other family members until last weekend.

“This is the infraction which Councilman Drayman has publicized,” he said. “My wife and I, both then and now, have a deep and abiding love for each other. We came to terms with my sexual orientation and decided it could not, or would not, destroy or shake our marriage.”

Mohill said in a prior statement that Drayman’s public announcement of his arrests was an attempt to misdirect the public from his repeated questions about home renovations performed on the councilman’s condo by subcontractors of Advanced Development & Investment Inc. — an affordable housing developer that constructed several Glendale projects now under federal investigation for fraud allegations.

“Desperate politicians, when discovered, do desperate things,” Mohill said.

His wife, Lorraine, and several family members also spoke in support of his decision to make his sexual orientation public at Tuesday’s meeting.

“Little did we know the vitriol that would follow,” Lorraine Mohill said of her husband’s decision to run for City Council. “Not being in the political arena for long, we certainly had no idea what was to come.”

Mohill also accused Drayman of “outing him” in order to damage his campaign.

“I have criticized and questioned Mr. Drayman, then and now only regarding his public life,” he said. “I only dealt with the details of his public life and not the details of his private life.”

Drayman, after Mohill and several family members and supporters spoke, said the rhetoric had gotten out of hand.

“When we’ve gotten to that point, we’re in the stratosphere that needs to be refocused,” he said. “And the fact that no one says anything about it is more alarming.”