--- title: Orlando Shooter Seems to Have Been Conflicted About Sex and Religion description: Such disorientation is common among killers canonical: https://time.com/4368420/orlando-shooting-omar-mateen-sex-religion/ author: Mark Thompson article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-06-14T16:47:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-11T04:59:53.706Z article:section: Politics og:title: Orlando Shooter Seems to Have Been Conflicted About Sex and Religion og:description: Such disorientation is common among killers og:url: https://time.com/4368420/orlando-shooting-omar-mateen-sex-religion/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt50af850f7e7e50a6/698897cbfb4eac18e288de99/rtx2g4kf.jpg?branch=production&width=600&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 600 og:image:height: 338 og:image:alt: Undated photo from a social media account of Omar Mateen og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Orlando Shooter Seems to Have Been Conflicted About Sex and Religion twitter:description: Such disorientation is common among killers twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt50af850f7e7e50a6/698897cbfb4eac18e288de99/rtx2g4kf.jpg?branch=production&width=600&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Orlando Shooter Seems to Have Been Conflicted About Sex and Religion > Sponsored content. 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Brief is TIME's Washington newsletter, written by senior correspondent Philip Elliott. It explains the politics, personalities and power dynamics behind the headlines, three times a week. It reaches 85,000 subscribers with a 37.0% open rate as of August 2026. #### Where can I get analysis of Washington politics by email? D.C. Brief is TIME's free Washington politics newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. It is written by a TIME senior correspondent who covers the capital full time. #### Who writes TIME's D.C. Brief? Philip Elliott, a senior correspondent at TIME, writes D.C. Brief. #### Is D.C. Brief free? Yes. D.C. Brief is free at time.com/newsletters. by [Mark Thompson](https://time.com/author/mark-thompson/) ## Mark Thompson Jun 14, 2016 4:47 PM UTC  Omar Mateen Omar Mateen Reuters by [Mark Thompson](https://time.com/author/mark-thompson/) ## Mark Thompson Jun 14, 2016 4:47 PM UTC Anyone who would deliberately kill 49 fellow humans was plainly evil. But Omar Mateen also was apparently conflicted. Just how much Mateen’s mind was clouded—both about those he killed, and in whose name he did the killing—is slowly becoming clear. “People who commit acts like this are mostly confused,” says Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a one-time Army general and psychiatrist who has testified in criminal cases. “There’s a level of distress: how disorganized are they, psychologically, how anxious and impulsive are they, and is there anything we can gather from their history that indicates that in this state of mind they might act violently—and he fits that clinical picture.” Married to a woman for less than a year in 2009, Mateen also appears to have had a [second](http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/omar-mateen-wife-noor-salman-article-1.2672099), later marriage (the couple may have had a son). Yet Mateen frequented gay clubs, and utilized same-sex dating apps, for years both before and after his marriages. Sitora Yusufiy, Mateen’s first wife, [told](http://nypost.com/2016/06/13/shooter-used-to-visit-orlando-gay-club-use-gay-dating-apps/) a Brazilian television station through her fiancé on Monday that she believed her former husband had “gay tendencies,” and that his father had called him gay in front of her. Mateen had visited the Pulse nightclub several times before he carried out his massacre there. “We didn’t really talk to him a lot, but I remember him saying things about his dad at times,” one Pulse regular [told](http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-orlando-nightclub-shooting-20160613-snap-story.html) the Los Angeles _Times_. “He told us he had a wife and child.” The Palm Beach _Post_ [interviewed](http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/orlando-shooter-omar-mateen-was-gay-former-classma/nrfwW/) a fellow student of Mateen’s in police training in 2006, three years before he married. “We went to a few gay bars with him,” he said. “He just wanted to fit in and no one liked him.” Mateen would become “really, really drunk,” Ty Smith told the Canadian Press of Mateen’s visits to Pulse. “He couldn’t drink when he was at home—around his wife, or family. His father was really strict … he used to bitch about it.”  Seddique Mateen speaks with reporters in his Florida home Monday. Reuters / Bernie Woodall Mateen’s father, Seddique Mateen, disputed any notion that his son was gay. “If he was gay,” he asked the _Post_, “why would he do something like this?” But Mateen’s ideology was also in flux. Mateen told a 911 dispatcher amid Sunday’s slaughter that he was pledging fealty to the Islamic State, part of Islam’s Sunni branch. But he had known suicide bomber Moner Mohammad Abusalha, who he met at their local mosque in Fort Pierce, Fla. Abusalha was loyal to al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate known as the Nusra Front, also a Sunni group—and the Islamic State’s key rebel rival vying for power inside that country. Mateen’s father, from Afghanistan, is a Pashtun, an overwhelmingly Sunni sect. But his son had also voiced support for the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah organization, which unlike the two Sunni groups, supports Syrian President Bashar Assad. The two main branches of Islam have been at war with one another for generations. While investigators focus on whether religious zealotry or homophobia (self-hating or otherwise) drove Mateen to kill, it’s likely that some of each played a role. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4368420/orlando-shooting-omar-mateen-sex-religion/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4368420/orlando-shooting-omar-mateen-sex-religion/"},"headline":"Orlando Shooter Seems to Have Been Conflicted About Sex and Religion","datePublished":"2016-06-14T16:47:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T04:59:53.706Z","description":"Such disorientation is common among killers","url":"https://time.com/4368420/orlando-shooting-omar-mateen-sex-religion/","keywords":["Terrorism","ISIS","gay","Islamic State","omar mateen"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt50af850f7e7e50a6/698897cbfb4eac18e288de99/rtx2g4kf.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Mark Thompson","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/mark-thompson/"}],"articleSection":"Politics","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt50af850f7e7e50a6/698897cbfb4eac18e288de99/rtx2g4kf.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Undated photo from a social media account of Omar Mateen","caption":"Undated photo from a social media account of Omar Mateen","creditText":"Reuters","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/politics/","name":"Politics"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/terrorism/","name":"Terrorism"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4368420/orlando-shooting-omar-mateen-sex-religion/","name":"Orlando Shooter Seems to Have Been Conflicted About Sex and Religion"}}]}] ```