This Is Who I Am. (Blackmail?)

This Is Who I Am.

And I Am Telling You Myself.

By maveriQ B Jackson

February 25, 2026

Yesterday, someone sent me a text message threatening to blackmail me. They demanded money or they would expose my “history in sex work.” They told me the other option was to drop out of the race I’m running for Colorado State House District 23. They called my husband and me worthless. They gave me 48 hours.

My response to them was three sentences. I called it what it was — blackmail — and I ended the conversation.

This post is the rest of my answer.

You cannot blackmail someone who has already decided to live in public. So here I am. All of me. Every chapter. No performance, no spin, no apology — just the truth of a life that led me to run for office in the first place.

Where I Come From: Alabama

I was not always maveriQ B Jackson.

I was born Dru Edward Gillilan. I grew up in Alabama carrying that name through everything you are about to read — through loss and grief and hardship and discovery and survival. In 2025, I legally became maveriQ B Jackson. Not because I was running from anything. Because I was finally, fully, running toward something.

The name means exactly what it looks like. Lowercase ‘m’, uppercase ‘Q’. It does not matter where you started. What matters is where you finish, and who you became on the journey. Dru Gillilan started that journey. maveriQ Jackson is where it has arrived — so far.

I am from Alabama. The real Alabama — not the one on a postcard. The Alabama of humidity and faith and knowing your neighbors and learning early that life is going to test you in ways you cannot prepare for. Growing up there gave me everything that has carried me through: a sense of community, a belief that people are worth fighting for, and an unshakeable certainty that your origin is not your destiny.

Alabama also gave me the women who built me.

The Women Who Built Me

Before I tell you about my life, I have to tell you about the women who made it possible.

My grandmother was raped at sixteen years old. When she became pregnant from that assault, her own mother kicked her out of the house. Sixteen years old. Pregnant. Nowhere to go. She lived on the streets.

She raised that child — my uncle — on her own, under circumstances that would have broken most people before they even began.

In her early twenties she married. And the man she married beat her. He cheated on her. He abused and mistreated her in ways that went on for years. She went to the police and was turned away because the law at the time required officers to witness the abuse themselves before they could act. So she was sent back. Again and again, she was sent back. The law did not protect her. The law protected him.

What happened next is the part of this story I think about the most.

When my grandmother discovered her husband was cheating, she did not fall apart. She found out who the other woman was. And rather than directing her pain at someone who largely did not know the full picture of what was happening, she chose to understand her. She befriended her. She brought her into the family. Because my grandmother was the kind of woman who could see that two people can both be wronged by the same man — and that the answer to that was not more division. It was grace.

Eventually, she forgave her ex-husband too. The two families became one. Not because anyone deserved it. Because my grandmother had the strength to choose what kind of story she was going to live in.

I want you to understand something: my grandmother did not tell me these stories to traumatize me. She told me because she believed I needed to know that the world is not always fair, that the law is not always just, and that survival is sometimes the most radical act a person can perform. And that forgiveness — real forgiveness, the kind that costs you something — is the most powerful thing a human being can choose.

She was right on every count.

She survived. She built a life. When my mother and my aunt came along, they grew up alongside their brother, helping my grandmother work chicken houses just to keep food on the table. Those children watched what their mother had endured. They grew up knowing exactly what it looks like when the systems that are supposed to protect people simply choose not to.

That is the inheritance I carry. Not money. Not connections. Not an easy path. The knowledge — bone deep, passed down through the women in my family — that laws can fail people, and that laws can also change. And that grace, even when the world gives you every reason to harden, is always a choice.

My grandmother lived long enough to see the laws that once silenced her become something different. She lived to see progress that she had every right to doubt would ever come.

That is why I do not accept the argument that things cannot change. I have seen what change costs. I have seen who pays the price when it does not come. And I have heard it in my grandmother’s voice, in the stories she chose to share with a child who she believed would one day do something with them.

I am doing something with them now.

Shea

Her name was Shea. She was my cousin by blood. She was my sister by everything else.

We grew up around each other constantly — the kind of closeness where the word “cousin” stops feeling accurate and “sister” is the only word that fits. Shea was woven into my childhood in Alabama the way the best people are: so present and so permanent that you never imagine a world without them.

She fought leukemia for three years. She was five years old when that fight began. She was eight years old when it ended. I was six.

I want you to sit with that for a moment. A six-year-old learning that the people you love can be taken. That fighting hard and being brave does not guarantee you get to stay.

Shea taught me that without meaning to. And I have carried her with me every day since.

I wrote “Eight Summers: A Southern Childhood” because Shea deserved to exist on the page. Because those summers we shared before everything changed are worth preserving. Because when you love someone and you lose them, the most honest thing you can do is refuse to let the world forget they were here.

That book is on Amazon. I wrote every word of it myself.

The Year I Learned What Loss Really Means

Loss did not stop with Shea. It rarely does.

When I was fourteen, my grandmother had a heart attack. My brother was ten years old. We were the only two people home. I held her as she died. I was fourteen, my brother was ten, and there was no one else.

There are moments that age you in ways that cannot be undone.

A few days later, we buried her. And while we were standing at her graveside, the hospital called. My grandfather had suffered a stroke. He was already gone.

Two funerals. One week. I was fourteen years old.

I do not tell you this for sympathy. I tell you this because you cannot understand why I fight the way I fight without understanding what I have already survived. You do not go through a childhood like mine and grow up to make empty promises. You go through a childhood like mine and you get to work.

Washington D.C., and the Man I Became

After Alabama came Washington D.C. — a city that has never once allowed anyone to remain comfortable or unexamined. You go to D.C. and either you find out who you are, or the city decides for you. I was determined to decide for myself.

I am a gay man. That is not a confession or a revelation. It is a fact about who I am, as plain as being from Alabama, as plain as being a writer. My identity is not something that happened to me — it is something I walked toward, with curiosity and a complete lack of apology. I married my husband, and I am proud of the life we have built.

Those years in D.C. were formative, complicated, and real. I traveled. I made choices I learned from. I became, slowly and then all at once, the person who would eventually sit down and write nearly 400 pages of legislation because he refused to wait for someone else to do it.

Yes, I Was an Escort. I Made That Choice.

I was an escort. I am telling you this myself, plainly, on my own terms, because someone thought it was a weapon they could use against me.

Before I say anything else, I want to be honest about what escorting actually is — because most people have a version of it in their heads that does not match the reality I lived.

Escorting is companionship. It is presence. It is sitting across from someone at dinner who has not had a real conversation in weeks. It is accompanying someone to an event so they do not have to walk in alone. It is being, for a few hours, the person who actually listens. The people who hire companions are not always who you imagine. They are often quietly lonely in ways that wealth or success or a full calendar cannot fix. There is a particular sadness to a person who has everything and still reaches out to a stranger for human connection — and I say that not with judgment but with genuine compassion. I saw that sadness up close. It made me more human, not less.

Is escorting sometimes about more than companionship? For some people, in some arrangements, yes. I am not going to pretend the industry is one-dimensional. But I want to be clear: the version I am being blackmailed over is being weaponized as if it is inherently shameful, and I reject that framing entirely.

I want to be precise about my own story: I did not do this work out of desperation. I was not in crisis. I made a deliberate, informed choice. I had student debt I wanted to eliminate. I wanted to help my family. I knew what I was doing. I chose it.

And I will tell you something else: the people in this industry — whatever their role, whatever their reason — deserve legal protections. They deserve safety, healthcare access, and the ability to work without fear. The current legal framework does not protect them. It endangers them. It pushes everything underground where exploitation thrives and the most vulnerable people have no recourse.

I speak on this not as a theorist. As someone who has been inside that world, I can tell you that the greatest harm does not come from the work itself. It comes from the criminalization that strips away every protection and leaves people with nowhere to turn.

My grandmother was failed by the laws of her time. I refuse to accept that the people most vulnerable in our society today have to keep paying that same price. Laws can change. They must change.

I am not ashamed of any of it. I am informed by it. There is a difference, and that difference is the whole point.

I Have Been Close to the Edge

I have also been close to homeless. I have used EBT. I know what it feels like to look at your bank account and feel that specific, quiet terror of not knowing how the next week resolves itself. I know what it means to navigate systems that were not designed with you in mind and do not particularly care whether you make it through.

I tell you this not for sympathy. I tell you this because it is the direct origin of CESA — the Colorado Economic Security Act — legislation I wrote before I ever announced I was running for anything. CESA was not born in a policy seminar. It was born in a life.

Every provision in that bill — universal healthcare, income security in the age of AI displacement, housing stability, food security, economic opportunity — I have needed at least one of those things personally at some point in my life. I did not read about these crises in a briefing. I lived them.

Why Colorado. Why Now. Why This Bill.

Colorado is home. Lakewood, Jefferson County, House District 23. When I arrived here I did not arrive as a politician. I arrived as someone who had traveled the world, survived a complicated life, and landed on a question that would not leave me alone: what would it actually look like if the systems that failed me instead worked?

The answer became CESA — the Colorado Economic Security and AI Workforce Transition Act, version 14, nearly 400 pages of legislation I wrote before I ever put my name on a ballot. Seven Pillars of Life Stability: healthcare, income security, family protection, housing, food security, economic opportunity, and protection from the disruption that AI is already bringing to working families.

I am running against establishment-backed candidates who come with endorsements and talking points. I come with legislation. My motto is transformation, not tweaks. Evidence over endorsements. I am not interested in performing the work of representation. I intend to do it.

Twenty-Nine Books and No Regrets

I am also a published author. Twenty-nine books on Amazon, and they span a range that reflects exactly who I am — all of it, without apology.

“Eight Summers: A Southern Childhood” — the most personal. Written entirely by me. About Shea, the cousin who was my sister, and the Alabama childhood we shared.

“The Rise and Fall of a Hypocritical Leader: Trump” — written by me. Because I believe in accountability, I believe in calling things by their names, and I believe silence in the face of leadership failure is its own kind of complicity.

“The Kindness Project” — because at the end of every hard day, after every fight and every setback, I still believe in human decency and our capacity to be better to each other.

And yes, there is adult fiction. The BNWO series is written using AI and explores content that is not for everyone. It is a legal genre with a real readership. I am not going to pretend it does not exist, and I am not going to apologize for it. I am a complete person with a full creative life, and the range of what I write reflects the range of who I am.

Every book under my name — from the most tender to the most provocative — comes from the same place: a commitment to honesty about the human experience in all of its complexity.

My Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/author/perspectiveofmav

I Do Not Back Down. Not for Anyone.

That text message yesterday was not the first attempt to make me smaller. It will not be the last. And I want to tell you about a moment that defines exactly who you are dealing with when you try.

I was in Statesboro, Georgia. I had posted something on Nextdoor about the region — about the frustration people felt over the lack of good work, the stagnant job market, the feeling of being stuck while the people supposed to represent them kept collecting their salaries and doing nothing about it. I said what the data showed. I said what nobody wanted to say out loud but everybody already knew.

A woman saw the post and found me in Walmart.

She called me a faggot. In public. To my face. Then she got her husband involved and the two of them came at me together — both of them loud, both of them certain that between the slur and the two of them standing over me, I would back down, walk away, or apologize for telling the truth. The police were called.

I stood there and I let them speak.

When the moment came, I did not respond to hatred with hatred. I talked to them about Georgia. About who was representing them in that statehouse. About where their tax dollars were actually going. About what the job market in their region looked like in the data, and what it looked like compared to districts with different leadership. I gave them facts. I gave them numbers. I treated them like people who deserved to know the truth about their own situation — even after what they had called me.

I respect her for using her voice. I mean that. A person willing to say what they believe out loud, even when I disagree with every word of it, is a person I can eventually work with. The ones I cannot reach are the ones who stay silent and let bad leadership go unchallenged year after year while their communities pay the price.

What I will not do — what I have never done and will never do — is let someone’s anger, their slurs, their volume, or their threats determine what I say or whether I keep saying it. Composure is not weakness. Conviction does not negotiate with intimidation.

The person who sent me that blackmail text is just the latest in a long line. They all get the same answer.

Speak softly. Carry a very big stick.

To Whoever Sent That Text

You reached out from a number with a 651 area code. You demanded money or my withdrawal from this race. You called my husband and me worthless. You gave me 48 hours.

Here is what you got instead.

You got this post. You got my full story, on my terms, in my voice, shared with every voter in HD23 and anyone else who wants to read it. You got proof that what you thought was a secret was never a secret — it was simply a part of my life I had not yet been asked about publicly.

You tried to use my history against me. My history is exactly why I am the right person for this seat. Every chapter of it.

This contact has been reported to the appropriate authorities and is being handled through proper legal channels.

You cannot blackmail someone who has already decided to live without shame.

Why I Am Still Running

I am running for Colorado State House District 23 because the people I have been throughout my life — the boy born Dru Edward Gillilan in Alabama, the grandson who heard his grandmother’s stories and refused to forget them, the six-year-old who lost Shea, the fourteen-year-old holding his grandmother while his ten-year-old brother stood beside him, the man who stood calm in a Walmart in Statesboro while hatred was hurled at him and responded with data, the person who navigated debt and hardship and uncertainty, the escort who made his own choice, the writer who explores the full range of human experience, and the man who chose his own name — those people deserve a representative who actually knows what their lives feel like.

Not someone who sympathizes from a safe distance. Someone who knows.

My grandmother told me her stories because she believed they would matter one day. She chose grace when the world gave her every reason not to. She forgave when forgiveness cost her something real. She built a family out of pieces that should never have fit together and somehow made them whole. I hope this post is worthy of that legacy. I hope she would recognize in this campaign the direct line from her life to mine — from the laws that failed her, to the legislation I am writing to make sure fewer people get failed the same way.

I live by a few simple things. Speak softly, but carry a big stick. Treat everyone with respect, even if they may not deserve it. And speak with passion — always, about everything that matters. These are not bumper stickers. They are the operating system I have run on through every hard thing I have ever faced.

The Q in my name is not decorative. It is a philosophy. It does not matter where you started. It does not matter what someone tries to do to you along the way. What matters is where you finish, and who you remained while you were getting there.

I am not dropping out.

I am just getting started.

mav QBJ

maveriQ B Jackson

Born: Dru Edward Gillilan  |  Lakewood, Colorado

Candidate, Colorado State House District 23

contact@votemaveriq.com  |  votemaveriq.com  |  (303) 564-9005

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