Happy 25th Birthday to Matthew Mitcham!

I will forever respect and admire Australia’s Matthew Mitcham for being the only athlete competing in the 2008 Summer Olympics in China to have the guts to be openly gay.

The only one.

So it was sweet justice that this courageous young man went on to win the Gold Medal in the 10 meter platform.

“I don’t think I would have done the Olympics without coming out because I think I would have been lying to my country by omission, by not presenting all of me,”Matthew said in a 2009 interview. “I’m proud of who I am and I wanted everyone to know who they were going for, who they were cheering for, I wanted them to know exactly who I was and not find out later and feel like there may have been deceit. I would feel like I was deceiving if I wasn’t totally honest.”