The Sidney Morning Herald prints what NBC didn’t want you to know…

Out-and-out champion celebrates

HE KISSED him briefly in the stands and gave him his Olympic bouquet. Later, outside the glowing blue Water Cube, Matthew Mitcham and his partner, Lachlan Fletcher, firmly embraced, both shedding tears. Next it was his mother Vivien’s turn to hold her golden boy, and more tears fell.

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Carefully nursing Mitcham’s Olympic bouquet, Fletcher spoke of the incredible journey that the diver had taken to the top. Fletcher has been the one constant over the past two years.

He was his rock when Mitcham retired in his late teenage years suffering anxiety and depression. He watched him become a stunt diver at the Sydney Royal Easter show, supported his fight back into the sport and now to win Olympic gold.

"It’s been so up and down," Fletcher said. "When I first met him, he was pretty unhappy, he wasn’t liking the diving in Brisbane at all, he didn’t want to do it, wasn’t happy being there.

"It took a lot for him to retire and stop doing it because it had been his life for so long. He wanted to try and be happy again. He took time to do normal things that people do.

"Then after five or six months he started to really miss it again and he had the opportunity to dive with Chava [Sobrino, his coach]. He started that and loved it ever since, every second of it, which is great to see him happy all the time."

What NBC didn’t want you to know:  Not that Matthew Mitcham is gay, but that he loves, and is loved, and that relationship nurtured and sustained him when he was beaten and down, and brought him back, all they way to the gold.  Love does that.  What NBC didn’t want you to know wasn’t that Mitcham is gay, but that love does that for gay people too.  To know that, is to see republican gay bashing for what it is.  Not a principled moral stand, but a crime against humanity.

What you have to understand about the entire gay rights struggle is that this is what was taken away from us for so very, very long, and what the haters are Still trying bitterly to take away from us.  Not sex, but love.  Vital, nurturing, sustaining, intimate human love.  The love that makes us whole, that completes us, that empowers us to reach beyond ourselves to the best within us. That is what was taken from us for so many human generations.  That is what we of the post-stonewall generations have been fighting to take back.  Our human status. 

When the U.S. Supreme Court nullified the sodomy laws the screaming from the hate pews afterward wasn’t about gay couples having sex, but fear the courts would now let them get married.  It was the first thing they started yapping about.  When bigots like Orson Scott Card say that a homosexual’s highest allegiance is to the society that gives them access to sex, he’s not describing what we are but what he sees us as being.  Not human.  Humans love, not-humans only have sex.  And you can rip the heart out of not-humans, because they don’t feel any pain.