Best. Gay. Week. Ever. (August 29, 2008)

"RELEASE THE AFTERELTON BLOODHOUNDS!"
Gawker, a site I usually like, took a swipe at us for our coverage of NBC’s lack of coverage of out gay Olympian Mathew Mitcham.

Photo credit: Jamie Squire/Getty Images

Here's what Gawker had to say about our NBC/Mitcham article:

"Mitcham's is actually a pretty interesting story, so, yeah, why didn't it air? Because of a vast conspiracy After Elton shrieks!

Well, OK, not so much shrieks as insinuates, but still AE's got the bloodhounds out, sniffing around for plots most foul."

Uh, WTF? When did we ever say it was a “vast conspiracy”? Seriously, we reported on this because the lack of coverage seemed like an egregious oversight. NBC sports simply didn’t recognize the newsworthiness of an openly gay man (the only publicly out male Olympian at Beijing) scoring the highest single diving score in history, preventing China from completing an expected sweep of gold medals in diving and, after receiving his gold medal, climbing into the stands to kiss his partner!

Matthew celebrating his historic win with mother Vivienne and partner Lachlan Fletcher
— something you wouldn't have seen on NBC

When we contacted NBC for comment on the lack of coverage we have a guy, Greg Hughes, blowing it off with “in virtually every case, we don’t discuss an athlete’s sexual orientation.”

Jesus H. Christ.

As our own Michael Jensen patiently pointed out to Mr. Hughes (and the point we frequently try to make around here) is that of course the media (NBC included) discusses sexual orientation.They do it every time they mention someone’s wife or girlfriend! It’s the tagline of our site that “visibility matters." It matters because, like everyone else, gays need positive representations of their lives. They need people they can look up to.Gay teens in particular need cultural represenations they can point to when trying to come out to their friends and family.

So when gays are essentially rendered invisible by the mainstream media — for whatever reason, even honest error — it’s sort of our site’s mission to call folks out on it, which we did in this case.

Honestly, I’m SO disappointed in Gawker and their cheap shot at us. And no, I didn't think it was the product of a "vast conspiracy." I just thought it was Gawker being dumb. One heartening thing: at least several of their commenters (on the whole an intelligent and witty bunch) bothered to ponder the Mitcham/NBC flap a bit more critically and disagreed with the post.

Okay, enough venting. I'll end this section on a more positive note — with Mitcham's gold medal winning final dive...

Next page! Gay cutaways and Maddow puts Pat Buchanan in his place!