Growing up in Honolulu, Tadd Fujikawa didn’t want to be a professional golfer. He took it up because he was training to be a judoka and he thought it would help him strengthen his grip. But then he got the itch, and switched. He was good, too, so good that in 2006 he became the youngest player ever to qualify for the US Open. He was 15 years old, and 5ft tall, and the rough at Winged Foot almost seemed to reach his knees. He shot 81 and 77. “It was such a lot of fun,” he said. It still is. “I feel like I love golf because more than any other game it helps bring out your true character,” he says, only, all these years he’s been playing it, he kept a part of his inner self hidden.

Last September, Fujikawa came out. He’s the first, and only, openly gay golfer on the men’s professional circuit. “I didn’t really have to do it,” he says, “but I know from my experience just how much it helped me seeing other stories like mine, how it helped me move past my fears and struggles, how knowing that I wasn’t alone gave me a lot of hope.” He wanted to give someone else that same help. “Even if it’s just one person, it will be worth it.”

Fujikawa made his announcement on World Suicide Prevention Day. He has struggled with depression himself. “It wasn’t all down to being in the closet, but that definitely added to it.” Four days after his 16th birthday, Fujikawa became the youngest player in 50 years to make the cut in a Tour event and, later that year, he won the Hawaii Pearl Open and turned pro. In the years after, though, his game fell away and he sank back down the rankings. “It went downhill fast, I just totally lost it, and I had put so much emphasis on golf that once it was gone I felt like I didn’t have anything to live for, and that’s really what started the depression.”

It was all complicated by his relationship with his father, who was arrested for selling drugs to an undercover police officer. “I always held a lot of resentment for what happened,” he says. He only came out to his dad an hour before he went public. “I called him and told him I was gay and right away it was like this wall between us just disappeared, and it was very, very cool. I’ve never been really close with him, but my coming out really helped our relationship.” Fujikawa is feeling good right now. “I’m in a better place since coming out, it was a bit of transition learning to feel comfortable again, and now it’s kind of like I’m starting over.”

Fujikawa lives in Sea Island, on Georgia’s south coast. He is a member of Brunswick Country Club. He plays a straight sport, at a straight club, in a straight county. The nearest gay community, he says, is a couple of hours away in Savannah. “Living in Georgia, it’s not, how do I put this?” he says, “I guess it’s a pretty conservative state and the people aren’t really as accepting and open-minded towards the LGBTQ community as they are on the west coast.” The decision to come out was scary “just because I didn’t know what was going to happen, what the reaction was going to be, whether I was going to be discriminated against”.

“Honestly I did expect a few of the members to pull away from me, and it’s been almost the opposite, everyone’s been so supportive and encouraging.” He has had a lot of messages from other pros too, some he knows, some not. He figured that one or two might come out to him, but so far no one has. “On the PGA Tour there’s got to be at least a couple of gay guys, there’s just no way around it,” he says, “but coming out is one of those things everyone has to do in their own time and, honestly, people don’t even have to come out. That’s the way it ought to be, where people can just live the way they want and coming out doesn’t have to be this big announcement.”

He did it because he wanted to let other people know “it’s OK and things are getting better and you can be who you want to be”. But golf’s not the easiest game for a gay man. He has to put up with a lot of what you might call locker-room talk. “The jokes, the banter everyone does, that’s just part of country-club life,” he says. “In the beginning, I didn’t know how to react to it. I wasn’t necessarily offended, but I was uncomfortable, because I wasn’t that secure in myself.” The truth is he has had to get used to it. “It doesn’t faze me any more, honestly. I laugh about it, I understand that it’s just part of life, that they don’t mean it in a derogatory way. I mean, it’s not a good thing but if I got offended by every gay joke that I heard, life would not be good.

“In sport there’s always this idea that you have to conform to a certain type of masculinity, and it’s difficult, it really is, for a lot of LGBTQ youth in sport. But I think we are being a lot more progressive, in all sports. Men’s golf is one of the last sports to change, but we’re taking the right steps.” He can see it himself, he says, in the “acceptance and inclusion that everyone has given me since I came out. It’s really special, and I didn’t expect it. I didn’t know what to expect, but it’s been pretty great, and I’m very thankful for that. I just hope we get to the point where we all live in peace and love each other for who we are, and support and accept each other for that.”

In the UK the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international suicide helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org