Former Republican member of Congress Aaron Schock came out as gay on Thursday in a long statement posted to Instagram and his personal website.

Schock spoke about his years of struggling with his sexuality and estrangement from his conservative family, and added that if he were in Congress now, he would "would support LGBTQ rights in every way [he] could."



During his six years in Congress representing Illinois, Schock consistently voted against policies supported by the LGBTQ community, including the 2010 repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," which allowed gay and bisexual people to openly serve in the military, and the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.



Although he did not explicitly apologize for his legislative record, Schock said that when he first ran for office in 2008, presidential candidates John McCain, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton publicly opposed marriage equality.



"That fact doesn’t make my then position any less wrong," he said, "but it’s sometimes easy to forget that it was leaders of both parties who for so long wrongly understood what it was to defend the right to marry."

When Schock was in Congress, his sexuality was often the subject of gossip. As he was known for wearing fashionable clothes and for posing shirtless on the cover of Men's Health, DC figures openly discussed Schock's sexual orientation. "He spent entirely too much time in the gym for a straight man," former Rep. Barney Frank, who is himself gay, once said. Frank urged the media to out Schock to expose his voting "hypocrisy," but Schock denied the rumors.



In his statement Thursday, Schock said that he had been "cautioned" about how the LGBTQ community would respond to his coming-out after nearly a decade of open speculation about his sexuality. "Where was I, they will ask, when I was in a position to help advance issues important to gay Americans?"



"No one gets to choose when we learn our lives’ big lessons," he said.

