Of course he is a Republican.

While he was a member of Congress representing Illinois from 2009 to 2015, Republican Rep. Aaron Schock voted against many measures that would have helped the LGBT community, earning a pathetic score of zero on the Human Rights Campaign’s Congressional scorecard. Chief among his controversial positions were a vote against the repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, and a vote against the Matthew Shepard Act, which expanded federal hate crime laws to include attacks motivated by a victim’s gender identity or sexuality.

But five years after the congressman resigned at age 33 amid investigations into his alleged misuse of taxpayer funds, Schock has come out as gay himself. In a lengthy essay posted on Instagram on Thursday, Schock said that he wanted to make a public announcement “to remove any doubt and to finally validate who I am as a person.”