Welsh politician Chris Bryant was BOTD in 1962. Born in Cardiff, he studied at Oxford University before becoming an Anglican priest. He left the ordained ministry in 1991 after deciding that being gay was incompatible with being a priest, and moved into politics. After several years in the Labour Party, he was elected in 2000 as a Member of Parliament for the Welsh constituency of Rhondda, an office he still holds. He was heavily involved in government inquiries into phone hacking by the tabloid press, calling for and leading a parliamentary debate to establish the Leveson Inquiry. In 2003 he was pilloried by the tabloid press for posting a photo of himself in his underwear on gay hookup site Gaydar, though later joked that it improved his parliamentary majority. In 2008, he was appointed Deputy Leader of the House of Commons, and was briefly Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Minister for Europe before Labour’s election loss in 2010. He resigned as Shadow Culture Secretary in 2015 in protest at Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. In 2021, he stated in a BBC interview that he felt “less physically safe as a gay man than he did 30 years ago” and criticised the then-Conservative government’s hostile stance on transgender rights and refusal to ban gay conversion therapy. He was knighted in 2023 for political and public service. Following the Labour Party’s win in the 2023 Parliamentary election, he was appointed Minister of State for Data Protection and Telecoms and Minister for Creative Industries, Arts and Tourism in the Labour Government. In 2010, he and his partner Jared Cranney entered into the first civil partnership held in the Houses of Parliament, later upgrading to marriage when the UK legalised same-sex marriage in 2013.