After four-plus decades of hosting Wheel of Fortune, Pat Sajak took his final spin on Friday.

In his farewell speech, the 77-year-old said, “Well, the time has come to say goodbye. I have a few thanks and acknowledgments before I go. And I want to start with all of you watching out there. It’s been an incredible privilege to be invited into millions of homes night after night, year after year, decade after decade.”

In the days since Sajak’s final episode aired, everyone from Ryan Seacrest to Jon Stewart have been remembering the game show host fondly, sharing memories of funny Wheel of Fortune moments, begging him to reconsider his decision to retire, and conveniently forgetting all his problematic off-screen behavior.

Like that time in 2014, before marriage equality was the law of the land and when employers could still fire a person simply for being gay or transgender, when Sajak took to Twitter to come out… as heterosexual.

“Damn the career consequences!” he wrote in a since-deleted tweet. “I’m hereby proclaiming my heterosexuality!”

The post seemed to come out of nowhere, but it fit in with a string of bizarre and downright nasty tweets the TV host was writing at the time, including joking that pretty soon LGBTQ+ rights activists would start advocating for “plants rights” and calling environmental activists “global warming alarmists” who are “unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their own ends.”

Sajak, a lifelong Republican and current Board of Trustees chairman at the anti-LGBTQ, pro-sexual assault Christian university Hillsdale College, never apologized for the tweet. Mainly because he was never pressured to. 2014 was a different time and most people (read: heterosexuals) seemed to find his joke funny, even endearing. In fact, Mike Pearl at Vice wrote a whole article about it titled, “Pat Sajak’s Crazy Right-Wing Tweets Are Weirdly Admirable.”

In the years since, Sajak appears to have softened his views. Or at least he’s done a better job at keeping them private. Most of the time, that is. There was that little slip-up he had in 2022 when he posed for a picture alongside anti-gay terrorist Marjorie Taylor Greene that we still haven’t forgotten about.

In his farewell speech, Sajak, whose Twitter page currently lists his pronouns as “he/him/you guys”, said he felt it was his responsibility as host of Wheel of Fortune to “keep this daily half-hour a safe place for family fun. No social issues. No politics.” Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to feel that same responsibility for the 23 hours and 30 minutes a day when the cameras weren’t rolling.

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