Gay 20-Year-Old Wants to Climb Everest in the Name of LGBT Rights

Twenty-year-old Cason Crane has already scaled Mount Kilimanjaro — at age 15 — and has his sights set on Mount Everest.

Crane is the gay activist behind the Rainbow Summits Project, which raises money and awareness for the Trevor Project, the organization that works to stop suicides among queer youth. Crane, who heads to Princeton in the fall, has climbed mountains in the U.S., New Zealand, Russia, Switzerland, France, and Argentina, and he plants a Rainbow Summit Projects flag at the summit of each peak.

"I'm so lucky to have had such a positive experience and I'm doing this project for kids like this who have had a much tougher time, who deal with this every day, who love sports but are afraid to even go to sports games for fear of being beaten up or called names and that just shouldn't happen," Crane tells OutSports. 

Crane is already in Nepal preparing for his climb up the world's highest mountain.

Read more here. Read an interview with Crane below, via Buzzfeed.