A gay man has won the Democratic primary for a U.S. House seat from Colorado. If he wins, he’ll be the third openly gay member of Congress. (That doesn’t include all the closeted gay Republicans, of course.)

Jared Polis, 33, is the founder of BlueMountain.com.

Mr. Polis, who poured more than $5 million of his own money into the campaign, narrowly defeated Joan Fitz-Gerald, the former State Senate president, and Will Shafroth, a conservationist, winning just over 40 percent of the vote.

Mr. Polis, who made a fortune co-founding an online greeting card Web site, bluemountain.com, and was elected to the State Board of Education in 2000, is favored to win in November against the Republican candidate, Scott Starin, as well as candidates from the Green and Unity Parties, in the mainly Democratic Second Congressional District. …

According to the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, a group that supports gay candidates for public office, Mr. Polis would be the first openly gay man elected to Congress as a nonincumbent.

There have been five other gay and lesbian members of Congress, including the current Representatives Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, both of them Democrats. All but Ms. Baldwin did not go public with their sexuality until they were elected.

Here’s Polis’s campaign website.