why am I anonymous?

I was thinking about why I am anonymous on this blog. I'm totally out, am part of a visible gay couple and family, all of my friends, family and coworkers know that I'm gay. So why use a pseudonym here? I have nothing to lose by being out, unlike others whose blogs I read - Poppy, Jeremy, John, Mikey and others. But I guess a blog is somewhat like the journal that I've kept since 1991 - personal, not something that I would share with others. Then why publish this for the world to see? Perhaps an anonymous blog is a way to have personal thoughts that can be shared with others without embarrassing myself or those that I write about. And I quickly learned how much support there is out there, both receiving and giving.

I took my son to his swim lesson today at a local indoor pool. He had a male instructor who looked to be in his early 20s. That's an advantage of living in a college town - lots of mostly attractive young people. Swimmers tend to be fit as well. I was admiring one part of this guy's anatomy that I have found sexy since I was in 7th grade - his underarm hair. It's not a kink for me, I don't obsess about it, but it is an attractive body part that is often ignored. I can remember exactly when I became attracted to underarm hair, and the person that triggered it in me. It was at the beginning of 7th grade, when some of the boys were playing a form of baseball using a tennis ball and their hands for bats. A basketball hoop was first base, and one of the boys raised his arm to lean on it. I was standing on the sideline watching and was shocked to see that he had hair under his arm. I was one of the youngest and smallest guys in my class, and I had not started to develop at all, so I was surprised to see that one of my classmates was. From then I looked around and saw underarm hair on some other guys too. I thought of them as more mature, better than me. I also realized that my attraction to their bodies was wrong in the moral universe in which I was raised, which made me feel more inferior. That lasted for many years, and to be honest I'm not sure that even now I've completely eliminated those feelings.

That makes me realize how successful straight society is in instilling homophobia into us. And our families, who should be our greatest support, can instead be the source of hatred and mistrust. There has been much talk here in the United States about similarities and differences between gay rights now and African American rights in the past. Conservative African Americans object to those comparisons, claiming among other things that there isn't lynching of gays as there were African Americans. But they are wrong, the lynchings occur, they are just now called suicides,and instead of angry white mobs doing the killings, young gays and lesbians do it themselves, many times because their families offer no support or offer violence and hatred instead.

Wow, how did a post on being anonymous turn into one on underarm hair and gay suicides?