An Apology To Cooper

UPDATE: A retraction of this post can be found here. You won't believe the REAL story.

In Tuesday's post about gay parenting, many of you weighed in on this growing phenomenon and what it means in the larger picture of our rapidly changing gay culture. Overwhelmingly, you expressed support for gay parents, with small minority expressing strong distaste for gay people who desire to have children. A few commenters directed readers to a blog called Cooper's Corridor (a site unknown to me) for insight into the life of good gay dad.

Late in the day, Cooper's Corridor disappeared.

With his permission, here is Cooper's explanation:

I have deleted my blog. I'm very sad that I have felt the necessity to do this, because I loved the Corridor and feel it had a unique voice of its own. I started getting many hundreds of hits on my blog and multiple e-mails, some very nice, but others full of vitriol and judgement. Yet others poked fun at me. I feel threatened. I won't expose my sons to that kind of scrutiny, so I ended it right then and there. I'll continue writing privately, but never again will I expose my heart and soul and those of my children to public consumption. It may seem like an over-reaction, and although it hurts terribly, I feel I had no choice. It's a sad world we live in when gay men denigrate and deliberately choose to hurt others.

I feel awful. I have pleaded time and time again for a civil tone in the comments of JMG. With a weekly comment volume in the thousands, I don't have the time to moderate or even read many of the comments and I depend on our (mostly) thoughtful and smart community of JMG participants to keep the peace. And it works, mostly. Reviewing the comment thread of the post in question, with a handful of exceptions, there's really not too much there that is very offensive.

But the idea that an apparently great blogger and fantastic gay father could be silenced by nasty JMG readers, even if they were directed to his blog by commenters and not me....well, that really fucking bothers me.

I offer my embarrassed apologies to Cooper.