Tonight I sent an email to family and friends about (Gay) Mormon Guy. Within a few minutes I already had responses - all of them incredibly supportive and loving. It's not all of my family, or even nearly all of the people who have been close in my life. But it's at least a step. With that done, the next and final step of merging my worlds is posting here and on Facebook.

There are people I know who would prefer some type of personal contact, and others who don't use Facebook at all... but I finally realized that sharing the facets of my life, as opposed to the normal coming out stories, isn't a huge thing for me like it is for some people. So I don't have to treat it like a huge or overly delicate issue.

That decided, I thought I'd just choose a day and be done with it. Next Thursday. Why? Because I have time afterwards for whatever eventuality.

As soon as I share who I am and about my life here, I won't be constrained by the confines of anonymity... and I'll be able to post about anything. That actually sounds sort of cool. But you know me as single-faceted Mormon Guy, not a real person with a real life... so over the next few days I'll post about my real life. If you know me, or are really good at scouring the Internet for commonalities, this will be information that is unique enough that it will identify me. Either way, it'll make it easier to understand who I am when next Thursday comes.

I'll start with an obvious one - my love of writing. I inherited awful wrists, so writing with a pen or pencil hurts like crazy... and I hated writing because it was painful. Then I discovered typing... and life got awesome. Today I'm a bit of an enigma. All of my blogging and emailing happens on my phone. Yeah. Thousands of pages.

I fell in love with writing on my mission, when I realized that I could influence people's lives through the things that I wrote. At the end of my mission, I began blogging to keep up the habit. That blog needs to be updated, but most of my creative energy goes into (Gay) Mormon Guy. Family & friends encouraged me to write books, and I did. I've published a couple of them (LDS bookstores carry one; the others were limited print or self-published).

My writing is usually limited to personal essays - sort of like what you see here on (Gay) Mormon Guy. I've done some other stuff, but I like this the best because it's real and because it has the ability to influence people on a deeper level than fiction or technical writing.
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