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Boi From Troy
Signs Off

Boi From Troy
Signs Off

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After five years of raising eyebrows on the Web, Boi From Troy blogger -- and gay Republican -- Scott Schmidt is signing off.

Often considered a black sheep of the gay community -- whoever heard of a gay, sports-loving Republican -- for five years, Scott Schmidt took to his blog BoiFromTroy.com to offer a different take on the gay rights movement. But Monday morning the blogger, activist and University of Southern California grad-football nut announced he was pulling the plug on his labor of love (his once multiple-times-a-day posts tapered off this summer while Schmidt sunk a fair amount of his time into working with Republicans Against 8). Advocate.com caught up with Schmidt just after he bid his loyal fan base farewell.

Advocate.com:In five years on the Web, you managed to amass a pretty loyal following. Why stop now?Scott Schmidt: For me, blogging was not as much about my readers as much as it was a venue for me to share my thoughts and passions. I always believed I should blog for myself, not for my readers. So when blogging was more a chore than a hobby, I realized it was time to hang up the cleats and retire.

When someone told me that the BoiFromTroy blog was my greatest accomplishment in life, I knew it was probably time to move on and make a real accomplishment or two.

One of your big projects this year was Republicans Against 8, and I know that took up a lot of your time. Did that play a role in your deciding to walk away? The decision to retire as BoiFromTroy actually came last summer -- around the same time as I started working on Republicans Against 8, but the two are unrelated. When people stop recognizing you as a person and instead look at you as a caricature of your blog's persona, then it is time to go back to being a person.

Looking back over your five years at BoiFromTroy, what's been the most rewarding experience? The most rewarding experience is to hear from those people who say that reading the blog let them realize that it is OK be be different -- to be gay and Republicans, to be Republicans who support gays.

On the other hand, I realized that there is power in what gets put online, and people can get hurt. There's a football player in South Carolina whose professional career may have been put in jeopardy because of something said about him online years ago, and I don't know that I want to bear the burden on my conscience of inadvertently changing people's lives like that.

Your opinions don't always walk the same line as the majority of the gay community. Have your opinions on any major issues facing the community evolved in your time writing the blog? One thing I have learned while blogging is that none of us fit nicely into compartmentalized boxes -- even into those boxes we define ourselves with. As a gay, Republican USC football fan, my readers would get crazy when I talked about other passions I had, like Georgetown basketball, some boy, or obsessively racking up frequent flier miles. We are all individuals, and we should not hold it against folks who don't fit the predefined community molds.

Million dollar question -- what comes next? Freedom! Although I hadn't been blogging as regularly lately, once I declared that I was no longer "Boi From Troy" it was very liberating. This doesn't mean I will give up writing, and I won't be leaving the Internet. I still have my column at Spot-on.com and still consider myself as a blogger -- I just won't be Boi From Troy.

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