Was this Mayor's private life somehow 'protected' while other politicians aren't? Were the things said untrue? If it's a matter of who said what, wouldn't the content of the emails be enough to show who said what, without having to reveal anyone's identity?
The internet is notorious for BS and rumors, should all posters have to use their real names?
That's merely my recollection of events however and it would behoove you to read the archived posts as I suffer from chronic Sometimers.
No. A conservative poster to Salon's "TableTalk" threads on gay marriage five years ago had gay men run down his family website and send his teenaged son gay pornography and links to gay porn sites via e-mail, in revenge for their inability to confute their conservative, family-oriented interlocutor fairly and squarely in the forum. (In fact, it was he who achieved elenchus against them.) One of the guys who did this was David Ehrenstein, a Hollywood critic, author, and historian of the Velvet Underground whose tag line, at various junctures, read "Gay as a Disney cow" and "Gay PC terrorist". Later on, he replaced his tag line with a five-line quote from his favorite gay porn novel. He was also a collaborator, with Michelangelo Signorile of The Village Voice, in "exposing" Andrew Sullivan's online dating habits and solicitations of risky sex with strangers. Not exactly a public service, Ehrenstein did this "outing" more in the spirit of another of his temporary tag lines, "Someday Andrew Sullivan's gonna end...."
You really don't want charmers like this following you home from a hot BBS altercation.
FReeper RonF is familiar with Ehrenstein from Salon, where they both contributed to a thread about the Boy Scouts of America and the James Dale lawsuit; Ron can at least partially corroborate what I just told you.