Gay Girl in Damascus Blogger is really married American male

[YankeeFan]

Interesting case of a blogger's internet identity not being the same as their real identity:

The mysterious identity of a young Arab lesbian blogger who was apparently kidnapped last week in Syria has been revealed conclusively to be a hoax. The blogs were written by not by a gay girl in Damascus, but a middle-aged American man based in Scotland.

Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old Middle East activist studying for a masters at Edinburgh University, posted an update declaring that, rather than a 35-year-old feminist and lesbian called Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, he was "the sole author of all posts on this blog".

"I never expected this level of attention," he wrote in a posting allegedly emanating from "Istanbul, Turkey".

"The events [in the Middle East] are being shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience."

The admission – confirmed in an email to the Guardian from MacMaster's wife – apparently ends a mystery that has convulsed parts of the internet for almost a week. But it provoked a furious response from those who had supported the blogger's campaign, with some in the Syrian gay community saying he had risked their safety and seriously harmed their cause.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/13/syrian-lesbian-blogger-tom-macmaster?CMP=twt_fd

 

[TheSportsPredictor]

If it turns out he sells and fixes espresso machines, I'm never reading anything on the Internet again.

 

[YankeeFan]

If I was making **** up about myself, I'd have a much more fascinating career.

Hell, my previous careers were more interesting.

Meanwhile, there's one brokenhearted French Canadian woman out there:

Twitter supporters and bloggers, too, reacted furiously. There was no immediate reaction from Sandra Bagaria, the French Canadian woman who exchanged around 1,000 emails with Amina and believed herself to be in a romantic relationship with her. Jelena Lecic, the London woman whose pictures were appropriated by the blogger and passed off as Amina, including in direct email correspondence with the Guardian, was not immediately available for comment.

 

[YankeeFan]

And another lesbian blogger turns out to be a straight man:

Just one day after the author behind a popular Syrian lesbian blog admitted to being a married, American man named Tom MacMaster, the editor of the lesbian news site Lez Get Real, with the tag line “A Gay Girl’s View on the World,” acknowledged that he is also a man.

“Paula Brooks,” editor of Lez Get Real since its founding in 2008, is actually Bill Graber, 58, a retired Ohio military man and construction worker who said he had adopted his wife’s identity online. Graber said she was unaware he had been using her name on his site.

Brooks’s identity came under suspicion after news broke that a woman called Amina Arraf on the blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus” might not really be a Syrian lesbian.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/paula-brooks-editor-of-lez-get-real-also-a-man/2011/06/13/AGld2ZTH_blog.html

 

[Stitch]

Some lesbians are just women trapped in a man's body.

 

[KYSportsWriter]

Some lesbians are just women trapped in a man's body.

 

[Ace]

My next career as a lesbian blogger is getting crowded, dammit.

 

[JonnyD]

If I was making **** up about myself, I'd have a much more fascinating career.

Hell, my previous careers were more interesting.

Meanwhile, there's one brokenhearted French Canadian woman out there:

Twitter supporters and bloggers, too, reacted furiously. There was no immediate reaction from Sandra Bagaria, the French Canadian woman who exchanged around 1,000 emails with Amina and believed herself to be in a romantic relationship with her. Jelena Lecic, the London woman whose pictures were appropriated by the blogger and passed off as Amina, including in direct email correspondence with the Guardian, was not immediately available for comment.

Odds that Sandra is also a man? 85%?

 

[Stitch]

What's depressing is reading all of these bylined stories on bloggers and social media trends and have not one person actually interviewed by a reporter. When the Alice Pyne thing hit (the girl with cancer who wrote a bucket list that included trending on Twitter), I didn't see one story for several days where a reporter spoke with her or her family. Has she spoken with the media at all?

 

[Big Circus]

People are ****ing weird.

 

[playthrough]

People online aren't who we think they are? Unpossible!

 

[wicked]

I never understood why people spend this amount of time making up stuff.

A few white lies here and there? Most of us have probably told them, or at least done some level of embellishing. But to make up an entire persona and cultivate it for weeks/months/years? Nuts, man.

People online aren't who we think they are?

And we didn't let them off their hook!

 

[YankeeFan]

NPR this weekend had an interview with a guy who has done a documentary about people who play (I don't even know if that's the right word) Second Life.

Really weird stuff. Grown men whose avatars are little girls.

 

[poindexter]

I never understood why people spend this amount of time making up stuff.

A few white lies here and there? Most of us have probably told them, or at least done some level of embellishing. But to make up an entire persona and cultivate it for weeks/months/years? Nuts, man.

People online aren't who we think they are?

And we didn't let them off their hook!

Please. We have our own Backdoor Bob who has floated around this site for years.