Two influential “lesbian” bloggers unmasked as straight male hoaxers
Amina Abdullah and Paula Brooks — two lesbians who have affected the world with their blogs.
Paula began posting her views about LGBT news headlines in 1998 via a blog, “LezGetReal,” and that effort eventually grew into the coordination of contributions by several other female writers.
Amina, with some help from Paula, began posting her personal struggles as the “Gay Girl in Damascus” this past February. Amina even flirted with Paula online despite the two having never met or spoken to one another over the phone.
Then Paula Brooks started to get suspicious of Amina Abdullah’s true identity. Questions arose from several traditional news sites about Amina’s story, her location, and why her photos were the same as another woman, Jelena Lecic. Suddenly a post appeared on “Gay Girl” from Amina’s cousin that said she’d been abducted by police. Fans of her blog were very upset. Reporters got very suspicious, especially at NPR. Facebook groups popped up calling for Syrian police to “Free Amina!” A second online “girlfriend,” Sandra Bagaria, admitted she had never spoken with Amina Abdulla and was “just as confused as everyone else.”
Fake Lesbian #1
Finally, Amina Abdullah was revealed to be not a Syrian lesbian, but a straight white man from America named Tom MacMaster. On Monday, MacMaster confirmed his identity with a final post titled: “A Hoax that got way out of hand. I never meant to hurt anyone.” He went on to say (via Google cache):
”I am really truly sorry and I feel awful about this. Words alone do not suffice to express how badly I feel about all this. I betrayed the trust of a great many people, the friendship that was honestly and openly offered to me, and played with the emotions of others unfairly. I have distracted the world’s attention from important issues of real people in real places. I have potentially compromised the safety of real people.”
In the post, Tom MacMaster laid out his personal story, saying that he had wanted to write fiction since he was a child. He also said that he was “involved in issues surrounding Palestine and Iraq.” MacMaster said that when writing on forums as a person with “a distinctly Anglo name” he would be “accused of hating America, Jews, etc.” So, he invented Amina Arraf, a “funny and smart,” “infuriating and flirtatious” character to use for his posts about Mideast issues. He created an e-mail address and a Facebook page for her, and also “grabbed photos” of Lecic, whom he had never met. He said he had been trying to “enlighten people.”
“And everything spiraled out of control. I couldn’t think how to shut Amina down…. It just kept growing…,” MacMaster said in his post. “My intentions were good; I got carried away…. I only wanted to set forth real information through the use of artfully crafted fiction.” And he apologized to Lecic, Bagaria, a man named Scott Palter, and to Paula Brooks; then signed off one last time as “Amina A.”
The blog is now offline.
Fake Lesbian #2
So, Paula Brooks of “LezGetReal” — caught in the middle of a scandal surrounding the fictitious Syrian”Gay Girl.” Paula Brooks, a prolific blogger who was drawing as much web traffic to her site as many top gay news publications. And “LezGetReal,” a site that claims: “We are real lesbians from around the world who aim to provide hard hitting commentary on politics, issues, and events that affect the LGBT community.”
Well, reporters at the Washington Post uncovered that “she” is another he — Bill Graber, another straight male posing as a lesbian.
On Monday, Graber told the Post his story, too. He said that he had helped to unmask “Gay Girl” via an IP address. He said that he felt MacMaster was doing “something malevolent.” Graber said that he was motivated to create his site by the lives of a lot of gay friends and, in particular, one “perfect” lesbian couple who he said had been denied hospital visitation rights.
He said he is neither gay nor did he hang out with gay people. But he did feel that the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy needed to change. And he added that he didn’t have any love for the Catholic Church or its demonizing of gays.
Graber went on to say that he had been trying to unload the burden of the web site for a year, and he now fears for its future (Washington Post):
”I’m afraid that the more people that know about me [being a man running the blog], the less people that will read it. My online family, I’m concerned about them. Linda Levatoir [a blogger on Lez Get Real] will have to scramble if she’s going to have to save the blog.”
The other writers at LezGetReal seem to have been taken by surprise by all this, too. One writer, Linda S. Carbonell (aka Linda LaVictroire), offered an apology to readers for providing a forum for phony lesbian voices, and said the remaining writers are “thorougly furious” with Graber though “none of us ever did the research to uncover Bill Graber.” She says (LezGetReal):
”The rest of the staff knew nothing about this. When the story broke about Amina actually being a man named Tom MacMasters, Bill Garber’s sockpuppet theater crashed around him and the staff of LezGetReal. Bill had hoped to keep LGR out of it, but we got dragged in. He was already in the process of turning over the site to others and withdrawing the Paula Brooks character from the internet. The exposure of Tom MacMasters cost us the opportunity to let ‘Paula’ retire quietly.”
In Carbonell’s somewhat rambling defense of LezGetReal, she said that “Except for me, our writers are lesbians and a transgender person.” She claimed that there was a distinct difference between the motivations of Bill Graber and Tom MacMasters. And she offered an apology to another woman, Melanie Nathan.
Nathan told The Guardian that she had been a writer for LezGetReal, and that she had suspected “Gay Girl” was “not authentic” but was rebuked by Graber, so she quit the blog. She said that she too was “taken in” by Graber’s “Paula”:
”The whole gay community of bloggers is freaking out right now because everyone in some shape or form has encountered Paula Brooks. It has had a severe impact on the trust among the web of bloggers who are interconnected and work with each other.”
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