Gay girls in Damascus & elsewhere

It’s a wild, weird web out there; as if we didn’t already know.

As of this writing, two very high-profile web celebs, apparently viewed as spokeswomen for their constituency—lesbians—were, um, exposed as being men.

It seems that Gay Girl in Damascus is neither gay, female nor Syrian. He’s a middle-aged American man living in Edinburgh who thought that he’d be somehow more authentic if he gave himself the persona of Armina Araf for blogging purposes. He used the photograph of a friend for his dating site—without her knowledge—to enhance his credibility.

And Paula Brooks, editor of the lesbian news site LezGetReal, is in fact a 58-year-old construction worker retired from the Air Force. He used his wife’s name as nom de blog.

Both Tom MacMaster (AKA Gay Girl in Damascus) and Bill Graber (AKA Paula Brooks) have professed themselves shocked and chagrinned at the consternation that their fabrications have caused. Because they didn’t mean to deceive anyone, really. They just…enhanced their real personalities by creating online personas that were the antithesis of their sad, middle-aged white guy lives.

MacMaster’s hoax has had serious real-life repercussions, as when he let it be known that Armina was taken up in the Assad government’s repressive measures. Real people were risking real harm to themselves attempting to find out what had happened to Armina. MacMaster insists he meant no harm, though, so that’s alright.

Leaving aside the basically pathetic idea of 40- and 50-something men developing elaborate anything-but-me “lives” to present to the world in a format where they’re unlikely to actually, you know, meet anyone—it is, after all, only an extension of claiming the house you have for sale has 1500sf (which would be counting the garage, patio and front porch) or that you’re a 38-year-old stockbroker who keeps in shape by running marathons (when you’re 46, unemployed and can barely waddle to the doughnut shop)—I find it interesting that they have to go to the utter extremes of fakery to support their net-cred. 

Did they think it would be easier to establish bona fides by representing themselves to be experts in lifestyles, issues and geographies completely alien to them, rather than pretending to be chess masters or breeders of thoroughbreds or organic chemists working on genetically engineered radishes? They couldn't just say they collect Bordeaux futures? They had to be experts on the lesbian lifestyle?


No, faking chess mastery, horse sense or agronomy would take some sort of, you know, knowledge. But apparently pretending to be a person of a different gender, with a different sexual orientation, in a different continent--well, anyone can do that convincingly. 

They’re astonished that their deceit blew up on them. I’m astonished that they thought completely fabrication was their only road to authenticity.

Well, as Jean Giraudoux said: Sincerity is everything; once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.