I first discovered the Gay Girl in Damascus blog on April 26, via a link on Twitter from NPR journalist @acarvin, Andy Carvin. Carvin linked to this post, about Amina's father's defense of her as his lesbian daughter. I followed the blog, but as I noted to my partner, she didn't sound like any of the out lesbians we knew. By the time Amina started writing about her experiences with lesbian love-making, I was rolling my eyes; it was too Mary Sue.

As it turns out, it was too Mary Sue; or maybe, Marty Sue. Carvin, noticing that no one he knew in the straight or queer communities actually knew Amina Arraf, the "Gay Girl in Damascus" in real life, started looking closer at the blog when on Monday, June 6, someone identifying themselves as Amina's cousin Raina posted that Amina had been kidnapped. Carvin, informed by Syrian sources that had serious doubts about Amina's story laid out what he knew and didn't know in this Tweet Deck post. Shortly after that, a British newspaper, The Guardian, published a profile of Amina Arrraf. It was very shortly followed by a call from Jelena Lecic, living in London, because the picture they ran of Amina was actually a picture of Jelena Lecic, taken from her Facebook page.

As Carvin discovered, The Gay Girl in Damascus blog, and the existence of Amina was entirely a hoax from a heterosexual male Tom MacMaster, an American from Georgia in a medieval studies graduate program at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. It turns out, that MacMaster was running Amina on a number of sites and listserves for some years. Moreover, MacMaster's wife Britta Froelicher appears to have been a complicit party to the hoax, which included "Amina" engaging in a long-distance romantic relationship with Sandra Bagari, a woman who thought she was romantically involved with another lesbian, to the point of exchanging some 500 emails. When Froelicher was confronted with the evidence, MacMasters admitted that it was a hoax, and he was a lying sack of fewmets.

But wait, there's moar. One of the pieces of evidence came from Paula Brooks, owner and Web master of the LezGetReal site; Brooks noticed that MacMasters/Amina, ostensibly blogging on LezGetReal before moving to his/her own site, logged on with an Edinburgh IP. But it turns out that Brooks is in fact, male, heterosexual, married and another lying heteronormative asshat named Bill Graber.

Bottom line? Both Tom MacMasters and Bill Graber were pretending to be lesbian women for sexual kicks; you can see this in the various messages they posted to each other (each man thinking hew was flirting with a lesbian), and to out and proud dykes. They're doing this for wankage, not for any desire to help queer communities, or Middle east communities, communities they exploited for sexual kicks.

Tom MacMaster, Britta Froelicher, and Bill Graber? I hope you suffer all manner of public and private humiliation for screwing over entire communities in Syria, in Scotland and in the U.S. while joyfully frolicking in your nice safe privileged entitled heterosexual marriages.