Oh, fake lesbian, you broke our hearts

IN THE AFTERMATH this week of the Gay Girl in Damascus hoax, when it was realised that a young lesbian blogging from Syria was in fact Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old straight American blogging from Edinburgh, there was a host of reactions. Crikey, said some, an internet hoax, let’s be surprised and wounded. That’s not good for the internet’s reputation for accuracy. It’s not good for real gay people in the Middle East. And what is it with straight middle-aged men pretending to be lesbians anyway? Where do they get off, and what do they get off on?

The Guardian, which initially wrote about the blogger's growing status as a heroine but which, to its credit, subsequently blew the whistle on the hoax, ran a couple of articles on Wednesday asking what it was that men found so fascinating about lesbians. Oddly, neither piece was written by someone from the gender widely considered to be expert in this matter.

But the question not raised to any noticeable degree was the more awkward one of just how attractive the media found this supposed young, gay, female blogger from the Middle East and how heavily it fell for her.

While posing naked on national television during the week, John Waters talked about his early days as a columnist for The Irish Times. "I kept waiting to get found out," he said. Can you imagine how neurotic the young Waters would have felt if he was in fact a young lesbian in Syria? MacMaster created the character, grabbed a photograph of an unwitting New Yorker as an avatar, started blogging in February and then, presumably subconsciously, waited to be found out. Perhaps this was part of the thrill.

He made contact with another lesbian blogger. He didn’t realise at the time that this too was a straight man, of 58. But why should he? What are the chances of there being two fake lesbian bloggers, and of them beginning a flirtatious e-mail relationship with one other? About as high as the chances you’ll still be sniggering about it in a year’s time.

So MacMaster wrote, and kept writing, and, perhaps, kept waiting to get caught. And he gave interviews, by e-mail, to CBS and CNN, among others. Profiles hailed “Amina Abdallah Arraf al-Omari” as a new hero of the Arab human-rights movement. And when he grew tired of blogging and waiting to be caught, MacMaster took a holiday, leaving as a “sort of away message” the news that Amina had been abducted by security forces. Then, finally, after a journalist asked if anyone had, you know, ever actually met Amina, a bit of detective work revealed the truth.

Having been caught out, MacMaster seemed in his cheeriness almost to be informed by a belief that somehow we were all in this together, an attitude of, “Hey, guys, sorry about that, but wasn’t it fun? Let’s keep in touch.”

But the media, previously in this relationship for the long term, was jilted and bitter. The outrage was directed specifically at MacMaster and more diffusely at that darned internet, but there was little introspection. No mea culpa. Instead, the archives of many newspapers and online magazines now contain addenda reminding readers that the person quoted in this old piece was, er, fictional. It’s like being stuck with the wedding photographs after things go wrong on the honeymoon.

But you could see how “Amina” appealed. She was a young, gay woman, oppressed in the Middle East during the Arab Spring. In the hierarchy of victimhood she was at the summit. Her story featured social networking (a big theme in this revolutionary period) and an unbreakable human spirit. It combined the appeal of previously arresting stories, such as those of Salam Pax, the Baghdad blogger from the war in Iraq, and Neda Soltan, the young Iranian woman shot dead during pro-democracy protests.

“Amina” was almost too good to be true. But if anyone considered her existence implausible (online, few are as they say they are), it still seemed far more likely that she was real than that she was a middle-aged man in Scotland.

The reporting of the abduction story then gave it veracity. When so many newspapers rely on other agencies and newspapers to provide foreign coverage, the presumption grows that someone, somewhere, in whatever office, must have checked out the facts. Anyone who doubted it had only to Google “Gay Girl in Damascus” to see that the world’s major media organisations had each reported it, and lent authority to the story.

But in the end it was just another sad internet-dating tale, like getting a profile suggesting a guy is 30, athletic and fresh from astronaut school. Then you meet him and realise he’s a fast-food junkie living with his mother. So you blame him. You blame the internet. But you don’t ask if maybe you need to remind yourself what it’s like to get out and meet some real people.