You have to have a lot of tricks up your sleeve to perpetrate a hoax for six years.  You must think in somebody else’s point-of-view—one you yourself can’t understand, steal a lot of photographs of people who aren’t you and most of all, make up a lot of lies.  People with a talent for this kind of fiction should be penny novelists, not bloggers. 

Unfortunately, Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old American citizen studying at a Scottish university, chose the second route, creating a blog persona named Amina Arraf.  Allegedly, Amina was an open lesbian in Damascus and ran a blog called “Gay Girl in Damascus” for over six years.  MacMaster’s lie may never have been discovered if he hadn’t gotten cocky—he posted on his that authorities in Damascus had kidnapped Amina. 

After MacMaster posted that Amina had been kidnapped, American journalists started trying to track down people in Damascus who knew Amina.  NPR’S Andy Carvin tried to talk to people who had met the blogger in person to no avail.  More media sources tried to track her down, but no one could.  Because of the huge public and media outcry for help for Amina, MacMaster posted on the blog that Amina did not and never had existed. 

MacMaster told The Guardian that he had Amina kidnapped so he could stop portraying the character he created out of vanity.  He tried to redeem himself by saying that he hoped that Amina was a role model to some of the closeted homosexuals in the Middle East. He also said that he always wanted to write fiction, but all of his attempts were only met with rejection. 

Here is his commentary, posted on his blog:

Amina came alive. I could hear her ‘voice’ and that voice and personality were clear and strong. Amina was funny and smart and equal parts infuriating and flirtatious. She struggled with her religious beliefs and sexuality, wondered about living in America as an Arab; she wanted to find a way to balance her religion and her sexuality, her desire to be both a patriotic American and a patriotic Arab. Amina was clever and fun and had a story and a voice and I started writing it, almost as though she were dictating to me. Some of her details were mine, some were those of a dozen other friends borrowed liberally, others were purely ‘her’ from the get go.

If MacMaster weren’t bad enough, another part of the story broke yesterday. Before she was “kidnapped” a number of American bloggers had “met” Amina, letting her guest blog on their websites and exchanging emails with her.  One was Paula Brooks, the creator of the website LezGetReal.com.  Amina had blogged for Brooks and they had exchanged emails.

Yesterday, Paula Brooks, the pseudonym of the gay woman who had been corresponding with Amina, was discovered to be a 58-year-old man named Bill Graber. He never would have come forward if he had not been involved in the Amina hoax. Graber will hand over the control of the website to one of the website’s actually gay (hopefully!) contributors. 

These white men don’t seem to understand what a terrible crime this is.  They assumed identities they could not possible understand—female, queer, Arab—and controlled the output that those identities sent out in the world.  In essence, they stole a voice that wasn’t theirs to transmit.  Because there is nothing legitimate they can say with these voices. If one person hates a lesbian or an Arab or a woman or if one person feels that their understanding of a lesbian or an Arab or a woman has been completely shattered in wake of these hoaxes, these men are criminals.  No matter what, these men are criminals. 

And I wish they could go on Oprah and have Oprah scream at them like she screamed at James Frey.  These men are worse than James Frey because Frey only took his own voice and made it more interesting than it actually was.  These men should not be let off the hook with lame apologies saying that they are nerdy and their fiction is not good enough to be published on its own merit.

The level of anonymity provided on the Internet is dangerous. The most terrifying part is the Internet’s ability to cut off the source.  You receive facts, but you don’t know from where those facts are culled.  You meet a person on an online dating website, but you don’t know if he’s a 25-year-old Seattleite or a fat Russian mobster in Kiev.  You don’t know if the woman that you are identifying with is an Arab-American lesbian in Damascus or a fat 40-something in Edinburgh. 

These men should be punished.  Internet crime punishments are not moving nearly as fast as the crimes being committed.  The Internet is becoming what American cities at the turn of the century used to be: without law or punishment so you can be everyone and no one at the same time.