JUST ONE day after the author behind a popular Syrian lesbian blog admitted to being a married American man named Tom MacMaster, the editor of a lesbian news site Lez Get Real has acknowledged that he is also a man.
“Paula Brooks”, editor of Lez Get Real since its foundation in 2008, is actually Bill Graber (58), a retired Ohio construction worker who said he had adopted his wife’s identity online. Graber said his wife was unaware that he had been using her name on his site.
Brooks’s identity came under suspicion last Saturday. Journalists, bloggers and fans of a woman called Amina Arraf, who wrote a blog called “A Gay Girl in Damascus”, had started to believe Amina did not exist.
Liz Henry, a web producer at BlogHer.com, questioned Brooks’s involvement with Amina, as Amina had started to write about the Syrian uprising on Lez Get Real before starting her own blog.
MacMaster came forward on Sunday to admit that he was behind the persona of Amina, but questions remained about Brooks.
Brooks had told Washington Postreporters that she could speak on the phone only through her father because she was deaf.
She described herself as a Washington mother of two who suffered from social anxiety disorder. To provide proof of identity, she sent a photograph of a driver’s licence, which showed a woman named Paula Brooks.
On Sunday, the Washington Post quoted Brooks as the female editor of a Washington-based blog and agreed to identify her only by her pseudonym.
The Post continued to question her identity on Monday after discovering real estate records that showed she lived in Ohio, not Washington. The newspaper confronted the man who identified himself as her father in numerous telephone conversations over the past four days. He admitted: “I am Paula Brooks.” That man turned out to be Bill Graber.
Graber said he started the site to write about gay issues after seeing the mistreatment of close friends who were a lesbian couple. He said the site was “done with the best of intentions”. He also said that as a former Air Force pilot, he used the site to argue in favour of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal.
“I didn’t start this with my name because . . . I thought people wouldn’t take it seriously, me being a straight man,” he said.
He felt sure that no one would discover his true identity until the story of Amina began to unravel. His connection to Amina was purely coincidental and started when Amina commented on a post on Lez Get Real in February
In the guise of Paula Brooks, Graber corresponded online with Tom MacMaster, thinking he was writing to Amina Arraf. Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realising the other was pretending to be a lesbian.
One of Graber’s contributors at Lez Get Real, Linda LaVictoire (62), who lives in Vermont and writes on the site under her maiden name of Linda Carbonell, said: “I was completely taken in; I have been completely taken in for three years.”
Graber said he hoped the truth of his identity would not hurt the website or set back the causes of the gay and lesbian community. – (Washington Post service)