The Internet is atwitter with the news that the blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus”, whose author had supposedly been arrested by Boy Assad’s goons, is neither lesbian, female, nor a resident of Syria. Instead, like those fake memoirs to which dear old Oprah was so partial, “she” is merely the latest leftie hoax.
If you find the notion of a Syrian lesbian blogger a bit of a stretch, the real author is a far more plausible construct: a 40-year old American male college student in a Che Guevara T-shirt. No imaginative powers required to create that identity, no sir.
As someone who’s been advocating the overthrow of Assad for a decade, I doubt whether sending a squad of Baath Party heavies to crack down on lesbianism is a priority for him right now. However, keeping male “activists” in college and adolescent T-shirts until middle-age is evidently a priority of the western world. Tom MacMaster thinks his fictional creation (ie, the projection of his highly parochial obsessions on to distant lands) was an “important voice” for bringing the issues into focus. The dreary predictability of his actual persona is far more telling. Also: “The other deeply disturbing aspect of this story is that this ‘man’ found a woman to marry him.”