The author of the Gay Girl in Damascus blog who was reportedly kidnapped by armed men last week, Amina Arraf has been revealed as the pseudonym of an American man living holidaying in Istanbul, resident in Edinburgh.
I too am more relieved that a real Arraf is not actually caught up in the custody of a brutal regime than angry, but that’s easier for me than it might be for Syrian activists, I suspect. Now the regime is going to be able to cast everything MacMaster wrote about what was happening in Syria as pure fiction, when he insists that he wrote about real events, just in Amina’s voice. I find it utterly plausible that he merely meant to highlight those events in what he thought would be a more appealing persona that he never suspected would get so much international attention (even though attention for the oppression was the primary but perhaps ill-thought-through goal), but now MacMaster’s whole body of work is going to be suspect.
Also? Problematic cultural appropriation issues up the wazoo.
Addendum: I’ve now read some more about how deeply he has embedded profiles of Amina on the web and in doing so has directly deceived many people who thought they were dealing with a real person at considerable risk, not just readers of a pseudonymous blog being disappointed, but people being actively endangered. I no longer find his explanations at all convincing, they are merely superficially plausible if people don’t dig deeper.
Categories: ethics & philosophy, media, social justice, violence
Friday Hoyden: Gillian Triggs 
Hands up anybody now who’d trust Rolling Stone to tell their story? 
Media Circus: No Snappy Title edition 
DUFC #69 
Hoyden About Town 
A couple of angry responses from
Syrian(gar, Middle Eastern, apologies for the hurried posting and misidentifying Mustapha) bloggers:Sami Hamwi and Daniel Nassar on Gay Middle East:
Mustapha on Beirut Spring:
(Links via comments on Liz Henry’s Chasing Amina.)
This comment from one Oscar on Liz’s blog also gave me some more details about just how deep his deceptions have gone – it’s far more than just a pseudonym, it’s a full alter ego and people have been hurt by finding out how their trust has been misplaced. I don’t find MacMaster’s explanations quite so plausible any more:
I’m disappointed and angry and disgusted.
I didn’t know enough about the background of the blog to get angry enough at first, Chally. The more I learn the more disappointed and disgusted I become.
I’d been popping in to read on occasion and had been increasingly moved by MacMaster’s writing, so this feels like a great betrayal to me. 😦 Of course, there are loads of people who whom the blog meant a lot more and, as you point out, lots of people were put at risk.
It’s natural to be sympathetic at first I think, if learning about it from a distance. In addition to the “raising awareness” defence (also used by Debbie Swenson who perpetrated the Kaycee Nicole deception) many people are familiar with identity play (this seems to be the term that’s being used) on the ‘net to some degree, and with some of the benefits people get from it, particularly people who are unable to express some aspect of their identity in their usual persona, or who haven’t yet even consciously integrated some aspect of their identity.
But there are multiple ethical violations when people are either led to believe they’re having a close relationship with a real person, or, as happened with both Kaycee Nicole and Amina Arraf among many others, are led to believe that a tragedy has occurred. The massive cultural appropriation, damage to activist plausibility and physical risks involved to people who cared about MacMasters’s Amina Arraf are exceptional.
Well, crap.
Worse, if any Syrian LGBT bloggers were put in danger from investigating “Amina’s disappearance,” the real danger will be coming from their heightened visibility, not from a specific group we now know not to exist. Which means that any greater danger they were put in, they’re still in it.
No wonder they don’t feel like accepting this twerp’s apology.
What an incredibly low thing to do. I am just disgusted.
And now the editor of LezGetReal has been revealed to be another cis het married white man masquerading as a lesbian woman.
Makes you wonder how many other high profile bloggers out there aren’t actually who they say they are. There must also be a lot of pissed off lesbian bloggers who now will have to demonstrate that they are in fact women and lesbian. Way to go priviledged cis white dude.
Whether other commentors are really Syrian lesbians has already become a running gag on LP.
And yet he still thinks it was harmless.
MacMaster, according to a Mondoweiss commenter/admin who can see IP addresses, is still posting in his own defence using Arab women’s names for his sockpuppets: Arab LGBT Movement: “We are not victims in need of a white male savior working in London…”. See comments. (Post is primarily a criticism of GayMiddleEast.com, originally posted at Mideast Youth.)
Looks like he doesn’t know when to stop digging.