Has the four-year Syrian lesbian hoax destroyed confidence in blogger journalism?

IT WAS a post entitled My Father the Hero that finally gave the game away. Up until that moment, American/Syrian lesbian Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari - better known as A Gay Girl in Damascus - had been hailed as a victim of President Bashar al-Assad's oppressive regime, an inspiration to the global LGBT community and a poignant symbol of the liberalising Arab Spring.

But as the 35-year-old blogger described how her father prevented the security services from arresting her by the sheer force of his rhetoric, doubts began to creep in. Her account of the way he defended her right to be gay, before forcing the armed men to back down and apologise, captivated the mainstream British and US media, and moved Western readers to tears, but failed to convince some Middle Eastern commentators.

"Pardon for raining on the parade, but I am sceptical about this story," wrote "ToiovoS", shortly after it was posted. "It reads more like a passage from a novel." Now, of course, we know the blog - which had gathered a global fanbase - was indeed a work of fiction, conceived by 40-year-old American student Tom MacMaster on his computer at Edinburgh University.

MacMaster - who had been posting as his alter ego for up to four years - was finally unmasked after Amina's supposed kidnap by Assad's police on 6 June led sympathisers and the US state department to try to locate her.

Alerted by gay blogger Daniel Nassar (a pseudonym) to possible anomalies in her story, National Public Radio (NPR) reporter Andy Carvin launched his own investigation. He discovered no-one in touch with "Amina" online had ever met her in person (not even real-life lesbian Sandra Bagaria, with whom she had a virtual six-month relationship). Meanwhile, Royal College of Physicians administrator Jelena Lecic revealed photographs purporting to be Amina were actually of her.

The final nail in Amina's coffin came when her blog's IP address was linked firstly to Edinburgh University and then to MacMaster's wife Britta Froelicher, who is completing a PhD in Syrian economic development, but who denies any involvement in the hoax.

Stranger still, days after MacMaster admitted that his fraud, Paula Brooks - the editor of a US-based LGBT website LezGet -Real on which Amina had posted - was exposed as Bill Graber a 58-year-old man from Dayton, Ohio. Both men claim to have wanted to give gay and lesbians a voice, MacMaster by drawing attention to the oppressive nature of the Syrian regime and Graber by campaigning against the US military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.

But others see them as dangerous fantasists, who have undermined the causes they purported to embrace. MacMaster, in particular, has jeopardised the safety of real gay and lesbians in Syria, where homosexuality is an offence punishable by a three-year jail sentence, and sown the seeds of suspicion among internet users.

"What concerns me most is that this will make people question the validity of personal accounts, which throughout history when you look at the Second World War or any other time, are always the most powerful," says Glasgow-based comedian Susan Calman, who has campaigned on gay rights and is an avid tweeter. "It may make people distrust personal accounts which really ought to be heard."

With little information coming out of Syria - and news releases controlled by the government, it is easy to see why the Western media bought into the hoax. Here at last was an authentic voice to fill the news vacuum, and not just any voice. As a beautiful but oppressed lesbian in a country on the brink of an uprising, Amina's blog was gold dust to journalists caught up in the excitement of the Arab Spring.

"I think it went with the flow of the story, the story being that the Arabs are not culturally predisposed to authoritarianism; that they are just as keen on freedom and democracy as the rest of us," says Brian McNair, professor of journalism at Queensland University of Technology. "So here's a woman who not only is blogging a pro-democracy line, she has progressive sexual politics. She challenges everything about authoritarian patriarchal Islam and that makes her blog attractive. It chimes with the way the story is being told in the West."

As far as the newspapers were concerned, it didn't hurt that Amina was pretty and gay. "There are key words which appeal to people's salacious nature and lesbian is definitely one of them," Calman says. "And this is the kind of story people want to read about lesbians. They don't like stories about the many lesbians who live quite quietly within relationships."

What is harder to understand is why not one, but two bloggers should choose a gay woman as their alter ego. Were they looking for sexual kicks or merely, as MacMaster has suggested, on a gigantic ego trip?

With MacMaster currently holidaying in Istanbul with his wife, it is impossible to question him about A Gay Girl in Damascus, which, over the course of five months veered from political polemic to Mills and Boon love story. When first confronted over the hoax, he was bullish, saying, that the blog provided a platform for legitimate opinions on the Middle East which he, as a white, straight man couldn't have expressed without provoking scorn.

But later he was more contrite. "I regret that a lot of people feel I led them on," he said. "I regret that a number of people are seeing my hoax as distracting from real news, real stories about Syria and real concerns of real, on-the-ground bloggers, where people will doubt their veracity."

About his "relationship" with Bagaria, with whom he exchanged more than 500 e-mails, he was more reticent, although he denied he was sexually excited by the virtual encounter. Still the abundance of male-orientated girl on girl porn on the internet is evidence that lesbians - particularly so-called "lipstick" lesbians - appear to hold a fascination for some men, even if their view of them is over-simplistic.

In MacMaster's case, however, the blog seems to have been as much about boosting self-esteem as titillation. As with other hoaxes - the Hitler Diaries, Piltdown Man, the Cottingley Fairies - part of the attraction is the ability to fool people over an extended period of time. "It can be very rewarding," says Michael Berry, a senior lecturer in forensic psychology, at Manchester Metropolitan University. "If they [hoaxers] get a positive response, it is incredibly reinforcing. But there's a danger they get in so deep, they can't extract themselves. What started out as a bit of fun may become an obsession."

So great is their need for validation, hoaxers can be blinded to the damage they are doing. Dr Dorothy Rowe, psychologist and author of Why We Lie accuses MacMaster of trivialising other people's lives in order to lend more weight to his own. "We all like to feel our lives have some significance, but most of us get by on a few small things," she says. MacMaster, however, took the drastic course of creating an alter ego in order to make himself feel important. "It's the utter vanity of the man that's astonishing," Rowe says. "To think that by reading reports, he's informed about how people feel. I have just opened today's newspaper and there's a Syrian mother talking about how awful it is on a Friday when men and boys are going to the mosque and then they go out and demonstrate and she knows she might never see her son again. He is making out he knows what that feels like. He doesn't. If you live a peaceful life in a peaceful country you are never put into a situation where you are in such fear and helplessness. "

Not only has MacMaster trivialised the experience of gays living in Syria, but he has handed Assad a giant PR victory. Sana, the government's official news agency, used the hoax as evidence of Western propaganda, claiming it had perpetuated "continuous fabrications and lies against Syria in terms of kidnapping bloggers and activists".

It has also made life for homosexuals across the Middle East more dangerous. "There are bloggers in Syria who are trying as hard as they can to report news and stories from the country," wrote Sami Hamwi, a pseudonym for the Damascus editor of GayMiddleEast.com. "We have to deal with [more] difficulties than you can imagine. What you have done has harmed many, put us all in danger, and made us worry about our LGBT activism."

Moreover, it has, at least in the short-term, made news outlets more cautious. To some that will be a good thing: the Amina debacle was, it could be argued, an indictment of journalism. Few checks on her identity were carried out, although, as McNair points out, editors may have been conscious that - had she been real - too much scrutiny could have placed her in danger. But at the same time, the anonymity of the internet makes on-the-ground reporting in war zones possible, a phenomenon launched by the Baghdad blogger who gave the only eyewitness account of what it was like to be on the receiving end of allied attacks at the start of the Iraq War.

The Amina scandal may also make ordinary internet users more cautious about forwarding links to sites like A Gay Girl in Damascus. "I am interested not only in gay rights, but rights for women in countries where there are problems and I try to forward links on Twitter," says Calman. "But I do think I might be more reticent about doing that now because - if you have 6,000 followers and you send them something that turns out to be untrue, then you do feel kind of responsible. "

Having created all this chaos, MacMaster seems reluctant to let his alter ego go. Though outwardly repentant, he seems eager to captitalise on his notoriety. "In retrospect I wouldn't have done any of it," the student told Istanbul-based freelancer Alexander Christie-Miller. "But at the same time, it was a wonderful character and story and I'm probably going to package it as a novel and hopefully find a literary agent when I get back to Edinburgh... We'll see."