A Gay Girl in Damascus (February 2011 - June 2011) was a blog purportedly authored by Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari.
Omari was, in fact, a hoax persona created by the American citizen and then-student of the University of Edinburgh, Thomas Jarvis MacMaster.
On June 7, 2011, author/blogger Liz Henry,[4] Andy Carvin[5] (a journalist with National Public Radio in Washington, D.C.), and others raised doubts about the identity of the blogger.
The photos purported to be of her were proven to be a Croatian woman residing in Britain, with no relation to Syria, the blog, or the ongoing protests in the country.
On June 12, Ali Abunimah and Benjamin Doherty of the website The Electronic Intifada conducted an investigation that pointed to a strong possibility that the identity of Amina was MacMaster, an American living in Edinburgh.
"[15] In February 2011, MacMaster posted as Amina on the website Lez Get Real, operated by Bill Graber, a straight man pretending to be a lesbian named Paula Brooks.
[23] In May 2011, Katherine Marsh of The Guardian, then deceived by the hoax, described the blog as "brutally honest, poking at subjects long considered taboo in Arab culture".
"[21] According to Doherty of The Electronic Intifada, MacMaster had also created social media profiles, including on Facebook, for both Amina and her fictitious cousin Rania, and had used them to correspond with activists for Palestinian and other causes.
Hajratwala said that she, unaware of MacMaster's true identity, did not send the script to an agent because she believed the material was "rambling and in need of a lot of work.
[27][31] In an email interview with CNN, MacMaster wrote as Amina that she believed that political change could improve gay rights.
[33] In April, Arraf told how her father confronted two security agents who came to arrest her, threatened to rape her, and accused her of being involved in a salafist plot.
[33] In the weeks before her reported abduction, Amina had described traveling around Syria, sometimes in disguise and once riding inside a box on a truck, Bagaria said.
At one point, Amina wore an Islamic head scarf and posed as her father's wife so that they could slip more easily through government checkpoints.
[28] She was described as walking in the area of the Abbasid bus station near Fares al Khouri Street, on her way to meet a person involved with the Local Coordinating Committee, a real opposition planning group.
One of the men then put his hand over Amina's mouth and they hustled her into a red Dacia Logan with a window sticker of Basel Assad.
[19] The Free Amina Arraf Facebook page had already gathered over 10,000 members by the night of June 7;[34] activists tweeted using the hashtag #FreeAmina.
[19] Now Lebanon wrote that Arraf was one of the "ordinary, inspiring heroes of the Syrian revolution", known for "her fearless, blunt accounts of political turmoil in the country, and for her candidness about being gay".
[35] Journalist Andrew Belonsky wrote an article for Death and Taxes magazine, stating the "U.S. government should ... use its power and influence to call for Arraf's release ...
[27] Writer/editor Liz Henry was quoted in the "Middle East Live" blog run by The Guardian saying "I started having doubts based on some of her patterns of talking about personas and fiction ...
"[40] On June 8, Jelena Lečić, a Croatian national and expatriate in the United Kingdom, issued a statement that the pictures claiming to represent Arraf al Omari were actually of herself, causing The Guardian and The Huffington Post to expunge, replace or remove photos that had been from the newspaper's past articles.
She appeared on the BBC's Newsnight to clarify that she had never known of the Syrian woman and that the usage of Lečić's personal images had been going on for some period of time.
[44] On June 12, The Electronic Intifada published evidence for its claims that Amina was the product of Tom MacMaster of Edinburgh, formerly of Atlanta, Georgia.
[49] Monica Hesse of The Washington Post wrote that upon discovery of the hoax, bloggers, women, gays and lesbians, and Syrians were unhappy, since a blog that claimed to be one of them was written by an American heterosexual male.
Hesse explained "If [MacMaster] had not been so emotionally resonant, so detailed, so seemingly 'real,' nobody would have cared so much when Amina disappeared, and nobody would have worked so hard to figure out what might have happened to her, and nobody would have learned that she was a pale man from Georgia.
"[50] Liz Henry, who had recommended some of the posts made by MacMaster when he worked under the Amina character, stated "He's stealing the voice of a marginalized person.
The narcissistic writing, the sprinkling of quotations from the Koran and tidbits from Syrian history, the stock stories compiled from a thousand news clippings — it all seems painfully obvious."
Hajratwala refused to remove the writings, posted the e-mails MacMaster sent her, and asked readers to copy and disseminate the Amina story draft.
[51] Brian Whitaker of The Guardian stated that the blog "was an arrogant fantasy" that "undermines, rather than illuminates, awareness of the realities of being gay in the Middle East.
"[52] Whitaker added that "Living a fantasy life on your own blog is one thing, but giving an interview to CNN while posing as a representative of the region's gay people appears arrogant and offensive, and surely a prime example of the 'liberal Orientalism' that MacMaster claims to decry.