Ok, okay. We knew once we touted Emory as one of the gayest places in Atlanta that it was eventually going to come back and bite us in the ass. We just didn’t think it would happen like this.
Turns out that the lesbian blogger hoax – no, not that one; this one – got its start right here on the campus of Emory. That’s the place we recently said is getting overrun by the gays. But it seems that the campus is so gay that it’s sort of an ex-gay camp in reverse: Students come in straight, but leave wanting to be gay – or in the case of Tom MacMaster (top photo), wanting to be a lesbian blogger.
Yes, the dude that blogs like a lady at A Gay Girl in Damascus got his start at Emory, turning down scholarships to several Ivy League schools to hit metro Atlanta, major in Middle Eastern Studies and nab an Emory diploma in 1994. He and his wife later moved to Stone Mountain.
His family, serving the role of apologist like Candace Gingrich-Jones to her older, White House-aspiring brother Newt, took pains to describe him as a smart guy who meant no harm.
Thankfully, our own sex columnist and longtime blogger Michael Alvear – never one to pass himself off as a lesbian while cruising online – exhibited appropriate disdain for MacMaster in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“It certainly infuriated me, because now what I see is the potential for the Syrian government to say, ‘See, attacks against gay people are fictionalized,’” Alvear tells the AJC, which describes Project Q Atlanta as a gay and lesbian “lifestyles magazine.”
Let us be clear here: Using “lifestyles” may imply that we have more than one, but know that Project Q is run by two gay men who really are gay men. We want to put to rest any rumors that we’re actually straight women blogging as gay men to get hair, fashion and design advice from our online friends. Not true. At all.
What’s odd about this hoax that we’re now blaming on an Emory education: The second lesbian hoax uncovered in as many days has ties to the first one. Bill Graber (bottom photo), the Ohio construction worker who came out as the straight man, not lesbian behind the popular Lez Get Real, helped the Washington Post reporters who uncovered MacMaster as a fraud track him down. Turns out MacMaster once fraud posted to Graber’s fraud site and he didn't like the fake lesbian taking advantage of his fake lesbian.
What you saw was a major sock puppet hoax crash into a major sock puppet hoax. My motivations are completely different than his. [Tom MacMaster] tried to climb right into your head. There was something malevolent about what he was doing. He was calling for other people to come out in Syria, come out of the closet. That’s not right. I had to get this guy to come out [and give his real identity]. [Graber helped uncover the hoax by identifying the IP address used by MacMaster.]What’s creepy about this double-headed lesbian hoax: MacMaster, posing as Amina Arraf, flirted online with Graber, posing as Paula Brooks.
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 realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian.And that leads us to this: What does a married man from metro Atlanta posing online as a lesbian say to another married man in Ohio posing online as a lesbian? Lez Get Real.
