A Gay Girl in Damascus

MacMaster created the character Amina Abdallah as a fictional persona or alias; MacMaster said in an interview with NPR that he could not recall when he created the character. NPR stated that it found posts from Amina at the Yahoo! group "alternate-history" dating to February 2006. MacMaster said that he created the Amina character so he could more easily participate in discussions about the Middle East. MacMaster believed that if he used his real name, people would have presumed that he was too closely tied to the United States, but as Amina he would have more credibility. As Amina, MacMaster posted on various listservs and websites. MacMaster fleshed out the character's background, and he said that he began writing a novel based on the character. Eventually, he created various profiles for Amina at various social networking sites. Originally he used the character to discuss politics of the Middle East and science fiction. In the northern hemisphere fall of 2010, MacMaster moved Amina to Syria. MacMaster said that he was going to stop using the persona by then. Eyder Peralta of NPR stated "But the Arab Spring called her back." 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. MacMaster and Graber corresponded, and under the Amina character MacMaster flirted with the Paula character. Graber said that the interaction "was a major sock-puppet hoax crash into a major sock-puppet hoax." As Amina, MacMaster wrote pieces for Lez Get Real. MacMaster began the blog A Gay Girl in Damascus under the Amina name. The publication, known for its commentary on politics, gender, sexuality, and Syrian culture, became, in the words of Nidaa Hassan of The Guardian, "increasingly popular after capturing the imagination of the Syrian opposition as the protest movement struggled in the face of the government crackdown." The blog gained popularity after an April 26 post titled "My Father the Hero" about two security agents who came to her home to detain her and were kept away by her father. She and he were described as going into hiding soon after, changing locations in Damascus. 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. According to American bisexual activist and author Minal Hajratwala, MacMaster (as Amina) wrote to Hajratwala in May 2011, asking for advice regarding a book Amina was writing. She said that MacMaster sent a copy of an autobiography of the character and asked Hajratwala to send the text to an agent. 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." ==Blog contents==

Purported biography The character of Amina Abdallah Arraf is a dual Syrian and American citizen, with an American mother and Syrian father. "The Lede Blog" of The New York Times noted that Arraf's draft of her biography indicated "very deep" American roots. Homosexuality Homosexual activity is illegal in Syria, and is punishable by at least three years in prison, and it is uncommon for gay Arabs to be open about their sexuality. the character of Amina wrote openly about her sexual orientation, experiences, and aspirations. In an email interview with CNN, MacMaster wrote as Amina that she believed that political change could improve gay rights. Syrian uprising The character of Amina was working on a book of her writings when she disappeared. She had gained popularity after her blogging about the Syrian opposition movement in the face of the government's crackdown on protests. Fictitious abduction The character of Amina Arraf was reportedly kidnapped by three armed men when she was on her way with a friend to a meeting in Damascus to meet with protest organizers around 6:00 pm on June 6, 2011. On the blog, MacMaster posted as "Rania Ismail", Amina's fictional cousin, reporting the event: "Amina was seized by three men in their early 20s. According to the witness (who does not want her identity known), the men were armed ... Amina hit one of them and told the friend to go find her father. 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." Basel is the brother of president Bashar al-Assad. ==Response to abduction==

The online response in the LGBT community, mainstream media, and social networking websites was rapid and extensive. Facebook pages were set up on June 6 calling for Arraf's release. activists tweeted using the hashtag #FreeAmina. On Arraf's blog, MacMaster, writing as Amina's cousin "Ismail", wrote they did not know whether Arraf was in a jail or held elsewhere. 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 ... Such a statement would of course prove that the U.S. remains committed to freeing citizens held overseas, just as we have in North Korea and Iran, but an official declaration would also send two indispensable messages: international governments must protect free speech, and democratic societies must respect LGBT equality." The U.S. State Department stated on June 7, 2011, that it was looking into the issue. ==Hoax revealed==

In the wake of the kidnapping reports, questions were raised about the possibility that not only the kidnapping but Arraf al Omari were an elaborate ongoing hoax. This possibility was also part of a discussion on the BBC World Service programme World Have Your Say including fellow blogger Andy Carvin, who expressed more confidence that she was real, but admitted the evidence was ambiguous. Researchers found a prior blog written under the name of Arraf al Omari called ''Amina's Attempts at Art (And Alliteration)'' that advertised itself as a mix of fiction and non-fiction: "This blog is ... where I will be posting samples of fiction and literature I am working on. This blog will contain chapters and drafts. This blog will have what may sometimes seem likely deeply personal accounts. And sometimes they will be. But there will also be fiction. And I will not tell you which is which. This blog will sample what I'm writing. This blog is not a diary. This blog is not about politics. This blog invites your comments." Misappropriated photographs 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. Lečić, who worked as an administrator at the Royal College of Physicians in London, was made aware of the issue by a friend. 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. She stated that having her photograph circulated and associated with someone else — whether that person was real or not — was upsetting for her. He initially denied this, but later that day the blog was updated with MacMaster's admission that he was the sole author of the blog. The blog post titled "Apology to readers" read: I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on this blog are true and not misleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone – I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about. I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in this year of revolutions. The events there are being shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience. Identity of author Thomas "Tom" MacMaster was raised in Harrisonburg, Virginia. At the time of the blog and its unraveling, he was a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh. MacMaster said that few would have paid attention to the blog if he had started it in 2010. Because of the political developments in Syria, people on the internet began to notice the blog. Attention increased after the blog character described her experience with the Syrian state internal police. ==Post-revelation reception==

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. Which meant that, at least according to a chilling and narrow definition of what it means to be real on the Internet, Tom MacMaster was very good indeed at being Amina." 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. His way of describing what it's like to be gay in the Middle East goes down smooth with people who have a progressive bent. Why did I jump to this blog — just because it was a person who shares some of my values?" 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." 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." According to Benjamin Doherty of The Electronic Intifada, MacMaster's use of Facebook and other social media to "infiltrate" the networks of political activists made such activists suspicious and uncomfortable. ==Documentary and popular culture==

• Canadian documentary filmmaker Sophie Deraspe's 2015 documentary film The Amina Profile explores the case through the perspective of Sandra Bagaria, the Montreal woman who was in an online relationship with Amina and became involved in the international attempt to "rescue" Amina after her purported abduction, only for the truth to arise afterwards that the blog was a hoax and that Amina had never really existed. • Episode 15 of season 3 of The Good Wife, titled "Live from Damascus", features a Syrian blog titled "Pink Damascus", supposedly created by a Syrian lesbian; investigation reveals to be created by a male from Kansas. ==See also==