Love in the Time of Sockpuppets

First Amina Arraf, the supposed Syrian and alleged lesbian
behind the blog A Gay Girl in Damascus, turned out to be a

married guy from Georgia. Now we hear that they couldn't get a
real lez to edit Lez Get Real, the lesbian news site
where "Amina" started her rise to stardom. The Washington
Post
reports:
"Paula Brooks," editor of Lez
Get Real since its founding in 2008, is actually Bill Graber, 58, a
retired Ohio military man and construction worker who said he had
adopted his wife?s identity online. Graber said she was unaware he
had been using her name on his site....

Over the weekend, as journalists, bloggers and fans of Amina hunted
for clues to the identity behind the blog, Brooks came under review
as a possible suspect. Liz Henry, a Web producer at BlogHer.com,
questioned Brooks?s involvement with Amina, as Amina had started to
write about the Syrian uprising on Lez Get Real before starting her
own blog....

Brooks had told reporters at The Washington Post that she could
only speak on the phone through her father because she was deaf.
She provided a photograph of her license as proof of her identity,
which showed a woman named Paula Brooks.

On Monday, we continued to question her identity. We spoke to the
man who identified himself as her father, who finally admitted
after numerous telephone conversations: "I am Paula Brooks." That
man turned out to be Bill Graber....

He felt secure that no one would discover his true identity until
the story of Amina started to unravel. He said his connection to
Amina was purely coincidental and started when Amina commented on a
post on the Lez Get Real site in February. It "was a major
sock-puppet hoax crash into a major sock-puppet hoax."
The best part of the Post piece: "Amina often flirted
with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending
to be a lesbian." Jeez. Are there any more real cowgirls in this
land?
It's not news that the Internet is rife with role-playing. Take
all
the masquerades of real life, add anonymity, throw in some
viral
marketers and alternate
reality games and lonelygirl15s for
flavor, and you get a network that can't go a month without
grabbing your shirt, slapping your face, and screaming DOUBT IS
YOUR FRIEND. I like to think the long-term social effect will be a
general increase in skepticism. In the short term, I feel like I
tuned in to The L Word and got Mission:Impossible
instead. Anyone else got a mask they'd like to peel off? Confess in
the comment thread.

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