Paula Brooks, who claimed to be editor of LezGetReal.com, admitted to the Washington Post that 'she', too, was a man

This article is more than 9 years old

This article is more than 9 years old

A second supposedly leading lesbian blogger was exposed as a man masquerading as a gay woman, a day after the Gay Girl in Damascus blog was revealed to be the fictional creation of a married male student from Edinburgh.

Paula Brooks, who claimed to be the executive editor of a US-based lesbian site LezGetReal.com, told the Washington Post that "she", too, was a man – in this case, a 58-year-old retired construction worker from Ohio called Bill Graber.

The LezGetReal blogger's identity began to come into question last week as doubts over the Gay Girl in Damascus blog intensified, voiced, among others, by the feminist blogger Liz Henry, who writes at BlogHer.com.

Before starting the Gay Girl in Damascus blog in February, Tom MacMaster, the Edinburgh student masquerading as Amina Abdullah Araf al Omari, had written posts on LezGetReal.com.

Graber, masquerading as Brooks, had supplied information to a number of news outlets, including the Guardian, which pointed towards an Edinburgh IP address for the Amina blog.

But the LezGetReal editor's own conduct increasingly led to questions over her own identity. Material released online on Sunday, which resulted in an admission by MacMaster that he was Amina, also raised questions about Brooks, including speculation over whether the two were creations of the same person.

MacMaster, in a contrite blog post on Monday, even apologised to "Paula Brooks" as a handful of named victims of his deception.

Challenged on Monday by the Washington Post, Graber said he had started the blog after witnessing the mistreatment of close lesbian friends.

"I didn't start this with my name because … I thought people wouldn't take it seriously, me being a straight man," he said. He said his interaction with Amina was purely coincidental, "a major sock-puppet hoax crash[ing] into a major sock-puppet hoax." "Sock puppet" is the term used by bloggers to describe a fake persona adopted by a blogger who may also be posting under another name.

Amina often "flirted" with Brooks, the paper said – with neither man apparently realising that the other was also a man pretending to be a lesbian.

Brooks told reporters that "she" was deaf, and so telephone interviews had to be conducted through her "father".

The Guardian spoke a number of times to a man masquerading as Brooks's father, after which suspicions were raised that Brooks was a man and was also potentially posing as Amina.

Further investigations established that, rather like the supposed young woman in Syria, even close associates had never met Brooks, and that her claims to have a PhD in archaeology from Bryn Mawr college, a masters from Gallaudet University and a BA from Duke University, were false.

In an email to the Guardian on Thursday, during our investigations, Brooks said: "Now I have a real day job … and a real off blog life … and I will be real annoyed if you intrude in that … you get my message?" The blogger, who claimed to have three children, said her "father" was "totally up [her] ass" following the paper's inquiries.

In another email Graber/Brooks wrote: "Let me be clear here … we are both the victim of this 'woman's' scam."

Challenged directly by email on Sunday, before MacMaster's admission, about the allegations that she was Amina, Brooks confirmed that "she" was an avatar, or false identity, and directed this reporter to a blog dated 2007 that described a woman's experience of coming out.

It was headed with the following Shakespeare quotation: "To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."

Melanie Nathan, an LGBT and human rights advocate who was a partner in LezGetReal.com and had also been taken in by Graber, told the Guardian of her feelings of betrayal.

"I left the site because I believed that Amina 'the Gay Girl from Damascus' was not authentic," said Nathan.

"I told Paula – Bill – that Amina was suspect and she went ballistic on me and called me a bigot."

"I was completely taken in. She [Paula] is a person to me, a real person with this persona, with children."

"The whole gay community of bloggers is freaking out right now because everyone in some shape or form has encountered Paula Brooks. It has had a severe impact on the trust among the web of bloggers who are interconnected and work with each other.

"In my opinion, what Graber has done, to be a straight man calling himself a lesbian, is tantamount to impersonating an entire community."

Linda LaVictoire, a contributor at LezGetReal.com who writes as Linda Carbonelli, told the Washington Post: "I was completely taken in. I have been completely taken in for three years."