THE LIE

By William Dameron

Google “40-year-old white man” and you’ll invariably come across William Dameron’s photograph. The image — he lies on a pillow staring into the camera, a hand held to his forehead — is indexed near the top of some 10 million search results. He looks to be in his mid-40s, graying handsomely at the temples. A wedding ring can be seen on the appropriate finger (an important compositional element, this). As far as selfies go, it is unremarkable. But as Dameron himself later discovered, this was the appealingly Everyman image that cyberthieves had selected for a global catfishing operation. His face — here listed as “Dieter Falk on the social network VK in Berlin,” and there as “Peter, an I.T. consultant in Melbourne” — was used on dating sites around the world to scam women (and a few men) into believing they’d found love. For Dameron, this discovery held a kind of cosmic irony. “For most of my life, I had pretended to be someone I was not,” he writes in “The Lie,” his debut memoir, “and now I had become the one others pretended to be.”

“The Lie” surveys an underexamined aspect of queer experience: that of the closeted partner and parent. Dameron, a married father of two girls, carried the burden of his own deception for more than two decades, and had come out prior to discovering the catfishing scheme. “After a lifetime of being an impostor, I could manipulate a situation,” he admits. A family’s deceit is often transactional. Lies are bought and sold on an intimate market. Dameron’s stolen identity, then, assumes the form of a karmic bill. “Had I catfished my wife?” he wonders uneasily.

Dameron grew up in the South, where queerness was to be concealed at any cost: “I had learned by the time I reached the age of reason that my dreams were not fit to share.” Dissembling was an early survival skill. Subtle modulations of voice and gait were practiced with the thoroughness of a method actor. (An early memory: A female classmate notices the swish of his walk, and shouts, “I wish I had a porch swing like that!”)