Note 6/17/11: if you've come to this piece through another site quoting me as an illustration of someone who is angry and/or frustrated on this topic, please be sure to read the update at the bottom of this diary.
Okay, it's late and I'm tired for all the right reasons. I come online to check some things and am reading a story I can't. quite. grasp.
So here's the thing: you probably know by now that "A Gay Girl In Damascus" was actually a heterosexual married guy from the United States named Tom MacMaster.
But now I read that the editor of the three-year-old lesbian news site Lez Get Real (the site where the "Gay Girl from Damascus" first got her start) has also been unmasked as a straight man named Bill Graber who was using his wife Paula Brooks' identity?
More below the fold (including 6/17/11 update)
WTF?!
Seriously, what is going on here?
Two straight men playing lesbians online? That's weird enough.
But this intersection is truly bizarre. I mean, maybe it makes sense. Maybe one straight man pretending to be a lesbian online would miss or overlook the fact that he's giving online voice to a blogger who is another straight man playing a lesbian online. Maybe an actual lesbian would have gotten a clue. Maybe it wasn't a lack of clue but a deliberate overlooking.
I don't know. There's something truly whoa-is-this-off here.
And now. I'm thinking about the implications of these two cases for any actual lesbian who speaks out online. I wonder if "are you really a straight man playing a lesbian?" will become a way to silence certain opinions or voices from us? I wonder what this is going to do to the actual lesbians who are on the net.
And to get personal about it, I wonder why as I write this, I can feel in my body how surreal it is that there is this virtual reality thing where people can so easily pretend to be what they're not. I feel this seesaw surreal-ness as I sit at this computer as a real human, an embodied lesbian who came to check the site stats for the satire site my wife and I share after spending some typically beautiful time doing some of the many things lesbians do when we're in love.
So here we are, two married lesbians, madly in love, with a website that includes some lesbian topics (it's not only a lesbian-focused site, it's other things too, but we write what we know and this is part of what we know). And it seems to me that these two [expletive deleted] straight men have with their lies and pretending called into question the legitimacy of any lesbian who dares to be online?
Here we are, with a website born during phone conversations during our long-distance courtship as we learned each other and laughed with each other. Here we are, with a virtual space that is ours, that we do want others to read and enjoy, that has been and will continue to be a learning ground for us as we work together and play together and find out exactly how satire functions as part of who we are together and how we move in this insane world.
As it turns out, my initial response, as I write this, is purely selfish. I never believed that online has some sort of safe space for lesbians. I don't believe there is safe space anywhere in this crazy world.
But this moves further than the reality of no safe space. This moves into ugly side of the disembodied nature of the internet. I can see myself learning to hate the dis-embodied-ness of the web because of lies like the ones these two straight men have told.
I don't want to feel that way. And probably it will pass. But that is in fact my first raw response to this second piece of news about heterosexual men impersonating what my wife and I really are, for real - embodied.
And. As long as I'm thinking out loud about this. I recently posted a diary on dkos that included how I met my wife. In that diary, I wrote that she and I fell in love based only on email correspondence, and we decided to get married before we had ever met in person or seen each others' photos. Her grandma (who's a truly marvelous woman) asked her early on how she knew I wasn't a 90-year-old man pretending to be a 40-year-old lesbian. It was a good question. But she did know. And she was correct. I knew, also.
We could feel the truth in our bodies even when it was only words.
So I wonder. Is it that the web is just wrong territory because it is so disembodied? Yes, in some ways that's the case. But my wife and I managed to feel beneath the words on a screen, managed to feel the truth of each other across this web. Is that just us being typically strange? (we are that for sure)
But I'm wondering: Are there online conditions under which the lies that these two straight men told - simply wouldn't fly? If so what are those conditions?
None of these questions are rhetorical. I'm tired and disgusted and compelled to post this now. Maybe when I come back online to check, there will be some ideas and insights about all of this from other Kossaks.
Update 6/17/11: I just last night learned that Salon and at least one other blogger quoted/referred to this diary in their writing.
I've posted a comment on the latter blog and emailed Salon (for some reason their login process is messed up for me and I can't register to post a letter).
Basically, I said this:
While it is true that anger was my initial reaction, it didn't remain my primary one.
My next response was what my wife and I increasingly do when something in this insane world makes us angry and frustrated - make fun of it. So, she came up with a short article for our site (and there may be others related to this topic - it could happen - but we have this one out for sure):
Be a Lesbian-Man ™!
For me, this is the stronger response. My wife and I refused to allow what these straight men did to deter us from moving as we do - putting our writing out on the net, enjoying the process, hoping others enjoy reading our stuff as least partly as much as we enjoy writing it.
We had fun with that piece. We may do more on the topic.
As long as I'm editing, I also want to highlight and recommend unspeakable's diary Gay Girl in Damascus" and LGBT Arabs, which was brought to my attention by psychodrew.