Gay Girl in Damascus was an arrogant fantasy

Why on earth would a married man in Scotland pretend to be a lesbian living in Damascus? Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh, has offered an apology for his hoax blog, A Gay Girl in Damascus, but his motivation for writing it, and keeping up the pretence by giving email interviews to the media, remains difficult to understand, despite his attempts at justification. "I invented a name to talk under that would keep the focus on the actual issue," he said in a BBC radio interview on Monday – though in reality his invention seems to have done anything but.

His blog began on 19 February, claiming to be "an out Syrian lesbian's thoughts on life, the universe and so on ..." That was several weeks before the uprising began and for the first month MacMaster talked almost entirely about his imaginary life as a lesbian. Some of the posts showed him to be well informed about current LGBT debates in the Middle East – so much so that one of them was republished by a well-established lesbian website in Lebanon.

I looked at the blog myself from time to time, though I never found it particularly useful as a source of information. Even so, it was an interesting read and – recognising that the writer probably had legitimate reasons for disguising "her" identity – there seemed no reason to doubt that the author was a westernised Arab lesbian.

"I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about," MacMaster says in his mea culpa statement, adding that he was merely trying to "illuminate" things "for a western audience".

This does not bear much scrutiny. Plenty of gay blogs and websites have appeared in the Middle East during the last few years. In the LGBT area MacMaster's blog added nothing significantly new to what was already available online and if he felt there were matters still to be "illuminated" he could easily have written about them without pretending to be someone he was not.

"This experience," he continues, "has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism."

It's not entirely clear what he means by this but, again, it's not an explanation of why he did it. He is not saying that his intention was to expose superficial coverage, "liberal Orientalism", etc – merely that his feelings have been confirmed by what happened.

Presumably his point is that the media have a tendency to focus on human interest stories rather than more abstract issues, and that a gay girl in Damascus has more novelty value than a straight man. It's a fair criticism up to a point, but why tempt the media (including the Guardian) to do something you don't want them to do, by providing fictional material? It doesn't make sense.

There's no doubt that MacMaster expended an enormous amount of effort compiling the blog and creating Gay Girl's persona: poems, long imaginary reminiscences – even warning readers to treat some other websites "with a very large grain of salt" – but to what purpose?

MacMaster says: "While the narrative voice may [sic] have been fictional, the facts on this blog are true and not misleading as to the situation on the ground." The sad part is that picture he gives is broadly accurate and there are indeed lesbian women to be found in the Middle East much like "Amina". But he has not helped to spread awareness of these realities; he has undermined it.

"I do not believe that I have harmed anyone," MacMaster insists – though others disagree. People in Syria certainly took risks trying to help "Amina" after the phony announcement of her arrest, as did the Guardian's correspondent when attempting to meet her for an interview.

However MacMaster tries to justify it, he should have called a halt as soon as it started to get out of hand. 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.