Second "Lesbian" Blogger Turns Out To Be a Man
Editor of Lez Get Real outs himself as a retired military man from Ohio.
| Posted Tuesday, June 14, 2011, at 10:33 AM ET
Seriously, gentleman, this is getting ridiculous.
One day after the author behind the popular “A Gay Girl in Damascus” blog admitted to being a married American man, the editor of the lesbian news site Lez Get Real came forward to acknowledge that he is also a married man and not “Paula Brooks” as he had claimed since the site’s founding in 2008.
Bill Graber, a 58-year-old retired military man, admitted to the Washington Post that he had been using his wife’s online identity without her knowledge to run the site, which has “A Gay Girls’ View on the World” tagline.
“I didn’t start this with my name because... I thought people wouldn’t take it seriously, me being a straight man,” he told the paper.
Graber’s ruse had gone undetected for years, but his Brooks identity began to be questioned over the weekend as journalists and bloggers went looking for clues to who was the real author of the “Gay Girl” blog.
Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old PhD student, came forward Sunday to admit he was the author behind that site, but that wasn’t enough to stop the Post from continuing to dig around.
The paper explains:
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.
Graber says that he will hand over control of Lez Get Real to Linda LaVictoire, one of the blog’s contributors.
The Post also managed to uncover at least a shred of poetic justice in this whole thing: MacMaster and Brooks had corresponded online with each other under the guise of their lesbian personalities, unaware of each other’s true identities.
For anyone out there thinking about pulling his own Graber/MacMaster’s stunt, we urge you to visit TheRumpus.net and read Brian Spear’s “A Note to My Fellow White Males” essay.
