The blogger who started LezGetReal, “a gay girl’s view of the world,” it turns out, was fake. The blogger who told the world she was Paula Brooks, was actually Bill Graber, a 58-year-old Ohio married straight man. This is the second blogger in as many days who claimed they were a lesbian, but, as it turns out, admitted to being a straight white man. The first was the also-similarily-named site, “A Gay Girl In Damascus,” who turned out to be Tom MacMaster, a middle-​aged man in Scotland.
(For the record, the term “gay girl” is at best old-school, and at worst, offensive to many whom proudly identify as lesbian.)
Monday the Washington Post broke the story, “‘Paula Brooks,’ editor of ‘Lez Get Real,’ also a man.”
“Paula Brooks,†editor of Lez Get Real since its founding in 2008, is actually Bill Graber, 58, a retired Ohio military man and construction worker who said he had adopted his wife’s identity online. Graber said she was unaware he had been using her name on his site.
Brooks’s identity came under suspicion after news broke that a woman called Amina Arraf on the blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus†might not really be a Syrian lesbian.
LezGetReal was a group blog, where it seems several different people wrote. One of them, Melanie Nathan, left the site and in an email in late May to The New Civil Rights Movement, among others, wrote, “I am pleased to announce my decision to retire my interest in LezGetReal.”
“This was NOT a difficult decision for me, given the recent direction of my partners in the site, which I am unable to condone. It goes out of the original mission we agreed upon.”
The Facebook page for “Paula Brooks” was missing last night as well.
For those who wrote at LezGetReal, the sad fact is that their credibility may now be called into question too — despite the fact that they assumed their boss was Paula Brooks, not Bill Graber.
In what is either an odd coincidence or the thread of a larger hoax, “A Gay Girl In Damascus,” in reality Tom MacMaster, made comments on the LezGetReal site, and later reportedly wrote pieces for the LezGetReal site.
“In the guise of Paula Brooks, Graber corresponded online with Tom MacMaster, thinking he was writing to Amina Arraf,” the Post article states. “Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian.”
In an extensive article on the LezGetReal story, Adam Polaski, writing at Bilerico, states, “The Paula Brooks Internet identity has been continually crafted for almost six years, when the name was connected with posts from Paula the Surf Mom on a blog based in the Outer Banks.”
The site, LezGetReal, has been down since shortly after the Post story broke Monday. An RSS feed version of a post reportedly from the site, titled, “To Our Readers,” bylined by Linda S. Carbonell, states,
“Nothing has ever appeared on this site that wasn’t factually based. Yes, we post opinions, but we don’t post fiction. The issues remain – the disenfranchisement of Americans for race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, poverty – these things are still happening. In 18 months we will have one of the most important elections in our nation’s history, an election that will determine the future of our nation and possibly the world. That has not changed just because Paula Brooks turned out to be guy who let an on-line persona get away from him. Bill [Graber, aka Paula Brooks] has been trying to ease out of the site for a couple of months now. He would have been “retired†in late August.”
Carbonell, in her “To Our Readers” letter, ends with, “I’m seriously thinking of adopting a phoenix as our new mascot.”
Let’s hope not.