Tom MacMaster is certainly no gay girl in Damascus, despite the blog he penned with the title to suggest otherwise.
By his own accounts, and those of people who know him, however, the Emory University grad who posed in the blogosphere as a 25-year-old Syrian-American lesbian is a brilliant man who meant no harm.
"People should stop focusing on the hoaxer and really be focusing on the most important people, the real people who are suffering in Syria,” MacMaster told the BBC in an interview early Monday morning.
MacMaster’s family came to his defense as word of his deception opened the weekly news cycle.
“I think he did what he wanted to do, and I’m proud of him for reaching his goal,” MacMaster’s father, Richard MacMaster, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He wanted to create a persona that people would take seriously.”
But gay rights activists and bloggers say MacMaster, an activist for Middle Eastern issues, has endangered real people who are trying to tell their stories in authoritarian societies.
“It certainly infuriated me, because now what I see is the potential for the Syrian government to say, ‘See, attacks against gay people are fictionalized,’ ” said Michael Alvear, a columnist for gay and lesbian lifestyles magazine Project Q Atlanta.
MacMaster, who owns a home in Stone Mountain, currently lives in Scotland with his wife, Britta Froelicher. They are both pursuing graduate degrees.
What started out as an exercise in fiction writing morphed into a full online adventure, taking MacMaster's alter ego, Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to the streets of Damascus. From February until this weekend, when he was revealed as a hoax, MacMaster as Amina grew a following of thousands and communicated with or was reported on by media outlets the likes of London’s The Guardian and The Washington Post.
When he wrote that she was “kidnapped” in an attempt to end writing, “Free Amina” groups emerged on Facebook, and the State Department reportedly began inquiries.
But MacMaster insists that he was trying to help people in Syria.
“I wasn’t trying to pick fights or stir up controversy,” he said in the blog he posted Monday, admitting to his hoax. “I was instead trying to enlighten people.”
Sam MacMaster, his older brother, wasn’t surprised.
“I think he means well,” Sam MacMaster told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “My brother always does things like this.”
Their parents metin the Middle East in the 1960s, where Eve MacMaster was volunteering for the Peace Corps and Richard MacMaster had gone to protest for Palestinian rights.
“We, as kids, assumed that that was what everybody did,” Sam MacMaster said. “Being an activist.”
So at the onset of the Gulf War in 1990, Tom MacMaster went to Iraq to protest American involvement.
“He was there as some sort of human shield,” the older MacMaster said. “Iraq put him on a plane and sent him home.”
Tom MacMaster speaks seven languages, some of them self-taught, and in high school, he won scholarships to several Ivy League schools after participating in a National Institute of Health project with Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Richard MacMaster said.
“He was very academically inclined,” the father said.
Tom MacMaster chose Emory, where he majored in Middle Easter Studies.
“He was a really bright student, committed to and interested in Middle Eastern issues,” department chair Gordon Newby said of MacMaster. “That’s the kind of student we get. Most of them have a moral commitment in wanting to make the world a better place.”
But in his Monday blog, the 1994 graduate admitted that he did anything but that.
“I have potentially compromised the safety of real people,” he wrote. “I have helped lend credence to the lies of the regimes.”
“He made it that much harder for gays and lesbians in Syria to be taken seriously about the systematic subjugation they experience at the hands of the government,” Alvear said.
Newby predicted even greater consequences.
“I can see this now being turned by the Syrian government back on America is behind this as policy,” Newby said. “Not that an individual has done this, but that we as policy are trying to use social media to undermine the viability and credibility of the Syrian regime because of the relationship to Iran.”
Alvear also worried about the consequences for Syria’s gay community.
But Newby didn’t believe MacMaster’s actions reflected badly on the school or on his department.
“We don’t have control over the political or moral lives of the students,” Newby said.
MacMaster was on vacation in Istanbul, Turkey, when his identity was revealed. Still, he insisted that his actions not distract from the plight of gays and lesbians in Syria.
“While the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on this blog are true and not misleading as to the situation on the ground,” he said in a Sunday post.
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