by Masha
Thank you Tin for being a bona-fide queer identifying female, and broaching the topic of fake lez blogs, writing as you were into a story with more immediate consequences. The clear and present danger Hong Kong is engineering for its non hetero- and-gender-normative inhabitants is a reason to “tsk-tsk” big-time. However, I felt that a little more riffing on the topic of faking it, with some additional cultural associations to the “crime” of disingenuously fictionalizing suffering while providing hope was apropos to Queerious. Hence, on http://damascusgaygirl.blogspot.com…
A blossoming 4 month-old blog with thousands of followers, generous accolades for reporting with guts and glory and a world of trust won from the vivacious and tough crowd of Middle Eastern queer women, has recently revealed itself to be a complete and well, disgusting hoax.
You may think of other words to evoke the betrayal, when slowly, the layers of Ameena Al-Araf, author of “A Gay Girl in Damascus”, peeled back and viola- revealed itself to be – a human being, (thankfully Watson the IBM supercomputer doesn’t have such an itch for fame or treachery… yet) but one that’s a yuppie white male on the edge of middle-agedom, misguidedly using his pursuit of higher education “in Europe” to shine a light on the plight of the every gay woman in the hotbed of an Arab spring Middle East. Continue reading
