“The Internet, where the men are men, the women are also men, and the children are FBI agents.”

This is the absurd story of how the mysterious disappearance of a lesbian blogger in Syria led to the revelation that two dudes flirted with each other pretending to be lesbians on the Internet.

Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, a popular out Syrian-American lesbian blogger who wrote under the name A Gay Girl in Damascus, shockingly went missing on Monday, June 6th.

The blogging world had become entranced by her tales as a young lesbian living in Syria, skirting danger, criticizing President Bashar Assad, living openly in a close-minded society and fleeing from “Them.” A public outcry emerged.

Amina had to be found.

There was one problem with trying to find Amina: Nobody had actually seen or spoken directly to her, aside from exchanging emails. And the only real clue to solving her disappearance shattered when Jelena Lecic, a London resident who had never been to Syria, came forward to tell the BBC the photograph being circulated purportedly of Amina was actually her. Amina had stolen her identity. They had never met.

NPR went digging the hardest, but it quickly ran into dead end after dead end. They scoured public records, they contacted the U.S. State Department, but in the end they were unable to find any shred of evidence to confirm Amina actually exists.

That’s because she didn’t. Amina was really Aman. Well, a man.

Concerned bloggers, journalists and others traced IP addresses of emails sent by Amina to the to servers at Edinburgh University. Then an old Yahoo! group with a connection to “Amina Arraf” was found to be listed under an address in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

As the hints of fraud piled higher, Tom MacMaster, the 40-year-old married and bearded dude seen here, came clean that he was, in fact, Amina.

The Georgia native is currently at Edinburgh University studying for his masters. His wife is studying Syrian economic development at St. Andrews in Edinburgh as well. For years MacMaster has been pretending to be Amina for the sake of “getting the information out.” He had communicated with many people as “Amina” through the Internet, sometimes striking up long-distance friendships through hundreds of emails.

You can read more about MacMaster’s ruse and the fallout here (and more reaction here), but let’s put that aside for a moment, because here’s where the story begins to take an incredible turn.

NPR had help in outing MacMaster, namely from Paula Brooks, the executive editor of a lesbian news site called LezGetReal. NPR explains her role:

But Brooks herself came under suspicion. “Liz Henry, a Web producer at BlogHer.com, questioned Brooks’s involvement with Amina, as Amina had started to write about the Syrian uprising on Lez Get Real before starting her own blog,” the Washington Post noted.

And after the Post and other bloggers began to circle around Brooks’ weak sauce attempts to explain her identity, finally a man named Bill Graber (pictured right) came clean that he was indeed Brooks. Graber is a 58-year-old retired military man and construction worker in Ohio who used his ex-wife’s identity, which is how he was initially able to produce a driver’s license showing that he was Paula Brooks.

Graber told the Post that he started the site to “write about gay issues after seeing the mistreatment of close friends who were a lesbian couple. He said the site was ‘done with the best of intentions.”

Graber says he never expected to have his identity revealed, but after the Amina story began to unravel, it “was a major sock-puppet hoax crash into a major sock-puppet hoax.”

Here’s where it gets juicy:

And there you have it: Just two dudes, pretending to be lesbians, potentially cyber-scissoring, trying to change the world one blog post at a time. Ahh, the 21st Century.

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