Taki's Mag

The eminently credible mainstream media was all aflame last Tuesday with reports that a prominent lesbian blogger in Syria had been captured by armed-and-hairy secret police who were none too pleased with her lesbian blogging. It was presumed that at the very least, her hatefully oily captors would administer a lesbian flogging.

Without bothering to so much as toss in a “reportedly” or “allegedly,” places such as CBS News, MSNBC, TIME, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and the Guardian posted articles on June 7 claiming that Sapphic Syrian was in the clutches of homophobic Islamist militarists.

After all, her existence had already been established back in April when pint-sized peter-puffer Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Beast spoke glowingly of Amina Arraf, self-described “Gay Girl in Damascus,” and her grandiloquent account of how her glaring father stared down glowering, gay-hating Syrian guards who’d come to grab and/or grapple with her.

Her existence was further confirmed late in May by CNN in an article pondering whether the Arab Spring would possibly be unfair to homos.

Then, suddenly sometime last week, NPR’s Andy Carvin acted as if he was the Last Reporter on Earth and decided to check some facts. He said that his contacts in Syria’s gay community claimed they had never heard of an “Amina Arraf.” Then it occurred to him that no one on Earth had ever said they’d met Amina in the flesh. Then a Croatian woman in London said that her ex-husband contacted her after seeing pictures in the media that claimed she was the kidnapped Syrian blogger. The woman, Jelena Lecic, said that this “Amina Arraf” person had stolen an estimated 200 pictures of her and had used them on her blog and a Facebook profile. Finally, it was revealed that all of the online correspondence that “Amina” had done with others was traceable to a pair of IP addresses in Edinburgh, Scotland, neither of which was available for use as a proxy. When reporters and government officials worldwide could find no trace of an “Amina Arraf” ever existing, it became clear that there was no Gay Girl in Damascus.

This morning it was revealed that “Amina Arraf” is actually a 40-year-old Scottish activist named Tom MacMaster. He said that although nothing he wrote was actually true, he was trying to “illumine” events that actually were true by, well, writing things that were completely untrue.

This isn’t the first time a middle-aged man has masterfully played the sympathies of gullible progressives by posing as a young lesbian. Back in 2004, a reputedly bisexual woman who called herself Plain Layne was revealed to be a portly Minnesotan man named Odin Soli. He had received Web infamy years before that by posing as Acanit, described as “a young lesbian Muslim girl with a Jewish girlfriend.”

But what seems far worse than pretending you’re a gay person suffering indignities is actually being a gay person whose identity demands so much persecution, they wind up inflicting it on themselves. This sort of thing doesn’t fit the progressive script at all, which is probably why you’ve never heard of any of the following cases.

Ladies first…

In 1997 someone distributed posters across the Eastern New Mexico University campus that read:

Are you sick of queers polluting this great land with there [sic] filth? I thought so. Want to do something? Join the Fist of God. With his might, we can ride [sic] the world of there [sic] sickness. Ask around. We’ll find you.

The poster listed eight reputed homosexuals—four males and four females—on the campus and concluded:

Take us seriously, or we’ll begin executing one queer a week following this list.

People listed on the posters said they began receiving threatening letters and emails. Then a “lesbian teaching assistant” named Miranda Prather —listed as the first to be murdered on the posters—says she was attacked in her home by a knife-wielding assailant who’d slashed her cheek. Police subsequently reviewed surveillance footage from a Laundromat where one of the hate posters had appeared. It showed that Prather was the person who’d been tacking up the posters all over town. A knife found in her home matched the slash marks on her cheek. She pled guilty to harassment.

In St. Cloud, MN, only two weeks after the iconic but still-contested 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a senior college student named Jennifer Prissel said that a pair of men attacked her in a parking lot while punching her, cutting her face and chest, and screaming anti-lesbian epithets at her. St. Cloud State University’s Pro-Gay Machine geared up to protect and honor her, raising $12,000 in donations toward helping to find the perpetrators. Prissel then confessed that all her wounds were self-inflicted. Still, “the campus lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender student organization” said that the incident represented “a giant step forward” in creating homophobia awareness.

In February 2002, rugged Montana lesbian mountaineers Carla Grayson and Adrianne Neff accused unnamed homophobes of setting fire to their Missoula home. The pair speculated the arson resulted from the fact that they’d filed a lawsuit claiming anti-gay discrimination in healthcare only days prior to the inferno. But investigators found what was described as “an elaborate arson device” involving “gasoline-soaked rope strung through both floors of the house, with intermittent piles of gasoline-soaked rags and socks on it.” The gasoline that had been used to light the fire was traced to the couple’s garage. Although Grayson and Neff were never named as suspects, police dropped the investigation of potential other arsonists. A similar case involving a lesbian couple who went from accusers to suspects in a house fire is now unfolding in Tennessee.

In 2005, a 17-year-old female wrestler and leader of a Marin County, CA, high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance said that mystery antagonists had spray-painted DIE FAG on her car and her school’s wall and had received several threatening phone calls attacking her sexuality. A vigil was held in her honor. Then she admitted she was the one who’d spray-painted both DIE FAGs and that she hadn’t received any threats at all. After the hoax was revealed, a female leader of a “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy group” said, “The next few weeks will no doubt be difficult for everyone involved, and I hope the community reacts with compassion.”

Whatever you say, Toots.

But it’s not only the lezzies. Fags have been known to pull this sort of stunt, too:

This April, gay University of North Carolina student Quinn Matney said that while he was taking a leisurely campus stroll at 3AM, a male who conveniently happened to be carrying a searing-hot piece of metal approached him and held the burning ingot to his wrist while saying, “Here’s a taste of hell, you fucking fag.” Matney described his assailant as a 19-year-old Caucasian with a “large build” who was accompanied by two other hateful Caucasian males. Someone described as holding the weighty title of the university’s “Co-President of the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender and Straight Alliance” complained that the “blatant hate crime” wasn’t receiving enough public attention. The victim complained, too. “It just doesn’t make sense to me,” Matney said of an “attack” that had burned all the way through to his tendons. It didn’t make sense to police, either, and within a week it was determined that he’d made up the whole story.

In 2007, Minnesota State University student Paul Marquardt said he was attacked and beaten by four men who pelted him with anti-gay slurs as they rained their fists upon him. As a gay-rights march was being planned in his honor, he admitted to police that although he’d been attacked, no one said anything about him being gay. “He told us that the story had gotten away from him,” said a police officer.

In 2001, gay New Jersey college student Edward Drago was arrested for sending death threats to himself and a gay student group, then filing false reports about these “crimes” to police. In response to the muck-up, which involved a huge gay-rights rally replete with pink ribbons, a college advisor said the experience had been “a wonderfully teachable time to talk about what we face,” whatever the fuck that means.

In 1998, University of Georgia resident assistant Jerry William Kennedy, Jr., told the police he’d been victimized by a whopping NINE hate crimes over the previous three years, including three incidents where homophobes had set fire to “pro-gay literature he put on his door.” While the school’s Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Student Union was using him as a political prop “to have the university create a panel to look into hate crimes,” Kennedy admitted he was fibbing the whole time. He was sentenced to three years’ probation for arson and filing false reports.

In 2000, 38-year-old horse trainer Branson Carroll said that a knife-wielding man kidnapped him near California Highway 101 and took him to a remote trail before proceeding to bind, gag, sexually assault, and make repeated disparaging comments about his sexual orientation. After a series of probing, prodding, and penetrating questions by investigators, Carroll admitted it never happened.

In 2004, 22-year-old Floyd Elliott told the police he’d been attacked by two males in a parking lot who branded his skin, slashed his stomach, and tried carving the word FAG into his forehead. But just as with Morton Downey, Jr.’s infamously backwards swastika, Elliott had carved the word FAG into his own forehead while looking into a mirror, meaning it appeared backward to police investigators.

Despite all this, gay activists insist that all of these hoaxes should not dissuade us from the unblinking, unquestioning perception that anti-gay violence and hate crimes are at epidemic levels.

Are they correct?

According to this PDF, the FBI counted 167,570 homicides in the United States in the decade from 1996-2005. Of these, only 26 were deemed to have been motivated by anti-gay bias. That’s a wee bit over one hundredth of one percent, which would fail to meet most reasonable standards of what constitutes an epidemic.

The truth seems to be that all these presumably objective news outlets jumped on the Gay Girl in Damascus story because they wanted it to be true. Her phony saga perfectly played to their sympathies: She was a tolerant Muslim gash-licker risking her life so that intolerant Muslims would tolerate her gash-licking, all of it woven into the by-now nauseating Arab Spring buzzwords about democracy and freedom and rights and equality and other such intangibles. And they all gobbled it up as eagerly as she claimed she ate pussy.

I believe that if someone’s comfortable with who they are, they don’t need constant validation and endless hugs, pats, and tummy rubs from people who are different from them.

It’s not the gay part I hate about you, at least when you aren’t obnoxiously litigious about it. It’s your dreary self-image based entirely on self-pity and an obsessive need for victimization that is so acute, many of you feel forced to fabricate unholy acts of persecution against yourselves.

I don’t care what kind of genitals you put in your mouth; the problem is that your mouth tells lies. No law on Earth can force me to tolerate a liar. Get it straight. Or get it gay. I don’t care, as long as you finally get it.