‘Lez Get Real’ exposed: Male blogger confesses to fake lesbian identity

Yet another male blogger has confessed to writing under a fictitious lesbian identity. Bill Graber, 58, announced yesterday that he started the lesbian news site Lez Get Real under the name Paula Brooks – a name belonging to his wife, who remained unaware of her husband’s online identity theft throughout the site’s three-year history.

Graber, a retired military servicemember and construction worker based in Ohio, started work on Lez Get Real (described as “A Gay Girl’s View on the World”) in 2008 after witnessing the mistreatment and discrimination encountered by a couple of close lesbian friends.

The Washington Post reports that Graber used his wife’s name as a pseudonym because he “thought people wouldn’t take it seriously” if he wrote under his own identity as a straight man – a justification uncannily similar to that employed by faux Syrian lesbian Amina Arraf, now revealed to be American graduate student and straight man Tom MacMaster.  When MacMaster’s hoax was exposed over the weekend in the wake of media investigations into Arraf’s identity, Graber began to draw related suspicion: in an ironic cyber coincidence, MacMaster got his start as Amina by writing for Lez Get Real, posting about the Syrian uprising and forging a flirtatious relationship with Graber’s pseudonymous Brooks that linked the two fake bloggers and helped contribute to their ultimate exposure.

Now that the truth is out, Graber has opted to turn Lez Get Real over to contributor Linda Victoire. Upon learning of Graber’s false identity, Victoire (who writes under her maiden name, Linda Crabonell) explained that she “was completely taken in.”

Graber noted his regret for any injury his lie might have inflicted on the future of the site or upon the causes dear to the gay and lesbian community.