"On the Internet, everybody knows you're a lesbian"

From the Washington Post:

‘Paula Brooks,’ editor of ‘Lez Get Real,’ also a man 

By Elizabeth Flock and Melissa Bell 

Just one day after the author behind a popular Syrian lesbian blog admitted to being a married, American man named Tom MacMaster, the editor of the lesbian news site Lez Get Real, with the tag­line “A Gay Girl’s View on the World,” acknowledged that he is also a man. 

I think that last bit should read: "... he, also, is a man." But you get the general idea.

“Paula Brooks,” editor of Lez Get Real since its founding in 2008, is actually Bill Graber, 58, a retired Ohio military man and construction worker who said he had adopted his wife’s identity online. Graber said she was unaware he had been using her name on his site. ... 

Graber said 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.” As a former Air Force pilot, he also said he used the site to argue in favor of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal. 

“I didn’t start this with my name because... I thought people wouldn’t take it seriously, me being a straight man,” he said. ... 

In the guise of Paula Brooks, Graber corresponded online with Tom MacMaster, thinking he was writing to Amina Arraf. Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian.

I can't top that line, short of revealing that "Steve Sailer" is actually a fictitious character, so let me, Selena Gomez, change tone. Something that we ought to have learned from the proliferation of Internet opinionizing over the last 15 or so years is that the conventional wisdom that there was all this diverse pundit talent out there who were being held down by the old boys network of white male privilege was about 179 degrees wrong. It turned out that the people with interesting opinions on the Internet were more white and male than the people who were paid to offer opinions on TV and in print. When you take away how pundits look and how they speak and just get down to the words they have to say, it turns out that the big discoveries were ... a whole bunch of white guys. To take one example, the Internet revealed that the best sports pundit in America was a white guy named Bill Simmons.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer