Nothing is what it seems, especially not online. The podcast Gay girl gone reconstructs in true crime style the story of Amina Arraf, the lesbian girl from Damascus who, more than ten years ago, allowed the world to look into her life during the Syrian revolution. Or so we thought.
Gay girl gone
Samira Mohyeddin/CBC
6 episodes, available via CBC podcasts, the DS Podcast app and the well-known podcast platforms
The name Amina Arraf made waves across the internet worldwide in 2011. She was, we read, a young lesbian woman who kept a blog (‘A gay girl in Damascus’) in the Syrian capital. In no time she became the voice of the queer community in a queer-unfriendly country. Until what everyone feared happened: Amina was arrested.
This is how it begins Gay girl gone, the podcast that journalist Samira Mohyeddin made about the case for the American broadcaster CBC at the end of 2023. Anyone who was too young to consciously scour the internet in 2011 would expect a story about a girl who looks death in the eye in a police cell somewhere. Are you such a person? Then stop reading here and listen to the podcast first before you get annoyed by spoilers. Amina’s story took a very bizarre turn. Amina turned out to be a fictional character, created by a white American cis man: Tom MacMaster.
Disney in Damascus
Gay girl gone zooms in on how and why MacMaster cheated the world and looks at its impact. In true crime style, the makers talked with MacMaster, with people who were in Damascus at the time, and with the Canadian Sandra, who had an online crush on Amina – which, however absurd – seemed mutual.
As a listener you feel the indignation towards MacMaster growing by the minute. How he acted from egocentrism and vanity: “He really wanted to be a writer and with Amina he finally had success.” But there was also something bad going on white savior complex. He was convinced that with Amina he sensitized the world to the precarious position of the gay community in the Middle East and used a narrative that resembled Disney films more than the situation as it was in Damascus.
But Gay girl gone is especially an important lesson in media literacy. The fact that MacMaster was able to go so far in 2011 had to do with the media’s eagerness to believe and present Amina’s human and bite-sized story, as a juicy dessert to the more impersonal articles about the civil war and geopolitics. Not only tabloids picked her up, but also a quality newspaper like The Guardian swallowed it all without much fact-checking.
As a listener, you might wonder: Could this still happen today? Blogs like Amina’s are now something for the Internet Archive. In vlogs, Tiktoks and Instagram stories you can still see the person behind it, you might think. But in times of AI and deepfakes, that also offers no certainty that another Amina story will not creep into the media. This podcast does make us alert.
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