The speculation about Amina Araf, aka Gay Girl in Damascus, reminds me of a similar episode in 2003 when many in the west were captivated by the writings of an Iraqi blogger who called himself Salam Pax.

His posts from Baghdad during and shortly before the US-led invasion became a must-read for journalists but it wasn't long before people started asking questions. Was his blog a hoax? Was it a CIA propaganda ploy? Or perhaps a Baathist ploy?

"I’m pretty sure he’s not the 'ordinary Baghdadi' he claims to be,"one American blogger wrote. "He criticised Saddam just enough to establish some credibility, and then forcefully condemned the war. 

"Since his main concern is for his home furnishings, he comes across like a clumsy parody of a gay man. So whatever his situation and motivation, he’s not what he appears to be, at least not as far as I can tell."

And the Little Green Footballs blog said:

"He is (or was) very probably a member of – or working directly for – the Mukhabarat (Iraqi intelligence). It strains credibility to the breaking point to believe that someone could be blogging from Baghdad without Iraqi intelligence being aware of every word he wrote."

You can find more discussion along these lines, posted on the internet at the time, by Googling "salam pax hoax".

In due course, Saddam Hussein fell, the author of the Salam Pax blog was found and, far from being "a clumsy parody of a gay man", he turned out to be the real thing.

Personally, I never had doubts about Salam Pax. The posts on his blog (and I followed them closely) had a ring of authenticity and I had also exchanged emails with him.

Fast-forward to 2011 and Gay Girl in Damascus. The first thing to note (which few have remarked on) is that she did not set out to document a Syrian revolution. 

She started her blog – and let's assume for the moment that the writer is indeed a "she" – on February 19, almost a month before there was any hint of serious trouble in Syria. Equally, if the blog was set up deliberately to serve the purposes of Israel or even the Syrian regime during the uprising, as some people are now suggesting, the decision to start it was so far-sighted as to be almost clairvoyant.

The blog's subtitle is "An out Syrian lesbian's thoughts on life, the universe and so on" and in the beginning it was fairly typical of gay Arab blogs (of which there are now quite a lot). The first few poststalked about LGBT issues in the Middle East: coming out, Islamic views of same-sex marriage, and Israeli "pinkwashing".

The writer was clearly familiar with these issues and the current debates about them within the region. One of her posts was 
later re-published on the Lebanese lesbian website, Bekhsoos – indicating that there were like-minded people in the region who regarded her views on LGBT matters as credible.

Although the writer describes herself as "out" (partly, if not totally), it's not very surprising that she created a false identity on the internet. In Syria, once someone is known to be gay it brings "shame" on the whole family, so there would be other people to consider besides herself.

The point to note here is that she did not disguise her identity in order to write about the uprising: she was already disguised before that, probably because of her sexuality.

Without the Syrian uprising, Gay Girl's blog would probably have continued as it began, reflecting on lesbian life in the Middle East and attracting negligible interest from the world's media. 

What can be said with a fair degree of certainty is that the writer is a westernised gay Arab, probably female, and familiar with Syria – I really don't buy the idea, suggested by a friend the other day, that the writer could turn out to be "Fat Man in Kansas". Whether the writer has been blogging all the time from Damascus, I'm less sure about. It's possible, but I can see nothing in the blog to prove or disprove that.

Now we come to the announcement of Gay Girl's arrest. Obviously the false identity she created makes it difficult to get at the truth, and establishing who she really is/was could make things worse for her if she has indeed been arrested. 

But let's consider another possibility: that the writer, who had originally only intended to give her thoughts on life as an Arab lesbian, decided that with all the media attention and worsening events in Syria, it was getting out of hand and the time had come to stop, and perhaps even go into hiding.

One option would be simply to cease blogging, but by that stage she was too much of a celebrity – people would have noticed and started asking questions. 

Option two: announce that she was giving up blogging or leaving the country – "personal reasons", etc, etc. That, too would have generated speculation and in the midst of the uprising might have looked defeatist.

Option three: go out with a final dig at the regime by pretending to have been arrested. Again, she must have been aware that there would be consequences, though not perhaps on the scale that has actually happened.

I don't like suggesting that this might be the truth but, as others have said, in the light of all the circumstances a pretend arrest is a possibility that has to be considered.

One thing that struck me about the two final posts from her "cousin" is that there is no appeal for anyone to help, no call for campaigns or petitions: her own family are handling it and making inquiries. The tone of the messages is relatively calm, and the last one tries to sound reassuring: "If they wanted to kill her, they would have done so" (presumably meaning they would have killed her on the spot rather than arresting her) and: "From other family members who have been imprisoned there, we believe that she is likely to be released fairly soon."

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 11 June 2011.