When is a Syrian lesbian blogger not a Syrian lesbian blogger? When she’s a 40-year-old American married straight male graduate student, apparently. A guy named Tom McMaster on Sunday apologized to readers of the blog called A Gay Girl in Damascus, saying that he’d written the whole thing, posing as Amina Abdallah Arraf, a self-described 35-year-old lesbian born and raised in the United States but now living in Damascus.

The fiction began unraveling last week.

McMaster, who is reportedly a student in Scotland who is currently on vacation in Turkey (and we don’t blame you if you don’t believe that, either), today told The New York Times: “I sort of by accident … created something that had a lot more interest than I had ever possibly expected and then when I tried to shut it down it just kept getting bigger.”

We’d like to say that we think there are times and places and circumstances in which it is perfectly okay to pretend to be someone you are not; but generally, to avoid trouble, you need to make people aware that you at least may not be what you seem.