"Munchausen-by-Blog Syndrome"

Blogging can open up access to all kinds of wonderful people. It also can be a good form of therapy - perhaps one of the reasons I continue to blog - and blogging allows one to voice their thoughts and feelings with feed back from readers and others. I am pretty open with my identity and if one wanted to do so, they could literally find me in person and confirm that I am who and what I say I am. The business card shown on this blog IS my real business card, for example. Not so with all bloggers it seems. Which is why I on occasion go off on anonymous commentors who post foul comments yet lack the integrity to reveal their identity.

*

All too easily one can create a false persona and imagined existence and gain a following and support from readers that apparently satisfies some weird, messed up psychological issues/needs of the person actually behind the phantom personality that emerges from the blog. Recent events have shown that I like apparently many, many others fell victim to one such false blog and the obviously screwed up author behind it. Like many, I cross linked to Cooper's Corridor and then was an invitee to Nico's Niche. Now I find out that the blogger was a fraud and that much of the material was stolen from another blogger. I guess the moral is to be suspicious and cynical - something I do not like to be - unless and until you confirm the real existence of blog authors. Here are some highlights from Joe My God that disclose the unfolding of the unmasking of "Cooper" who in truth never existed (I thank Joe for the title of this post, btw):

*

Remember Cooper? The firefighter gay dad of two adopted boys who pulled his widely-loved blog after an "attack" of malicious comments and emails from the readers of this blog? Causing me to get extremely bent of out shape and offer Cooper a heartfelt (really) public apology? Over the last few days our little blogosphere has retched forth some unpleasant, uncomfortable revelations about Cooper. The short version:

*

He is not a firefighter.

He is not an adoptive father.

He is not gay.

He is not, in fact, a he.

*

The story began to unfold at Sweet/Salty, the blog of a woman named Kate, a young mother dealing with the death of her infant son. On the day of the supposed attack on Cooper's blog by JMG readers, Kate had emailed him, extremely distressed to have discovered that Cooper had lifted many of her gorgeously written posts verbatim, including photographs of her husband.

*

Upon receipt of Kate's surprisingly kind request to remove her plagiarized material, Cooper deleted his blog and apparently then concocted the JMG attack story to placate his legion of starry-eyed readers, people who avidly followed Cooper's Corridor as a place where they saw their most earnest ideals about gay parenting realized.Shortly afterwards, Cooper's Corridor resumed as Nico's Niche, a private blog where Kate's material continued to appear. Kate found my public apology to Cooper and emailed me about the situation. Knowing that Father Tony has had a longtime internet friendship with Cooper, I put him on the case. What he uncovered may blow your mind.

*

According to the bizarre confession wrangled by Father Tony, Cooper's Corridor/Nico's Niche was written by a woman, a 52-year-old British Columbia grandmother named Jo, who says that ever since she was a little girl she has felt that she is a gay man trapped in a woman's body. Cooper/Nico (Jo claims) was a concoction created in order to deal with her lifelong gender identity disorder. She says she calls her inner gay man "Nicky".

*

Go read Kate's initial angry post, then you absolutely must delve into Father Tony's post, where in addition to publishing Jo's emailed "confession", he muses in his typically artful way about the anonymous nature of the internet and how much we can ever really know about people, even when we think we have an insider's view of their day-to-day lives.

*

Even this post may please the sort of person who engages in what I call "Munchausen-by-blog syndrome", but consider this yet another unhappy lesson about trust, gullibility, and how we as gay people are sometimes overeager to find our heroes.