A while ago I had a friend.
Mar. 9th, 2008 12:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
erastes An online friend, that is. I was - for a while - very close to him. We used to chat daily via IM. I'd send him my book, chapter by chapter and he'd critique it. We talked about gay male sex (he was - he told the world) a submissive gay male in a three way "marriage" with Hal and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
satinvalkyrie. He helped me in writing my gay sex, helped me "get it right" and we chatted about sealing wax.
Then a couple of years ago, I started to get a little suspicious - he never let anyone see his photo. Not so unusual, - neither do I, but I have reasons e.g. I don't HAVE any recent ones and I don't think putting 10 year old ones online is at all honest. Petulant God or Seph (spifftastic) as he called himself, would post pictures of his blue-black hair (he was part English, part Amerindian, he said) or his chest or his dick. (he once started a community for his dick, too(sephs_cock), which was about the same time I started to shy away) but nothing else. His boyfriend Hal (teh_hal) also had an LJ.
We talked about writing, he was writing a book and I helped him with it. But my suspicions that he wasn't what he seemed grew. I began to suspect that he was a woman (I thought he might Seph's "wife" in the 3 way marriage. The crunch for me came when he said he met a boy from Hawaii, Tomas, and Tomas started an LJ and wrote in it - IN PIDGIN ENGLISH. That was it, for me.
Now "he" has admitted what I have suspected for a couple of years now, that it was all a lie, that he is a woman and that he's been making it all up. As a work of fiction, it was pretty impressive. She created a huge amount of material - what Seph wore, what he drove, where he worked, who his family was, who his boyfriends were, what he did on a day-to-day basis, what parties he went to and what he got up to. He invented visits to England, an accent, a backstory which was bitter-sweet, and much much more.
The Outing Herself Post is very typical of Seph's style. Unbelievable and self-abrading and "fuck you" in style. It's yet another attention grabbing post and for all anyone knows, it could be true, it could be not. Who gives a fuck, frankly.
Well, apart from all the people "Joseph" got close to. This has happened to me twice before so I know what people might be feeling now. I won't say "I don't understand why people do this" because in a way - I do. Pretend to be a man on LJ - particularly as a writer (and a damned good one - here's his fandom work that was posted on hp_literotica.) and you will attract fangirls (because male writers are rare) It IS frustrating to pour your heart into a fanfic and get perhaps five comments - and see someone likecopperbadge get 100 comments on a post about blowing his nose.
I find it dispicable, and blaming it publicly and all on psychoses is sick. If you are sick, girl, get help. Don't drag hundreds of people into your invention. Go join "Second Life" because there you can be anyone, any sex, any age. And no-one expects the impossibly bosomed blonde woman in Second Life to be an impossibly bosomed blonde woman in real life. He's likely to be a truck driver from Minsk. The entire BREADTH of this deception staggers me, that's what i can't grasp. The invention in this woman's mind is completely wasted - she shouldn't have any problems selling fiction.
This is no different, in my eyes, to the decpeption perpertrated by Riverbend, or the author of "true memoire" "Love and Consequences" or "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years" Granted - Seph wasn't making any money from the lies, but to my eyes, it was just as bad (if not worse) because he was living a full and active life on LJ - making friends, commenting all over the place, getting confidences from people (yes, including me) under false pretences.
Luckily I learned my lesson from another person online, who turned out to be a fraud, and I left Seph a while ago, but my thoughts go out to people who are feeling very real hurt right now.
satinvalkyrie. He helped me in writing my gay sex, helped me "get it right" and we chatted about sealing wax.Then a couple of years ago, I started to get a little suspicious - he never let anyone see his photo. Not so unusual, - neither do I, but I have reasons e.g. I don't HAVE any recent ones and I don't think putting 10 year old ones online is at all honest. Petulant God or Seph (
spifftastic) as he called himself, would post pictures of his blue-black hair (he was part English, part Amerindian, he said) or his chest or his dick. (he once started a community for his dick, too(sephs_cock), which was about the same time I started to shy away) but nothing else. His boyfriend Hal (teh_hal) also had an LJ. We talked about writing, he was writing a book and I helped him with it. But my suspicions that he wasn't what he seemed grew. I began to suspect that he was a woman (I thought he might Seph's "wife" in the 3 way marriage. The crunch for me came when he said he met a boy from Hawaii, Tomas, and Tomas started an LJ and wrote in it - IN PIDGIN ENGLISH. That was it, for me.
Now "he" has admitted what I have suspected for a couple of years now, that it was all a lie, that he is a woman and that he's been making it all up. As a work of fiction, it was pretty impressive. She created a huge amount of material - what Seph wore, what he drove, where he worked, who his family was, who his boyfriends were, what he did on a day-to-day basis, what parties he went to and what he got up to. He invented visits to England, an accent, a backstory which was bitter-sweet, and much much more.
The Outing Herself Post is very typical of Seph's style. Unbelievable and self-abrading and "fuck you" in style. It's yet another attention grabbing post and for all anyone knows, it could be true, it could be not. Who gives a fuck, frankly.
Well, apart from all the people "Joseph" got close to. This has happened to me twice before so I know what people might be feeling now. I won't say "I don't understand why people do this" because in a way - I do. Pretend to be a man on LJ - particularly as a writer (and a damned good one - here's his fandom work that was posted on hp_literotica.) and you will attract fangirls (because male writers are rare) It IS frustrating to pour your heart into a fanfic and get perhaps five comments - and see someone like
copperbadge get 100 comments on a post about blowing his nose.I find it dispicable, and blaming it publicly and all on psychoses is sick. If you are sick, girl, get help. Don't drag hundreds of people into your invention. Go join "Second Life" because there you can be anyone, any sex, any age. And no-one expects the impossibly bosomed blonde woman in Second Life to be an impossibly bosomed blonde woman in real life. He's likely to be a truck driver from Minsk. The entire BREADTH of this deception staggers me, that's what i can't grasp. The invention in this woman's mind is completely wasted - she shouldn't have any problems selling fiction.
This is no different, in my eyes, to the decpeption perpertrated by Riverbend, or the author of "true memoire" "Love and Consequences" or "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years" Granted - Seph wasn't making any money from the lies, but to my eyes, it was just as bad (if not worse) because he was living a full and active life on LJ - making friends, commenting all over the place, getting confidences from people (yes, including me) under false pretences.
Luckily I learned my lesson from another person online, who turned out to be a fraud, and I left Seph a while ago, but my thoughts go out to people who are feeling very real hurt right now.
