Deception Uncovered In the Sapphic Community

I learned some disturbing news yesterday night...AC Adams, an author I was very familiar with and even purchased a few of her books, was actually a man named Adam Gaffen. Shout out to Jae for writing an in-depth post about it.

Catfishing in the sapphic fiction community - Jae

How AC Adams aka Adam Gaffen deceived readers and fellow authors in the sapphic fiction community by creating a fake persona.

JaeJae

This is disturbing because he's a cishet man in his 50's, who crafted the persona of a woman in her 20's–an English professor with a wife, a cat, and who allegedly lived in Boston. He befriended several people in the sapphic community, stole spotlights reserved for new authors, and committed fraud by selling his services to unsuspecting victims.

But above all, he's shattered the trust of former friends of his and the persona, and left people deeply unsettled by the deception. I know one of the people affected by this, someone who was friends with the faux AC, and received frequent messages for a year.

There were a few red flags, things we all kind of dismissed at the time, but ugh...I got weird vibes from AC and kind of kept my distance, though I did promote her books on my own blog every now and then. I did block Gaffen on FB because I got suspicious about (mostly doubts about him actually reading my Vellas) his behavior.

And AC advertised his books a lot. That was a little suspect too, cause I didn't peg her as a science fiction fan. But again, I dismissed it because I thought I was being too judgmental. Little did I know...

AC's social media accounts have been purged, and the Finding Faith books have been taken off Amazon. Good call, because Goodreads is already catching on and spreading the truth.

But this whole thing is just...

You can get by as a man writing sapphic books. You don't need to catfish people in the community to do so. That's what pen names are for, after all. I write under a pen name because my real name is pretty dang mundane, but I don't construct a whole fictional persona to go along with it.

I don't have that kind of energy and don't see the point in pretending to be someone I'm not.