Prances with Wolves

As a fake scholar, fake artist, and fake Indian, I always though the story of Ward Churchill would be hard to beat.

Timothy P. "Nasdijj" Barrus, an Opie-looking wannabe Navajo who killed off two imaginary children on his way to a national magazine award that he parlayed into three nonfiction books about people who never existed, before he got into writing gay porn while living as the father of a suburban white kid while at some point faking involvement as a soldier in the Vietnam war, takes the cake:

After the Esquire piece, Nasdijj published "The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams" in 2000, followed by "The Boy and His Dog Are Sleeping" -- which won a PEN award -- and "Geronimo's Bones." He wrote that he was the son of an alcoholic Navajo mother and a white cowboy father who raped and beat him. He said he grew up in migrant labor camps.

His former brother-in-law, Stephen Cheetham of Lansing, said Barrus had no such life. Cheetham said he hadn't seen Barrus since the 1970s, but over the years his two children told him what they heard of Barrus from their mother.

"I had heard that he was writing stories under different names," Cheetham said Thursday. "Something about how he claimed to be a Vietnam veteran at one point, claimed to be a Native American Indian at another point.

"His parents were a very middle-class, working, typical American family. He was never involved in Vietnam, he was never a Native American Indian, his parents weren't Native Americans -- there wasn't anything like that in his past."

It gets weirder:

In the 1980s, Barrus gained attention in some gay circles as a writer of pornography; other gay writers didn't think his work sounded authentic.

"I had some serious doubts about how gay he ever was," said Lars Eighner, a writer of gay literature who had mainstream success with his books. "It's a house of mirrors when you deal with him."

Barrus' third novel was about gay soldiers in Vietnam, but taken as a fictionalized memoir. Eighner said his gay literary friends didn't believe Barrus was ever in Vietnam.

I think he called that book Victor Charlie In My Chocolate Factory.

In a shocking related story, militant gay liberal activist John Aravosis of Americablog was discovered to be none other than David Hasselhoff.

Rusty is having fun with this story as well.

Update: Read Navahoax in the LA Weekly which broke this story and also has a link to "Nasdijj's" blog.

And Phin's got a song...