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Sometime in the mid-80s I began to correspond with Timothy Patrick Barrus. I cannot be more precise. I lost all my papers, including the correspondence, when I became homeless in the late 80s. I am working with memories more than twenty years old, and many of the details are fuzzy.

I was writing what is somewhat euphemistically called gay erotica, and my first book Bayou Boy and Other Stories was published at about that time. Whether it was the book or the previous magazine publication of some of the stories in it that brought me to Barrus's attention, I do not now recall if I knew at the time. Barrus presented himself as a big name in gay publishing, and I suppose, allowing for ordinary puffery, that much was true. My correspondents soon included Steven Saylor, T.R. Witomski, and John Preston, as well as Barrus, and so far as the erotic side of the gay market was concerned, they were all heavy hitters. I have described that correspondence as three-cornered or four-cornered, or whatever, but as it progressed, I began to suspect that only I was exchanging letters with Barrus regularly.

Saylor had attended college in Austin, but I never knew him then. I considered myself fairly isolated, sending my work over-the-transom from Austin. I assumed all the others knew each other well, and indeed, Preston and Barrus had both done a stint editing at Drummer, Saylor was doing editorial work for similar magazines in San Francisco. T.R. Witomski lived with his parents in Toms River NJ, so far as know, until his death, and even ran an adult novelties business from their home for a time, but he was within striking distance of New York, and as Barrus told it — sometimes — Mineshaft was an account of their running around the bars together. But other times it was Barrus and Preston. And other times it was Barrus writing about TR and Preston's adventures as if they had involved him. Barrus often repeated his anecdotes, and as I have mentioned they were often other people's anecdotes. But he told them differently at different times, so it is not just my fading memory. Exactly who was involved in which events, as Barrus recounted them, was often quite cloudy to begin with.

At any rate, Saylor is the only one I have ever met in person, though the others seem to me to have crossed paths at various times. I considered myself the outsider, and thought it was rather generous of Barrus to include me. I also thought he was rather older than I was, when in fact he is a couple of years younger.

Now I should say I may not be the most credulous person in the world, but I am fairly credulous, and at first I believed many things that Barrus wrote. One thing I did not believe was that publishers are scum. It was one of Barrus's favorite themes. Magazines payments were slow, reporting on submissions was slow, and so forth. So far as I could tell, that was the rule in all of freelance fiction. It was all I had ever known. So frustrating as it was, I did not take it personally. Perhaps things were better in other markets, but I had read Asimov about the early days in pulp science fiction, and if things had changed, I did not know it.

Saylor has said that I believe in the Invisible Hand, and I suppose I did then. I thought, you wrote as well as you could and you kept at it, and I scoffed at paranoid wannabees who thought publishing was all a matter of knowing the right people and making contacts. Of course, I did make contacts, but I made them by writing as well as I could and by plugging away at it.

I had resolved to paper a wall in the little shack I lived in with rejection slips before I gave up, but I never got close to doing so. The first story I sent to a gay magazine was bought, and so was the one after that and so forth. Eventually I accumulated a half-dozen rejection slips, but only for stories that I placed elsewhere with little difficulty. It was easy for me to believe in the Invisible Hand.

Barrus told me some horror stories about publishers, but I found that whenever I reported those anecdotes to Saylor, Saylor would inform me that they had not happened to Barrus, but to Preston or someone else. One of the stories was that Barrus had negotiated a book deal with someone who turned out to be an inmate in an asylum whose publishing business was entirely delusional. That really happened to someone — Preston, I think — but it did not happen to Barrus.

Eventually, Barrus sent me a copy of his book Mineshaft. Mineshaft was in the form of a pulp porn book — a characterization I make with the utmost respect. At one time if you were a gay writer and you wanted to say something to a gay audience, pulp porn was the main way to do it. That was very much my approach and attraction to writing gay erotica. Things had been changing, of course, in the 70s and 80s, but I still thought it was perfectly sensible to use the porn genre to reach gay readers. I am not sure now whether I read every word of Mineshaft, but I read enough of it to notice that there was not much sex in it. I believed you could use the porn genre to put other messages across, and that is what I was trying to do with my work, but it seemed to me that you did have to put the sex in. There seemed to be much getting dressed to go to the club, much trying to get admitted to the club — which involved some dominance and submission of a not particularly sexual kind with the doorman — and much running around calling one another "Mary!" — which seemed something of an anachronism in an 80s leather novel, and contributed to my impression that Barrus was older — but not much in the way of actual sex or anything I could identify as like sex.

Now I should say, of all my correspondents, I was the only one entirely innocent of leather. I did not get it then, and I do not get it now. I guess I prefer my cruelty to be the mental sort, and it might have something to do with romance, but it does not connect with sex for me. Now I have been lectured (not by any of the people named above) that leather is the ultimate expression of gay, which strikes me as the same sort of bullshit blackmail that "Lesbianism is the ultimate feminism" was. I once wrote a satire leather piece that I thought would be so over the top that everyone would forever after find leather too ridiculous for words. That worked out about as well as Alfred Nobel inventing dynamite to make war too horrible to contemplate. Leather people thought it was hot, and I had to read the piece to them at a convention as the price of my ticket to Stonewall 25.

In the hard leather culture, there is a kind of myth that sexuality does not matter. It does not matter whether you do it with men or with women, it is the leather thing that makes them all Queer — so the theory goes. I just bring that up, because eventually the question comes up whether Barrus really was ever gay, or was really anything he ever said he was or claimed to be. And the point is, you can go pretty far into leather culture without really having an answer as to whether you are gay or bisexual or whatnot and without ever thinking that there is anything to these distinctions. To bring it back to Mineshaft, I cannot identify reliably as sexual stuff that hardcore people think is really hot, so I am not absolutely sure Mineshaft was so asexual as I remember it. My naïf idea of rough sex is that the spanking is the foreplay, but apparently in some cases, it is the main event.

I also received a copy of Barrus's My Brother, My Lover, either from Barrus or from our common publisher. It came out the same year as my Bayou Boy. It was full of violent and painful incest which I found, so much as I could read of it, entirely emetic. Evidently much of the material was recycled in one of Nasdijj's books. Since that time I have observed that when straight men think of gay sex, they generally think of only one of the several possible sex acts, they think it hurts, and they think it is forced or coerced in some way. In other words, they tend to think it is prison rape. I should have thought: this is what happens when a straight man tries to write gay porn. Not only am I credulous, but also I am fairly slow.

I did not find anything very sexual about Mineshaft or anything very gay about My Brother, My Lover, but in those days I had a life and a career. Stuff Barrus wrote did not always add up, but that did not bother me much. Being as credulous as I am, things strike me as only a little odd when they might be setting off alarms in people who are more skeptical. The truth to tell, T.R. Witomski was a much more fascinating character, Saylor was an editor with whom I did much business, and Preston was then the top of the heap in gay writing. A letter from Barrus was a diversion that was often welcome, but unlike the letters from the others, would never contain any useful information or interesting ideas, such as TR's plan to use computers to make custom porn at a time when home computers were still a rarity. All of us were trying to discover how to make our writing pay, albeit from different perspectives and stages in our careers, and although Preston was the best at it so far, he often seemed baffled, as were we all. If there were a new magazine or an anthology, I would hear of it from the others, but not from Barrus.

Eventually Barrus's Viet Nam novel Anywhere, Anywhere came out. I read excerpts, and I saw several reviews which seemed to indicate that was a thinly-veiled memoir. It seems to me there was an article in which Barrus undertook to speak for gay Viet Nam vets. Now I should say that Saylor is usually fairly gentle in his attempts to disillusion me, and it is sometimes a hopeless task for him as subtlety is often lost on me, but when I mentioned in a telephone conversation that I had not known Barrus had been to Viet Nam, Saylor laughed at me in a very rude way. It stings a bit after all these years. Barrus, he told me, had never been in Viet Nam or anywhere near the military.

Well, that struck me as very audacious, because although I could easily imagine writing a foxhole love scene, all the ranks and units and names of weapons and numbers of forms and possibly secret handshakes seemed to me fraught with opportunities to get the context wrong. What's a battalion? What's a division? What's the rank of the guy who leads a routine patrol? Who do you salute, and does anyone really bother somewhere near the front? That kind of stuff scares me silly when I think of writing a military fiction, not to mention writing one that people could believe was based on experience if they were so inclined.

So, even though I thought — after Saylor informed me — Barrus was playing fast-and-loose with whether there was any factual basis for his novel, it seemed to me a sort of merry rouge kind of a prank. And after all, I knew gay men who had served in Viet Nam and their stories were not being told — they were invisible. Perhaps it was all for the best. Now I have to ask myself whether there was a novel by a real Viet Nam vet who was unambiguously gay that did not get published because we already had our Viet Nam novel in Anywhere, Anywhere.

I did not become homeless overnight and Anywhere, Anywhere came out when my financial situation was in its tailspin. I did not have much attention to pay to Barrus, but he did reveal to me, in sort of an offhanded way, as if it were something that I surely knew already, that he was married and had a daughter who would be graduating from high school soon. This situation would not have struck me as particularly remarkable in a man who was a generation older than me, and I did think Barrus was somewhat older, but it struck in my craw.

I will not give the whole rant here, but I take particular umbrage at people who exploit the gay market while providing the heterosexual cover of a family for themselves. Yes, things were different for people who got married in the 40s or 50s, but they were not that different for people who were born in the 40s or 50s. And this "We're Queer, too, because we have whips and harnesses and piercings" is just a bit too much like white rap.

Nonetheless, when TR denounced Barrus as the most sex-negative writer in the gay market, I felt a little defensive for Barrus until I began thinking about it. When I began thinking about it, I realized I had no evidence that Barrus had ever regarded gay sexuality as a good thing or had ever portrayed gay sex as anything good or happy or anything other than grim. I heard Barrus was doing SM performance art in San Francisco, and saw a few grainy pictures of him on the newsprint pages in Drummer trussed up with tit clamps, and then for me Barrus fell off the face of the earth, only a bit before he disappeared from gay publishing altogether.

I became homeless. I did speak to Barrus once, by telephone, when I was on the streets and considering a trip to San Francisco. And he did advise me, accurately I believe, that the Summer of Love was long over and San Fransisco was a particularly rotten place to be homeless.

I wrote my truthful memoir, got off the streets for a while, realized I could not even then make a living writing, became physically unfit for any other work, and was yesterday's news. Well. Better a has-been than a never-was.

Sometime in 2004, someone was compiling a memorial volume for John Preston and asked me to contribute something, which I did. In the piece I mentioned Barrus, and after that I got occasional inquiries about Barrus because he was not mentioned much on the web and any search for his name would turn up my mention of him. Well, I wondered about Barrus myself. So I asked everyone I could think who might know and only heard back from people who knew who he was but had not heard anything of him for years and people who had never heard of him at all. I began to think he was dead since I believed he was such a noisy sort of character that there would be some rumblings if he was living.

In May of 2005, I received one of those rather ordinary seeming inquiries from Matthew Fleischer. Matthew did not show me any of his cards at all, and being the credulous person that I am, I did not suspect there was anything to it. Barrus was, by then, history, or to be more precise, gay history and was listed in the main texts of gay literature in which I was merely a footnote, if that. So inquiries from grad students were not really out of the ordinary.

That day there were a couple of exchanges with Matthew about Barrus. He had a photo labeled "Barrus by Rosen" and asked whether I could positively identify it as Barrus. Actually, the photo was "Nasdijj by Rosen," but Matthew was not tipping his hand to me yet and had renamed it.

I am terrible with photos. I had never met Barrus in the flesh, and this was a rather fleshy photo. The only photos of Barrus I recalled were the last ones I saw in Drummer which were small and on the inside pages on yellow newsprint. The photo seem consistent with those I had seen of Barrus, and it seemed to me I recalled the scars, although I do not now know when I had seen photos of Barrus that revealed the scars. Memory is a funny thing, and witnesses often get photo arrays wrong. I was not sure, and I was not sure that the title "Barrus by Rosen" had not biased me.

I told Matthew I thought it was Barrus, but I was not sure. I also said the photo did not seem very recent, as Barrus had seemed paunchier in the photos I had seen years ago. Evidently I was very wrong about that, but I did tell Matthew that a couple of weeks in the gym could have made the difference.

The next day Matthew let me off the hook and told me that he had reason to suspect that a supposedly Navajo memorialist known as Nasdijj, who had made quite splash in the literary pool around the turn of the millennium, was in fact Barrus. Eventually I came to understand that Ted Conover, who had reviewed one of Nasdijj's books, had found a number of discrepancies within the text, had been alerted when he got a scathing note about the very positive review from Nasdijj, and then had heard from someone who knew something about fetal alcohol syndrome, which figured prominently in Nasdijj's book, that the symptoms of the disorder were nothing like those described in the book. Conover smelled a rat, and Matthew was Conover's student. Eventually other professional obligations occupied Conover's time and the investigation became Matthew's entirely. I understand how they came to suspect Nasdijj, but it is yet to be revealed how they knew to look at Barrus, who was fairly obscure by that time.

I never was, really, in the literary loop, but I have not been near it for years, so the name Nasdijj meant nothing to me, and I had never heard of him or his books. But as soon as I read Matthew's email naming him, I was on the web, and quickly found Nasdijj's blog. It was Barrus. You can keep your photographic evidence, your physiometrics, your DNA analysis, Barrus has an indelible style and I recognized it as soon as laid eyes on the blog. (Besides which, he cannot let poor Dorothy Parker rest in peace.) Maybe I wouldn't have been certain from the book excerpts I have since read, but in the more relaxed blog, it was clear. I knew.

I wrote Matthew that I was entirely certain that Barrus and Nasdijj were one and the same person. I was certain to my core. I did not know whether it was Barrus pretending to be Nasdijj or whether it had been Nasdijj pretending to be Barrus. All I knew was that they were the same.

I bit my tongue for months while Matthew put the evidence together, and indeed, he did a great job doing so. His story is with LA Weekly.