Tim Barrus (Nasdijj) — Author
Tim Barrus — novelist, magazine editor, and self-invented literary phenomenon — entered Jack Fritscher’s orbit in the chaotic engine room of Drummer magazine, where Barrus served as editor of issues 117–121 in 1988 and contributed fiction to several more. A founder of San Francisco’s 1980s “LeatherLit Movement” and author of novels including Genocide (1988) and To Indigo Dust (1992), Barrus later reinvented himself as Nasdijj, a purportedly Navajo memoirist whose harrowing, acclaimed books — The Blood Runs Like a River through My Dreams (2001), The Boy and His Dog Are Sleeping (2003), and Geronimo’s Bones (2005) — collapsed in a landmark 2006 Esquire exposé revealing the author’s true identity. Fritscher, who knew Barrus for decades and appears throughout that Esquire investigation, defended him not as a simple fraud but as a writer “exploring the territory of identity.”
Below, Barrus’s own essay “My Glittering Hotel” recounts his volatile years at Drummer and his enduring debt to Fritscher — the one person, he writes, who ever truly held him. That debt runs both directions: as chief editor at Knights Press in 1988, Barrus championed the acquisition of Fritscher’s own novel Some Dance to Remember, a connection detailed in Fritscher’s Gay Pioneers chapter “When Queers Collide,” his sweeping account of the internecine wars of 1970s–90s gay publishing. The complete Esquire investigation into the Nasdijj hoax rounds out the record of one of gay literature’s most singular and controversial figures.