Free Republic

In June of 1999 a writer calling himself Nasdijj emerged from obscurity to publish an ode to his adopted son in Esquire. “My son is dead,” he began. “I didn’t say my adopted son is dead. He was my son. My son was a Navajo. He lived six years. They were the best six years of my life.” The boy’s name was Tommy Nothing Fancy and Nasdijj wrote that he and his wife adopted Tommy as an infant and raised him in their home on the Navajo reservation. At first, Tommy seemed like a healthy baby, albeit one who consistently...

Former Chapel Hill author Nasdijj won national acclaim writing memoirs about his brutal childhood as a Navajo Indian in the Southwest and as a father to two adopted sons who died of AIDS and fetal alcohol syndrome. In truth, he was Timothy P. Barrus, a man of Scandinavian descent who grew up in a solidly middle-class neighborhood of Lansing, Mich., and had a career writing gay pornography, according to public records and several people who know Barrus. The likelihood that Barrus had fabricated his past -- and parlayed the fiction into three successful nonfiction books -- was first raised Wednesday...