Lars Eighner’s Adult Home Page

With the help of press release whore PR Newswire, who apparently will hand out any kind of PR for money, The Sacramento Bee has promulgated literary hoaxster Tim Barrus’ latest fraud. Although the Bee disclaims responsibility for whatever PR Newswire posts (evidentally automatically) to the Bee’s site, nonetheless unwary donors maybe taken in by the scam appearing under the Bee’s nameplate.

Readers of various certain ages may remember Barrus as a one-time editor of The Drummer, as a Key West S-M performance artist, or as the phony-Navajo memorialist Nasdijj. The Nasdijj scam took in Esquire Magazine, Houghton Mifflin, and Ballentine Books for a number of years through three books and numerous literary awards before being exposed by Matthew Fleischer in LA Weekly. Barrus had no Native American ancestry, none of the tear-jerking events in his “memoirs” had occurred in fact, and many parts of his works were close paraphrases from other writers including Sherman Alexie and Lars Eighner.

Barrus’ new scam is Cinematheque Films and a non-existent gallery called Real Stories. Barrus claims these are art projects of underage street hustlers he has rescued to his halfway house. Neither the boys nor the halfway house exist outside of Barrus’ imagination. None of the imaginary institutions are 501(c) tax-exempt charities, nor are any of them endorsed by Bishop Desmond Tutu, but this hardly gives pause to Barrus — who seems never to have perpetrated an under-reaching fraud.

Barrus seems to have a lively fantasy life involving underage boys being sexually and otherwise abused which first came to the public eye in My Brother, My Lover, a novel of sado-masochistic incest issue by Gay Sunshine Press in 1985. By the time he perpetrated the Nasdijj fraud, the imaginary boys seemed to fascinate him more if they had fatal diseases and gave effusively detailed accounts of their abuse, sexual and otherwise. Sometimes Cinematheque is supposed to be in Paris, sometimes in Tribeca, but in fact through its imaginary peregrinations Barrus remained in North Carolina with his wife, with no real-world rescued boys in evidence.