There are those who would say I’m not entitled or qualified to “curate” Tim Barrus. First, as his “co-writer,” I have a vested interest in portraying him in a positive light. Okay. Keep that in mind.
Second, some -- probably including Tim, and certainly his boys -- would say that I have no context for the exotic situations about which he writes and in which he has lived. So the first criticism would be that I know too much about Tim and the second would be that I don’t know enough. Let’s just say they cancel each other out.
There is no single context that can do Tim’s work justice. Until now he has mostly been addressed by aggregators of “gay” writing, lists rather than much discussion. “Gay” writing falls into a host of categories, still unsettled. Tim’s definition of “Leather Lit,” which is meant to describe himself, is only part of his work. The S/M world is intense, private, and voluntary. Work with the AIDS epidemic, with human trafficking and the support of adolescent boys at risk are perhaps more major. Some of this work rests on his experience as a special ed teacher.
Ironically, much of the evaluation of his writing was done in the belief that he was half-Navajo, which seems in some minds to have been voided by the revelation that he was not, though there is a large and respected body of writing about Native Americans that is written by white people: the Hillerman mysteries, “Laughing Boy,” “When the Legends Die,” and even one written under false pretenses by a neo-Nazi: “The Education of Little Tree,” which is still published by the University of New Mexico Press. PEN, the writer’s organization, gave Tim their “Beyond Margins” prize (which does not specify an NA writer) and did not rescind it since they are aware of the phenomenon of “noms de plume.” Much of what Tim knows about NA’s is from Chippewas in Michigan. Many of his critics didn’t even realize there were Indians in Michigan, much less what tribe they might be. He has worked with other SW tribes.
In a never fact-checked biography by the “Gale Reference Team” which produces the “Contemporary Authors” series for libraries, several reviewers are quoted:
In Salon, Maria Russo says, “The ‘singular language’. . . blends Native American mythological rhythms and imagery, stirring Whitemanesque catalogs and unadorned observations about life on and around the reservation, Nasdijj’s terse, elemental sentences don’t so much follow one another as nestle on top of the next, like a desert rock formation. His anger as the ‘white people world’ just about reaches off the page and shoves you, and yet there’s a disciplined quality to his fury. For all it’s descriptions of drunken violence and crushing poverty, the book has a gentleness at its core.”
In the Washington Post Book World, Christopher D. Ringwald wrote: “much as a drumming circle or meditative chanting may bring participants to an altered state, Nasdijj’s repetitious, episodic style taps a deeper consciousness.”
In Kliatt Edna M Boardman said: “He may be one of America’s great writers today.”
In the Salt Lake Tribune Online, Martin Naparsteck wrote: “some pages. . . will shred your heart. Some will boil your blood. Seldom has one book contained so much pain and anger and so thoroughly drawn the reader into its emotional sandstorm.”
In the Austin Chronicle Online, Michael Robertson said, “Nasdijj rough-hews the English language until it takes stunning forms. He dismisses narrative linearity because memory is ‘the exploded junk from hand grenades and words become the most elemental stuff, crushed rock and flowers to sift through his fingers with disciplined intensity.’”
In the New York Times Book Review, Ted Conover, a journalist who has made his reputation by walking on the wild side, wrote “This is an outsider’s book; Nasdijj has sympathy for the downtrodden and anger toward the world that marginalizes them. . . . Nasdijj exposes a pain so deep in the Tommy chapters that he breaks your heart . . . this is a fascinating book, unlike anything you are likely to have read . . . his book reminds us that brave and engaging writers lurk in the most forgotten corners of society.” It was Conover’s student, Mathew Fleischner who tried to build a career by labeling Tim Barrus a hoaxer, carefully leaving out any hint that he was a man who wrote under many names for many reasons. One of the reasons for that was to protect Tim’s family, but this protection was shattered in the scandal.
Since then Tim’s blog/vlog short pieces combining word and image -- some of his most arresting and vivid work -- present the problem of being multi-media. They can’t be evaluated without including the whole post, which means viewing images and video on a computer.
A whole body of print, some of it enraged invective, resides in comments meant to expose, embarrass, accuse, punish, and somehow move publishers off their commitment to a stupid and damaging status quo. His assailing of the “wall” around Manhattan publishing did not cause its collapse, but he was identifying the problems as loudly as Joshua marching around Jericho with a brass band and was gratified when it fell.
Poetry on Facebook came as grace, unexpected and lyric if dark. Often just a sentence or two in response to a poem, most often by Carolyn Srygley-Moore, or sometimes something longer, these are mature work. Now many of them appear with his photographs on Rachel Chapple’s webside dedicated to AIDS prevention and the fight to find a cure. http://www.real-stories-gallery.com/
By the time Facebook closed its doors to Tim, he was unable to travel. He posts material from early in his life, sometimes about his life as a whore before carrying AIDS made him a lethal weapon. I know nothing about the literature written by prostitutes but I would be surprised if many of them addressed the practical issues of safety and child care. (Children are also a result of sex, in case you didn’t realize.) Westerners have long been fascinated by female whores on the frontier (“Lonesome Dove”) or the Frenchified bordellos of New Orleans (“Pretty Baby”). Now that they have realized that men have sex with men as well as sheep, they may still be startled by Tim’s matter-of-fact domesticity in Vegas, where he preferred to live with the female sex workers rather than the males. I’ll say this: Tim is a man who makes loyal friends no matter the context.
The gay photographers and writers of San Francisco and Florida, Tangiers and Paris, produced fine work and included famous names, but were snuffed early by AIDS and drugs. Tim (b. 1950) was just a little late, hitting his stride as the virus was isolated and tests were available. But then came the meds that made him a survivor, merely suffering. Avascular necrosis, the result of huge doses of predisone necessary to save his life from fungal pneumonia, requires repeated surgery and uses up all book profits.
There is one context that Tim prefers to leave off-limits: his family. I itch to call on social theory that might destroy the myth of the safe white suburban home where children are protected. Interposing himself as a human barrier, Tim managed to save his descendents, some biological and some psychological. He does not wish that to be undone. Just let me say that he has remarkably stayed close to boyhood friends.
What remains is to look at specific writing.
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