Second fake of the day

Actually this should have been the fake of Friday, but I was too lazy to blog it until Violet Blue posted a followup to her Friday post, in which she charged Harmon Leon, a writer for SF Weekly, with faking his "Infiltrator" story about attending the Adult Video News awards. One big tipoff: the awards this year were held in Las Vegas, not L.A. as Leon had it.

Now SFist says the Weekly will issue a correction. Leon attended something called the FOXE Awards, and they were held in L.A. -- but "a few years back.... The copy editor got it wrong." Oh.

Of course, the whole "Infiltrator" shtick is based on hoaxing -- convincing gullible people that the writer is actually a minor German porn actor, a Promise Keeper or a right-wing radio talker, when in fact he is just a clever prankster, relying on people's credulousness -- or maybe just their need to be validated by belonging to groups that others, even strangers of dubious provenance, are interested in joining -- thereby being exposed to the groups' unguarded expressions of insider-dom. (Apparently he has been running this shtick for years. A book of his pieces, The Harmon Chronicles, was published in 2002, and the "Dieter Lietershvantz" persona was also used for this undated piece in which he presents himself as a "celebrity Scientologist.") And such articles do serve a purpose, even if the purpose is merely to expose their targets to mockery. Don't you wish someone had done that early in the crypto-political career of, say, Anita Bryant?

But the whole value of such pieces rests on the assumption by the reader that the exploit actually took place -- that the author managed to insinuate himself into talk shows, trade shows, Scientology spas and Republican confabs. Satirical articles in which the writer posits him- or herself as a member of a group to be made fun of have been around forever. I could, for example, write a piece in which I pretend to have been an intern in Jack Abramoff's office while he and Michael Scanlon were scheming to rip off Indian tribes; I could make fun of the way they mocked their clients and treated congressmen to expensive perks. Such a piece would be funny, but it would lack authority. If, on the other hand, I claim to actually have been present while those hijinks went on, that's another matter. Suddenly I find myself in the middle of a national scandal.

I bring up the Ambramoff affair just by way of example. Leon's pomposity-puncturing capers don't rise to that level -- lucky for him, for wasn't Dan Savage practically crucified for saying he had falsely posed as a Republican voter in an Iowa presidential caucus in 2000? -- but you can see that the power of a written piece is greatly amplified if the writer claims actually to have lived it.

SF Weekly, hoaxes, Harmon Leon, Dan Savage