(cont. from home page)

after Galliano lured him there and propositioned him with drugs, despite being told by the young man that he was an epileptic and sober.

The sunsetting of the Provoking Provocateurs era began when PFC, by then a proper WordPress site with its own domain, was hacked and a parody about Lady Gaga meeting Julian Assange “in the attic of Ecuador,” with an L. Gaga byline that implied she was the author, was surgically removed — text, creative assets, author profile and all. Having used skills honed as a veteran screenwriter, James had spun Gaga’s Twitter posts to capture her voice; the tech support agent at PFC’s web hosting service believed that, based on comments to social-media shares of the post, James’s caricature had convinced too many of Gaga’s fans and Assange’s detractors that both the story and her authorship were authentic.

“This was expertly done,” the agent said. “They could’ve taken down the whole website and wiped all traces of it. Consider it a warning — don’t report the piece.

In 2015, the blog was reformatted to be PFC’s creative services website. James stopped publishing essays: LinkedIn-style educational articles about online content creation and SEO were too difficult for him to focus on as someone with such severe ADHD that he dropped out of eighth grade and was homeschooled for a semester before transferring to another school.

In February 2023, James returned to essaying with Quibblers & Scribblers (Q&S Post), a Substack newsletter primarily intended to build a readership for a memoir that was required source material for a TV series about his teen years on the frontlines of the Cold War in Rome, as the rebellious gay son of a Republican covert intelligence operative.

Award-winning journalist and radio host Bridget Warner Leroy isn’t the only fellow writer who believes that Q&S Post is ahead of the rest. Click below to find out why.