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Any memoirist today inevitably has to deal with the fallout from James Frey's admitted fabrications, but Kilmer-Purcell has a unique connection: he's a close friend of Frey's, whose blurb appeared on the first edition, calling it “a wonderful book, a ridiculous book, a sad and beautiful book, a book I'll read again, a book I highly recommend.”

Kilmer-Purcell thinks the media cared much more than readers about Frey's transgressions. “I learned on my tour that just about every reporter/journalist has a book moldering in their desk that they can't get published. Most people are insanely jealous of his success, me included. It's the American way,” he reveals, departing from an earlier official “public statement” about Frey. Still, he's glad he waited until the scandal had died down, and is scathing in his indictment of authors who didn't.

“I could've owned Page Six. Hell, I could have finally gotten a New York Times Op-Ed piece published—but I didn't. While I may be a publicity hound, I'm not a whore. I'd never chide another writer. As far as I'm concerned, any author can write any damn thing s/he feels like,” Kilmer-Purcell states. “I thought Mary Karr was a sanctimonious bitch for writing the New York Times Op-Ed piece that she did. A writer shouldn't impose their regiment on other writers. If the bitch ever preaches to me, I'll cut her,” he concludes.

Still, he didn't walk away unaffected. Aside from removing Frey's blurb, all the details that got changed from his original draft (including names, locations and apartment descriptions), he was then asked to verify, but ultimately, what he wanted to say got kept in. There was no need to glam up the already intense story. “I wrote what I remembered, and if someone is going to read a memoir about a drunken drag queen as if it's the Bible, then they should really just stick with reading the Bible,” he declares, annoyed with those who'd question his memoir's veracity based on Frey's, calling it “guilt by association.”

So, are his drag days really over, or might we see an Aqua resurrection? “I'm way past the point where I feel like putting on the whole rig and heading out for a night of debauchery,” Kilmer-Purcell confesses. “Actually, I don't fit in the costumes anymore. I'm just older, fatter, and tireder. But I like having her around, so if I can keep her semi-alive in print and in the movie, I feel like she's still ‘with us.' The bitch won't die.”

Yes, there's a film version in the works. Clive Barker has optioned the book with a screenplay written by Kilmer-Purcell now making the rounds with directors. His next book, however, will be completely fiction, about “D-list celebrity schadenfreude,” a topic he's intimately familiar with from countless hours logged onto gossip site Datalounge (http://www.datalounge.com). Why does he love it there so much? “I go there for the community. They're the snarkiest, bitchiest, wittiest collection of humans ever assembled in one place,” he writes, the glee practically jumping off the computer screen. “These are my people.”

In addition to Datalounge, he's also an active MySpace user, and if you go to The Memoirists Collective page he runs along with Danielle Trussoni, Maria Dahvana Headley, and Hillary Carlip, you can see a photo of his bare bottom. He likens it to hawking his book door to door, “but only to the houses I already know have an Augusten Burroughs or David Sedaris book on their bookshelf.”

With so many teenagers and young adults on the site, he also feels he's doing a public service of sorts by putting his story out there. “I was a faggoty little gay boy from Wisconsin. Had I been able to read my future story then, I wouldn't have felt so freakishly alone. Being able to talk to MySpace friends in Iowa and Nebraska does a little good for my soul. Many have told me it's given them some sort of courage.”

And of that, Joshua has plenty to spare.

Get more info at IAmNotMyselfTheseDays.com; get the book at Amazon.com

Rachel Kramer Bussel is a Village Voice columnist and freelance writer.

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