The Secret Life of F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre

[randy_byers]

I was more than a little bit startled when news of F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre's recent suicide arrived from fannish quarters and it turned out that he was a science fiction writer and fan who was well-known as "Froggy" to quite a number of my friends and acquaintances in the SF community. I only knew of him as this strange character who wrote long hoax reviews of lost silent films on IMDb, much to the irritation of fans of silent film. Because of the sorrow with which his death was received in the SF community, I am hesitant to share this occasionally harsh thread about his death and life from the silent movie discussion group NitrateVille, and yet it's a fascinating discussion from a different perspective. Putting the link on my LJ rather than on one of the fannish lists also seems safer, because I didn't see much discussion of his death on LJ.

One thing that strikes me once again from reading that thread is how like SF fans silent movie fans are in the way that their obsessions can make them sometimes humorless and unforgiving. I guess nobody likes to be made a monkey of. But I'm also struck by how peevish and obsessive MacIntyre was in playing out his (very elaborate, very fannish) hoax. It's playful and peevish at the same time, and that seems like an intimately familiar combination of traits. The more I read about him, the more layers there seem to be to this particular onion. How many of those layers are deception or delusion?