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In one way, the mystery of James Brighton has been solved. In another way, it's deeper than ever. The 20-something-year-old gay man who, as reported here last month, says he found himself naked on a Montreal street last October 12, unable to remember who he was, where he was from, or even his name, turns out to be Matthew Honeycutt, 28, of La Follette, Tennessee. The connection was made after a US tabloid TV show, "Hard Copy," broadcast an interview with him.

Tennessee police, it turns out, had been seeking Honeycutt ever since he disappeared last October. After losing his job and his car, Honeycutt used the ID of his brother, a Pentecostal minister, to get a driver's license, a loan, and a new vehicle. Then he left town. Honeycutt's family, happy to hear he is safe, says that he has suffered from schizophrenia.

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Just hours after the "Hard Copy" broadcast, presuming that Honeycutt was staging his amnesia, police raided the apartment of a Montreal Gayline volunteer who was giving him a place to stay. Police arrested Honeycutt, parading him handcuffed before waiting TV cameras and charged him with being a public nuisance and obstructing justice. He is free on bail.

But Honeycutt and those who have helped him say that his amnesia is real, and that he is not otherwise disturbed. "He's a beautiful soul, a really good person," says Bruce Walsh of Montreal's Gayline, which took Honeycutt under its wing after he called them for help last October. Walsh says Honeycutt is still in the process of relearning who he is. "For the first time he has his appetite back," says Walsh, "now that he knows who his family is, that he's going to see them, and that they love him."

Doctors at Montreal General Hospital who have examined Honeycutt dispute his family's claim he has schizophrenia, as do those who have befriended him. "They called it dissociative amnesia to begin with, but it now appears to be a fugue-- a defense mechanism to remove yourself from a bad situation," says Walsh, who has met with Honeycutt's psychiatrist.

"We knew that we were getting involved in something that we had no idea how it would resolve, that he could have been a murderer or something like that," Walsh says. "But it's a risk we were willing to take, and we're real glad we did." **