JT LeRoy's true identity revealed in New York magazine

BTW Asia Argento is FUCKING STUPID too, while we are here.

this article was about 100000x times more interesting and complex than any of leroy's "transgressive" drivel.

The "Heart is Deceitful" movie was unbearable.

The former editor of my magazine has 'restless' tattoed on her back IN ITALICS WITH SERIFS, thus committing SIGNIFIGANT fashion and graphic design faux pas TO GO. One of these days she will wake up from (possibly imaginary) debauchery to find that someone has crossed out the tattoo and written KICK ME in black marker.

It's so time to fire up a mail to D3nni$ ¢00p3r - he'll tell me what's going on, he's an old pal.

I am invited to Julian Barnes' Booker Prize party tonight (would rather be at the one for the Smiths, Zadie/Ali) so at least I will have something to talk about there. I don't really *mind* the books themselves, I just didn't think they were all that and didn't like the opium den cult around the author. But these people who'd had really vanilla upbringings were all going ON about the transgressive qualities and the omnisexuality blah blah which made me vom a little; besides something about publishers wanting this crap as written by teenagers is disturbing and exploitative.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. (I did laugh at your vom comment, though!)

Maybe it's time to invite Lynndie England to some art parties, ya think? Bitch is crazy. C OOH LALA

I didn't mind the recent piece on eurodisney that "JT" wrote. it wasn't he/shelarious or anything, but it wasn't bad.

Beef with D3nni5 C00p3r, why?

Sorry, I just finished reading the article and thought we were actually talking about the elaborate hoax, not sniping at celebrity spawn.

Yeah, it's already out.

i read about half of sarah on an airplane. terrible travel reading! i like hoaxes and applaud Laura for pulling this off.

Thistle practice at the same practice space we do but I never bothered to talk to them.

I also remember an interview in Vanity Fair between Leroy and Tom Waits.

It really makes me think, hell, I should just go for it and cash in, you know? go back to the academy and get a fashion mullet (they won't know if it's still in or not), edit anthologies on trailer parks and give talks on the cultural significance of NASCAR (RIP #3), you know, write some short stories.. They'd be flimsy stories full of tawdry "look at the freak" details.

I guess that's what I sensed from JT Leroy and Gummo as well, it felt like they didn't see people as people, it was just a freakshow - and I have done that myself telling stories to entertain friends from the 'burbs about weird shit that happened back home in redneck land, and then I feel like an asshole. Hmm.. I was walking to the metro the other day and overheard these two Indian dudes my age shooting the bull, and the one was like, "Whatever man, I grew up in an actual village in India!"

I would think so. A decade-long self-imposed almost-public identity clusterfuck doesn't sound like something one does just for shits and giggles.

and xpost-
not just a sociopath, the exchange between the author and "jt" reminded me of Norman Bates and Mother!

Feel a bit sorry for the poor woman.

Even so, was Da Capo in on the JT "hoax"?

matos, don't take that too literally...but I do get the feeling that some people tally up the race and genders of the contributors before they even bother to read the articles (for example, no critisism has ever mentioned that half or more of the articles are about artists of color), even though the overwhelming majority of music writers are in fact white and male, as you must know, since you're a music editor.

yeah, like me!

No, I meant worked with her. As in, both people were members of an ensemble cast and had scenes together.
I honestly have no stake in Asia Argento. I just thought your posts were sort of mean. You say a lot of nasty shit about someone who you don't know, which is gross.

As for the Dennis Coop3r thing, maybe I missed the joke - were you satirizing some notion of Hollywood absurdity by closing out with a major name-drop?

fuck the haters

I consider lots of things about writers in my section, writing foremost. Anyway, my point isn't "white people BAD!" It's that the first thing I and everyone else who picks up an anthology do/does is look to see who's in it. After that comes whatever math there is to do.

I will only read music writing anthologies that consist entirely of articles written by Hmong people
fuck the haters

and fuck the kneejerkers sideways

Exactly. And that's what makes it such a great "Six Degrees of Separation"-like story -- it says as much about the people who bought it, and who wanted to buy it, as it does about the hoaxsters.

x-post

D3nni$ ¢00p3r discussed this whole business two months ago in his blog without ever quite naming names (but it was perfectly apparent who he meant). He seemed quite upset by the mindfuck, understandably.

you obviously haven't read many of Suzy's posts since about half of them are like this.

http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/people/features/jtleroy051010_1_400.jpg

Did JT ever guest-host 120 Minutes? I've seen him somewhere before.

:-D No wonder I wasn't paying attention -- I WAS LIVING IT!

*native South Londoners say 'izzit?' instead.

How'd it get there?????

Poison's hiatus began ~94-95

OH NO!

-- rasheed wallace (kanestbkly...), Today. (rasheed wallace) (later) (link)

=o

Also, writers lying about their identity -- who cares?

At least that's what I gleaned from the 9,000 page article linked above.

-- shookout (shookou...), October 10th, 2005. (later)

I saw this exact scenario play out at a Portland screening, only substitute Gus Van Zant for Lou. It seemed fairly odd at the time -- kind of came out of left field. Maybe the statement had stage directions?

"They asked me for my passport, my social security card," LeRoy said. He declined to hand them over. "I've always played with identity and gender. I understand what [the Times is] saying, but they entered into working with me knowing that ... Just because the Washington Post came after them, why should I be forced to prove who I am? They knew exactly what they were getting when they dealt with me."

-- gypsy mothra (meetm...), October 11th, 2005.

well Leroy does sell racoon penis bone necklace ornaments

What he says is interesting and kind of weird. He essentially admits that he and Eggars together edited the fuck out of Leroy's stuff, that it was horribly spelled; that they both shaped stories and pushed them in different directions. That's an awful lot of editing. But he ends his article with this: "But I knew the work. And that was good enough for me." Dude aren't there a million other people who have good ideas but can't spell or punctuate or tell a fucking story who deserve your time (for FREE) as much as Leroy? Admit that you were hoodwinked and played.

A little more info for those who refuse to register for the NY Times.

"I’m embarrassed to tell you all the nutty things I did. Every time he was mean, or screwed up, I always told myself to stay steady and kind. Why did I make the effort? I’m no saint. But from listening to him, I believed the childhood he described surviving would have killed anyone else. The very least I could do was show compassion. I lived up to my promise, too — until a week before Stephen Beachy’s story came out saying that JT Leroy was a hoax."

David Weigand evidently has a different definition of "gifted, good writer" than me.

Anyway, I think the whole thing is a stunning coup. Wish I'd thought of it!

and even if his work needed "editing", whos writing doesnt, this cult of authorship really needs to be pulled apart from the inside out.

i love him more now

oh bullshit. yeah everyone needs editing but when you need to be completely rewritten top to bottom more often than not that's something else entirely

And what of using poverty, abuse and HIV-infection as your one-way-ticket to Hollywood deals and dinner with Carrie Fisher?

the peice i have xtra this week was cut to shreds and rewritten by the editor, and i got a cheque, do i care? no, because it doesnt matter who wrote it, i like the money, it will pay for groceries, but do i think i earned it, maybe/maybe not...and the peice went thru a half dozen people b4 it went to the editor of xtra, a lot of the advice w. new writers making a career is about pitching and networking, leroy is the natural extension of the obsession with that kind of networking...hawks coming home to roost.

hes playing the game, if everyone wants to help the poor little faggot, if it is in fashion to be a victim, and if one can makes a career out of it, if books for happy, well fed borgies, who talk more and more of the strangeness and the decadence of sex in order ot makle them feel anything, then leroy is a natural extension, a reward for the discourses of a culture.

seriously though, i sort of agree with anthony in a way, except i'm a pretty decent writer who hates networking/backslapping/all that bullshit. i don't really know or care how "it" got published (heh), or am trying to compare myself in any way, but it's kinda frustrating to think of writing as something that's more networking than, y'know, just writing.

i hate to be slightly formalist, perhaps even conservative about it, but another side of me says that proper spelling/grammar/punctuation/etc. IS good writing.

don't hate to be that way. at least not entirely.

anthony's sense of entitlement here and everywhere else he bitches that I didn't accept his pitches continues to astonish me

That's a pretty willful misinterpretation of what I was saying.

This line in the NYT, though,

Ms. Albert, 40, and Mr. Knoop, 39, as unfulfilled rock musicians who concocted the character of JT Leroy to gain access first to literary circles and, later, to celebrities

is awfully snobby. Everybody likes a good sham, surely? Even one perpetrated, to some extent, by a couple of American Nathan Barleys.

"I have never been frauded by an author racket before, and I have to say, it feels like a punch in the stomach.

There are people out there who think that outrage like mine is overblown. Some have said this is simply a story about a talented author using a pseudonym which disguises their gender.

That’s horseshit. If Emily Albert had sent me those first short stories in her own name, I would have read them all the same. I publish authors all the time who have a very different life than their characters. My hat is off to them, they have my every respect. Their research and credibility are on the line, and they live up to it.

Emily didn’t have to con me to get me to pay attention to her writing. But by portraying herself as the Little Cripple Boy, who’d choke back the tears as he asked me for a match, she set up the dynamic that determined the rest of our relationship:

Don’t expect anything from JT— he’s too fragile. Don’t tell him to not be an asshole— he can barely get up in the morning. Never refuse a request, no matter how crazy— he’s never had anyone he could count on in his life."

I was conned by JT Leroy

I talked to him on the phone for hours. I even listened to his therapy sessions on tape. And after one particularly weird conversation about his upcoming sex-change operation, I decided he was a fake. So why did I still get sucked in?

By Ayelet Waldman

Jan. 11, 2006 | There's nothing I find quite as annoying as the phrase "I told you so." But, well, I told you so. Five years ago, after I read Armistead Maupin's "The Night Listener," a novel based on his experience with a literary hoaxster, I started insisting that the real JT Leroy was most likely a 50-year-old Midwestern woman. Turns out I was off by a decade or so.

As everyone by now knows, JT Leroy does not exist. He is a literary hoax. New York magazine outed him three months ago, and Monday the New York Times came through with the rest of the story. The public face of JT Leroy is Savannah Knoop, the sister of Jeffrey Knoop, one of the authors of the fraud, and JT's books and stories were most likely written by Knoop's wife, Laura Albert, singer for their band Thistle, an entity nearly as contrived as JT himself.

Even after I'd decided that JT was not who he claimed, I kept talking to him on the phone. At first when he called he was interested in speaking to my husband, but Michael couldn't stand the guy. After their first interaction -- an aborted interview of Michael by Leroy for the magazine Bomb back when JT was known as "Terminator" -- Michael refused to have anything to do with him. But I let myself be sucked in.

There was something strangely seductive about that breathy voice on the phone. He was fun to talk to; the sheer magnitude of his self-absorption was entertaining. And there was the whole celebrity thing. He was like a breathing version of Us Magazine. He'd just hung up with Julianne Moore, Courtney Love was telling him a story, Gus Van Sant was giving him a hard time about his script.

I went along with it happily, once even listening for an hour or so as he played taped portions of his sessions with his therapist, Dr. Terrence Owens. I never really understood why JT wanted me to hear these unbelievably boring sessions. I assumed back then that it was because we had talked a lot about mental illness and he wanted me to understand the depth of his experience. In retrospect, knowing that JT does not exist, I think those tapes are a marvel. Someone actually went to the trouble of producing elaborate two-person recordings. And for what? What was the point? They were clearly meant to provide evidence of authenticity, and perhaps playing them for me was a dress rehearsal for a bigger, more important audience.

It will probably be hard for people who think of JT as a street kid turning tricks at truck stops to imagine this, but mostly JT and I talked about our kids. Maybe this was the reason JT called me, someone who wasn't famous or a literary celebrity, someone who couldn't help his career in any way, someone whose name it did no good to drop. JT Leroy just wanted to talk to another mom. He said he co-parented his kid -- a young boy -- with Speedy and Astor, the people I now understand are Laura Albert and Geoffrey Knoop. It seems likely that the person I was talking to on the phone was Laura Albert. We had long, meandering conversations about the challenges of combining work with parenting, about what kids are like at different ages, about the dilemma of private vs. public schools.

It was during one of these conversations that I came to my conclusion that JT was, in fact, a fraud. At some point, apropos of nothing, he told me that since we'd last spoken he had gone ahead and had that sex-change operation he'd been thinking about.

I don't remember the dialogue exactly, but it went something like this:

"Really?" I asked. "I thought they made you go through some elaborate hormonal process before they let you have the final surgery."

"Nah," he said. "I'd done so much damage to my penis, hacking away at it. It was no big deal just to take off the stump."

My first thought was, Jesus Christ, ouch. My second was, bullshit. I mean, come on. Hacking away at it? The stump? Not even I was gullible enough to buy that.

It was after the stump incident that I began asking friends if they thought JT was a real person. Of course, they'd say, they had met him. Well, sure, I'd met him, too. We'd hung out together in Rome in the summer of 2002 when both he and Michael were invited to appear at a literary festival. I met him again at some local readings. Whenever I saw him, he was usually accompanied by Speedy, the woman he described as having saved him from the streets. I didn't pay much attention to her -- she was quiet and not particularly interesting. I might have had I known that she was the person with whom I'd been comparing SSRIs.

The real question is why, even after I became so suspicious of the mythological creature known as JT Leroy, I still talked to him on the phone. After all, it was clear that this person, whoever he was, was playing me. It was also clear why. JT Leroy's creators were interested in using their association with literary figures to burnish his literary reputation. And I was married to one of the figures they wanted to be associated with. I knew this, and still I talked to him. Over the last six years we've probably had no more than half a dozen or so conversations, but I certainly talked to him for longer at a stretch than I do with most of my real friends. I indulged him and myself. So did lots of other people. All those rock stars and movie stars who supported him and spent their time talking to him even though it was obvious he was just manipulating them. Why did they bother? What was his magic?

I can't, of course, speak for Madonna or Winona Ryder, but I was snookered by something JT inspired me to feel about myself. Sure, there was the general entertainment value of listening to stories about the train wreck that was his life. Even as pure fiction they were fascinating. But more than that, talking to JT made me feel good about myself. It might have been because he gave me the opportunity to feel completely sane and secure. It might have been because I was flattered that the same person who whiled away hours with Margaret Cho also seemed to enjoy talking to me. But mostly it was because whoever he was, he seemed so genuinely in need of advice and assistance. It feels awfully good to be needed. It feels good to think of myself as someone so generous with my time that I was willing to devote hours of it to a fucked-up near stranger. That's why I can't possibly be angry at having been taken in. I got as much out of it as he did.

The larger question, one that Maupin expressed so eloquently in his marvelous book, and one that people have been batting back and forth all week, is the morality of courting people's sympathies, including mine, by exploiting the issues of AIDS, homelessness, teenage castaways and transgenderism. Wasn't Albert and Knoop's assumption of these victim identities in order to achieve fame and fortune immoral, even evil? Doesn't it belittle the experience of everyone who has really suffered as they only pretended to?

Yes, of course. And yet somehow I'm not as troubled by this particular thing. It probably did little harm, except to the egos of those of us who were fooled, and it probably did some good, if the books themselves found an audience among the very people JT was pretending to be. I'm much more troubled by James Frey's actions in perpetrating a similar fraud. I view him as far more venal, more absurdly self-aggrandizing, and dangerous. Because Frey actually tried to convince people that his "recovery" could inspire them in a specific way. If they acted as he did, if they followed his lead, they too could be saved. JT Leroy's creators presented a model of redemption, not a prescription for it.

The larger questions of the hoax of JT Leroy and the unmasking of James Frey will probably consume cultural critics for some time. What JT Leroy's creators were selling was not just the books and stories, some of which were fine and moving in their own right. What they were selling was an imprimatur of authenticity based on their supposed author's biography. This is why the tales of the traumatized waif's life got so much attention -- because it was supposedly real. Still, I am not convinced, as some are, that the hoax says something deeply disturbing about the way the reading public values the artist over the art, the biography over the work. Is that a surprise, and does it really matter?

I don't think it's so much that editors are suckers as it is that the publishers really have little incentive to fact-check these kinds of things. Witness Doubleday's response to the James Frey Smoking Gun revelations as reported by the NY Times today. It's in the publisher's interest for "memoir" to be interpreted very loosely - to the point that fiction/nonfiction distinctions become meaningless. Either way the books sell.

Worked for Jonathan Caouette.

except when it is, which is often - a healthy person can play many different roles in life, and be various things to various people and in various situations, but when you attach yourself too hard to "mutable and constructed identity" (=i.e., no actual identity), you're opening the door on real depression, and alienation, and all the nasty bits that go with those

of course, if that's to yr liking, more power etc

This episode reminds me of a condensed version of Wanda Tinasky writing into the AVA in the mid-80s and the fall-out over the following 10 years.

I'm not entirely familiar with Mrs. Leroy's work but I felt that Sarah owed much to Darcey Steinke (confirmed 30-something female), Jesus Saves in particular.

-- suzy (theartskooldisk...), November 26th, 2001 5:00 PM.

I'm afraid I was not as gullible as some people on my magazine - and had to sit there and listen to my former editor go ON about him. I just sent the story to my editor at ESM, who has JT on our masthead (they do not mention our mag in the article).
BTW Asia Argento is FUCKING STUPID too, while we are here.

-- suzy (theartskooldisk...), October 10th, 2005 6:55 AM.

http://www.denniscooper.blogspot.com/

Susie Bright's on the cd too, so methinks she doth protest too much.

The Weinstein Co. is teaming with "Stay" producer Tom LassallyTom Lassally to bring a biopicbiopic of fictitious author J.T. Leroy to the bigscreen based on a trio of articles by New York Times scribe Warren St. John.

Jesse PeretzJesse Peretz, who helmed TWC's upcoming "Fast Track," is attached to direct from a script by Captain Mauzner. The scribe penned the mini-majormini-major's upcoming "Factory Girl."

St. John last month broke the story that Leroy -- an alleged HIV-positive teen street hustler-turned-lit sensation -- was actually the invention of musician and writer Laura Albert, and that Leroy's public appearances were made by a young woman named Savannah Knoop.

St. John had initially interviewed Leroy 16 months ago without realizing the author's true identity. The scribe exposed Albert's hoax in his next two pieces on Leroy by following up on a Stephen Beachy New York magazine piece that raised questions about the author's identity.

Over a number of years, Albert's ruse won her creation, Leroy's work, a cadre of celeb backers, from Winona RyderWinona Ryder to Courtney Love. Leroy's gritty fictional works -- including "Sarah" and "The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things" -- supposedly drew on the author's real life as a cross-dressing teen prostitute from West Virginia.

A bigscreen adaptation of the Leroy tome "The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things," directed and starring Asia ArgentoAsia Argento, is set to open this week. That film was penned by Albert under the Leroy identity.

UTAUTA is packaging the Leroy pic, and no cast has yet been set.

Michael ColeMichael Cole and Kelly Carmichael will oversee project for TWC.

St. John is also the author of "Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey Into the Heart of Fan Mania," about obsessive football fans.

I remember absolutely nothing about this story, either when he was ascendent or when the hoax was revealed. Easy for me to say after the fact, but as I watched The Cult of JT LeRoy, I couldn't believe that people were being reeled in so easily. Even if you liked the writing (which I haven't read), wouldn't all the theatrical nonsense that accompanied it either turn you off completely or at least set off warning bells?

this classic post is on the other jt leroy thread so let's spread the love around/compare and contrast w 2nd post in this thread

JT Leroy is no joke perpetrated by anyone, he's BRILLIANT. And does make the occasional appearance. The only thing about the whole phenomenon that sucks is Ms C Love is angling to play the mum in the film of Sarah.

― suzy, Tuesday, November 27, 2001 1:00 AM (13 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha wait gear already did that a decade ago sorry

I made a sidelong comment about "JT Leroy" in a piece last week, and Albert has popped up in comments to act out hurt feelings and demand a retraction.

Hahah wow

Ha scrolling through the comments this weekend super hungover trying to figure out if I have any new thoughts about that record and oh, well, this is awkward…