The Famous Writer Who Lied to Me — The Bold Italic — San Francisco
By Michelle Tea
San Francisco has hosted a rich annual celebration of writing for more than a decade thanks to Litquake. The October festival is the city’s biggest and best concentration of the written word come to life, and this year organizers will present more than 800 authors and journalists in 160 events around town. We’re pretty damn excited for it.
We’ll have a few pieces focused on Litquake during its run, including a juicy one from author Jerry Stahl, but first we wanted to look back on a literary scandal that ricocheted out from San Francisco eight years ago. One of our favorite local authors, Michelle Tea, remembers a dark time in local lit history and the J.T. Leroy lies that hit home. (P.s. See Michelle at these great Litquake events) — Editors
But of course, I didn’t know I was communicating with Albert, a forty-something erotica writer whose name was vaguely familiar to me from a cybersex literary subscene of the ’90s. I thought I was speaking to J.T. Leroy, a homeless, queer teenager; a heroin-addicted street hustler who’d recently gotten clean; and a survivor of all sorts of childhood abuse.
I ‘met’ JT Leroy about a year after the novel Sarah hit the literary world, to wild acclaim. Sarah was the story of a transgender tween sex worker in Appalachia, a dark story, brightened by a drag queen magical realism, and it had caused a sensation. Not only was the novel excellent — a lively, engaging read that brought you in with a meat hook to the heart — but also word got out that it was a thinly veiled memoir: yes,the author had grown up in the worst rural poverty our country has to offer; and yes, the author had been a truck-stop prostitute; and yes, the author had been addicted to drugs. But he was clean now, and too fragile to make public appearances, embarrassed by his pesky Karposi’s Sarcoma lesions. To promote the book, celebrities sympathetic to both literature and the plight of traumatized young queers came out to read from Sarah on J.T.’s behalf: Winona Ryder, Shirley Manson, Marianne Faithfull, and Justin Vivian Bond.
Apparently, J.T. had read the work of queer-lit cult hero Dennis Cooper, and the stories of gay-boy hustlers getting exploited or worse by older men resonated. He reached out to Dennis, passed him his work, and Dennis passed it to his literary agent, Ira Silverberg. Boom — a book deal.
There was a fair bit of skepticism about this — after all, oppressed communities (and I include both writers and queers under this banner) can get nasty when one of their kind manages to clamber up into the spotlight. People were cynical about the celebrity stampede to support the writer the way people get cynical when celebrities rush to support any cause. Others were suspicious if J.T. Leroy was who he said he was at all. People started wondering aloud if Dennis Cooper hadn’t perhaps written Sarah himself. Or maybe it was the work of another writer — someone even asked me if I were J.T. Leroy. But I believed in J.T.. Homeless, queer youths were everywhere. That people doubted that a kid from this milieu could possess literary talent smacked of classism to me. I’d bet there were bunches of J.T.s out there, scribbling into notebooks they lost while high or running from cops. Maybe J.T.’s success would open some doors for them.
While editing an anthology of first-person writing with my friend Clint Catalyst, I thought to reach out to J.T. and ask for a piece. I was thrilled that he said yes, thrilled that we could include a piece from this chimera — totally of our little queer world but suddenly thrust into the spotlight with a photo shoot in Vanity Fair and a whole season of fashions from Italian line Costume National inspired by the truck-stop hookers of Sarah. At our City Lights book party, I sold the anthology to the crowd, listing all the amazing writers who had contributed: “Dennis Cooper! Eileen Myles! J.T. Leroy — if he really exists!”
The second the gag left my mouth, my stomach plummeted. Why did I say that? Because I was nervous before the audience, and nothing is as reassuring as laughter. But the joke I made was at the expense of a struggling teenager, and I felt terrible for selling him out for an easy laugh. And beyond that, I knew that the joke would get back to him. Don’t ask me how, but I was certain. J.T. Leroy seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. The next day there was an unfamiliar voice on my voice mail, shaky and fey, demanding I call him.
Of the two hours I spent on the telephone with who I thought was J.T. Leroy, the accusation I remember most clearly is, “How do you think it feels to have survived all of those things and have people tell you that you don’t even exist?” As the survivor of much abusive creepiness in my own youth, creepiness that I was told didn’t exist or didn’t matter, the question really tore at me. I apologized forever.
Why would J.T. share this information with a person he’d never met and barely knew? A person who had just publicly betrayed him? It made no sense, but nothing about J.T. made sense. Until you remembered that you were speaking with a traumatized teenager. Then it all made sense. And you stayed on the telephone with him for hours and gave him everything he wanted.
I wasn’t the only one he did this to. The writer and sex expert Susie Bright was kept on the phone with J.T. repeatedly, long into the night, doing what she could to help this tormented kid back to the land of the living. All of us accepted a high level of emotionally draining madness because we thought we were speaking to an at-risk kid, when, in fact, we were speaking to a 40-something-year-old middling erotica writer named Laura Albert.
Although no one much cares about the J.T. Leroy scandal anymore, it was a big deal when local writer Stephen Beachy broke the story in a juicy piece of investigative reporting for New York magazine. People were pissed that a relatively privileged adult white woman had piled on the oppression to get a book deal, while others put a feminist spin on it: what an ingenious way to dupe the publishing industry into publishing a woman! If it had only been the books and the pseudonym, there might have been something to that “Look What a Woman Has to Do to Get a Book Deal Around Here” conversation. But as a writer who ran right up against Laura Albert’s deception industry, I know it wasn’t about a feminist leveling of the playing field.
After the truth came out, Laura faded away, although she’s been popping up here and there — bearing her soul at a storytelling event in New York; being featured at a reading series in Seattle. The public face of J.T., Savannah Knoop, wrote a book all about it — Girl Boy Girl: How I Became J.T. Leroy — and there were rumors of a movie in the works. The potential doors that the moment might have offered to real struggling queer and genderqueer artists never swung open, though they’re out there. Check out Imogen Binnie’s Nevada for a trans female reality check; Rhiannon Argo’s forthcoming Girls I’ve Run Away With for runaway teen lez skateboarding action; Amber Dawn’s How Poetry Saved My Life for a street-walking story you can trust; Ali Liebegott’s Cha-Ching! for a genderqueer exploration of poverty; and anything by Justin Chin for a darkly humorous and brutally honest expression of living with AIDS.
And that’s perhaps the most disheartening legacy of this literary hoax. Sure, Laura Albert’s masquerade made people wary of memoir’s claims to “truth,” but she had some help with that. The list of fake memoirs is long and contains front-page fibs like James Frey’s faux-junkie Million Little Pieces scandal as well dozens of phony hard-luck, abused-child, and holocaust-survivor tales, like Herman Rosenblat’s fraudulent concentration-camp love story Angel at the Fence, which Penguin declined to publish after the truth came out. Celebrity endorsers have fallen out of favor as well, though all the folks who cosigned J.T. seemed to have a legitimate foot in the underground — Winona through her merry-prankster childhood, Marianne Faithfull from her own time on the street, addicted, and Justin Vivian Bond, a transgender icon.
I think the real J.T. hangover has been the death of the dream that such a profound underdog could possess such talent. For a moment, all eyes were on an individual who could have given some profound insight into how people survive in the underbelly of this country. Once the hoax was revealed, and the author revealed to be a nonentity, interest in these stories seemed to evaporate as well. The collective eye returned to what it usually rests on: middle-class domesticity, the hijinks of the extremely wealthy, etc. The cultural possibilities that could have come from a street-hustling, genderqueer teen in the common eye were gone before J.T. could whip her wig off, before Laura Albert could say, “I’m sorry.”
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of the story included a statement regarding Dave Eggers, which could not be verified upon further review. And, although Michelle Tea and many others were under the impression that JT Leroy was HIV positive, Laura Albert says she never stated JT had HIV.
