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Yvettep
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 946
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, March 08, 2006 - 06:17 pm: | 
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From http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/03/08/albert/ (a fairly long article, only parts snipped below)
March 8, 2006 | SAN FRANCISCO -- When Geoffrey Knoop confessed to the New York Times in February that his partner of 16 years, Laura Albert, was the one who wrote as JT LeRoy, the jig was up. For over 10 years, Albert, now 40, had fooled the literary world with her invented character, who wrote a confessional novel and stories based on his tempestuous life. The concept was tailor-made for the tragedy-redemption media racket -- LeRoy was a male cross-dressing prostitute whose mother pimped him at truck stops in West Virginia. He ended up a street urchin in San Francisco, turning tricks in the Tenderloin for heroin money, before learning to become a writer.
His books quickly became hipster samizdat. Celebrities like Lou Reed, Courtney Love and Tatum O'Neal gobbled the stories like candy and eagerly volunteered to perform his works at public readings. Movie producers smelled opportunity and bought film rights to his books. The indie film "The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things," based on LeRoy's collection of stories, starring Asia Argento and featuring cameos by Peter Fonda, Winona Ryder and Marilyn Manson, opens this Friday in New York and Los Angeles. And Albert and Knoop's rock band Thistle toured the United States and Italy, thanks to lyrics by LeRoy.
As his fame grew, so did demand for public appearances. And so Knoop's half-sister, an aspiring model and actress, was recruited to play LeRoy in public, wearing a stringy blond wig and sunglasses. With the recent admission by Knoop, persistent rumors of the gigantic ruse were finally confirmed, and the LeRoy saga quickly collapsed and disintegrated into a mist of anger and recrimination.
Albert and Knoop are now split up. The stress of keeping up the JT LeRoy charade was a source of their separation. While battling for custody of their young son, he pursues a movie deal, and she sits in her San Francisco apartment, where the phone rings, the e-mails pour in, and the JT LeRoy empire slowly melts away.
LeRoy's fiction is in many ways Albert's life. Both were fond of aliases. JT LeRoy was known as Terminator and Jeremy; Albert has used many names, including Speedie, Laura Victoria and Emily Frasier. Both engaged in long, late-night phone conversations. Both emerged from desperate lives spent on the streets -- Albert in New York, LeRoy in San Francisco.
...However you choose to view the whole affair -- cruel, obvious, protracted, selfish -- even those who are the angriest will admit that, yes, the whole thing was ingenious. Posing as a bruised young gay man with a lilting Southern accent, 10 years' worth of phone calls, sending hundreds of e-mails and faxes -- it took a lot of courage to pull off such a brazen stunt. Everyone I contacted said Albert was exactly the person who could do it, and when they discovered that she was indeed JT LeRoy, they said they weren't surprised at all. It was an incredible show, and most of the credit goes to a punk-rock mom in San Francisco who wrote porn and did phone sex for a living.
...In interviews, Albert, posing as LeRoy, said an outreach worker named Emily Frasier first found Jeremy at age 13, fresh from a childhood of abuse and neglect, wandering around in San Francisco traffic in a haze. Albert said Frasier rescued him and brought him to Owens. (Owens did not return my messages.)
Wilinski was fascinated that a 15-year-old kid could have written something so mature. It was rough but showed some real talent. "I wrote a paragraph basically encouraging the kid to keep writing," Wilinski says. "The next week or so I got a phone call from this soft voice, hemming and hawing. It was a kid, I thought. We ended up having a relationship that was almost exclusively over the phone. He called me a lot. He would call me at 11 p.m. and read me things. My editorial input was just to encourage him to keep writing. 'Oh, that's interesting,' I would say. 'Why don't you tell me more about that?'"
The troubled teenager, however, pushed the conversations beyond books and movies and writing. Wilinski found himself, as so many other JT LeRoy friends would later discover, something of a confessor and life coach.
Says Wilinski: "It wasn't just about writing. It was, 'I think I'm going to kill myself. I'm going to start using again.' Those sorts of things. He got me on the phone with [author] Dennis Cooper once. I don't know what the hell he was doing. 'Hey Dennis, Hey Eric. So, you're friends with Jeremy. OK, gotta go.' The thing for me is, I was handed this kid by somebody, an intelligent person who I trusted. I had no reason to doubt the legitimacy that Jeremy existed."
The two continued their phone relationship for the next few years until LeRoy's first published story, "Baby Doll," appeared under the byline "Terminator" in a September 1997 anthology edited by Laurie Stone, "Close to the Bone: Memoirs of Hurt, Rage, and Desire." Then the calls from Jeremy tapered off. "I just figured he'd moved onto other people," says Wilinski. "It didn't bum me out that he stopped calling as much."
...For the past five years, Albert had been doing exactly that -- creating a persona that would be irresistible to listeners. With her sexpert and singing careers having crashed to the ground, she concentrated on being JT LeRoy. She showed friends a copy of the unpublished manuscript of the novel "Sarah," and said it was written by a boy she knew from doing sex outreach. But with certain friends, she bragged that she wrote it.
When the literary publishing house Bloomsbury released "Sarah" by JT LeRoy in April 2000, it detonated in the publishing world like a secret bomb. The lurid tale, told in teenage slang, had the whiff of autobiography. An androgynous 12-year-old narrator, nicknamed Cherry Vanilla, competes with his mother, Sarah, for tricks at truck stops in the South.
An elaborate back story quickly unfolded in reviews and articles. This was the life the author had lived as a young boy. He eventually ended up wandering the streets of San Francisco, and was rescued by a doctor and sympathetic writers and editors, who encouraged him to put down his hellish life on the page. Although Albert didn't initially publicize LeRoy as being HIV-positive, at some point in the media swirl, the young prostitute was mentioned as having the virus, and Albert never discouraged the rumor, which continued to disseminate through articles and blogs.
...Today, Albert sits in her San Francisco apartment surrounded by ghosts, the papers and books and galleys and manuscripts, remnants of a career that punk'd us all. Producing these books was a collaborative effort involving many authors and editors. Does she have a writing future under her own name? Will anyone care if she puts out a book besides the tell-all story about the hoax?
"I see JT as an elaborate nom de plume," says former New York Press editor Strausbaugh. "Sort of a 21st century George Sand. Here's this middle-aged woman who's not getting anywhere as a writer. She reinvents herself as a girly boy and becomes a huge success. On whom does that reflect more poorly, her or all the rest of us?"
Many of her friends, like Blush, are proud of what she did. "It's very hard to pull off a prank these days," he says. Wilinski, who witnessed the hoax from the beginning, sees some positive aspect to all of it. "The runaway kids that I ran into on Haight Street were humanized for me because of the JT books," he says. "My friends felt the same way."
A few months ago, an old friend of Albert's got back in touch with her after several years. Rumors and news stories were circulating that JT was a hoax. Albert told the friend it wasn't true. Regardless, the friend continued, JT LeRoy was in a way pure genius. Albert replied, "You know, I just like to get good work out there."
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 4148
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, March 08, 2006 - 07:54 pm: |
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A compelling example of truth being stranger than fiction. |
Emanuel
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Emanuel
Post Number: 164
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, March 09, 2006 - 09:21 am: |
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This story is a great example of how to promote of film. I wonder if the studio sent the New York Times a press release which helped them decide to write the story. Free publicity is beautiful. |
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