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Who is JT LeRoy? The True Identity of a Great Literary Hustler 10/10/2005 11:39 PM SAVE THIS | EMAIL THIS | Close Profile Who is the Real JT LeRoy? A search for the true identity of a great literary hustler. By Stephen Beachy Laura Albert (a.k.a. Speedie or Emily Frasier), left, with JT LeRoy at an event he hosted at Deitch Projects last year.(Photo credit: Danielle Levitt) In 2000, when JT LeRoy’s novel Sarah was published, I attended his first reading in San Francisco, where local writers read in place of the pathologically shy author. Beforehand, Mark Ewert, who had helped organize the reading, shared rumors with me about LeRoy. Because almost no one had ever met him in person, some people thought novelist Dennis Cooper was actually the author, or maybe Ewert himself, Cooper’s ex-boyfriend. Certainly LeRoy seemed suspiciously similar to the characters in Cooper’s novels, fucked-up teenage boys in perpetual danger, or to the wise, otherworldly children in Ewert’s Web film Piki & Poko. JT, or Jeremy, LeRoy, or “Terminator” (as he was first known), was a teenage hustler who’d been pimped out as a cross-dressed prostitute by his mother at truck stops throughout the South, until he landed on the streets of San Francisco in the early-to-mid- nineties. At the time, Ewert himself was sure that LeRoy was more or less whom he claimed to be; he’d spent hours on the phone with LeRoy. He even spotted someone at the reading whom he believed to be JT, appearing incognito. Ewert reported his hunch to Dennis Cooper, who reported it to JT. Ewert had spotted him, JT confessed, and JT was highly upset. The JT legend incorporated this anonymous, spectral presence into its mythology. Even if JT didn’t show his face, we could still assume that anytime he had an event—and there were many—he was there, somewhere; we just couldn’t see him. According to the official story, available in dozens of interviews LeRoy has conducted almost entirely by phone or e-mail, LeRoy was saved from his street life at the age of 13 or 14 by psychologist Dr. Terrence Owens. To give JT continuity between therapy sessions, Owens suggested that JT write down his stories, which Owens then gave to his neighbor, the editor Eric Wilinski, for feedback. JT http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Who+is…etro%2Fnews%2Fpeople%2Ffeatures%2F14718%2Findex.html&partnerID=73272 Page 1 of 9 Who is JT LeRoy? The True Identity of a Great Literary Hustler 10/10/2005 11:39 PM contacted Wilinski and, through him, JT’s favorite poet, Sharon Olds. A john who liked to read Olds’s work while having sex with JT had given him her books, JT once said—and Olds happened to have run the graduate program Wilinski attended. A later addition to JT’s story has LeRoy found on the streets by Emily Frasier, an outreach worker who recommended him to Owens around 1993, when he was 13, and who lived with him in an intimate alternate family, along with her husband and their child. Around the same time, JT also reached out to other literary figures by fax: In 1994, he got in touch with Dennis Cooper by faxing a request through Cooper’s agent, Ira Silverberg. He struck up a telephone friendship with Cooper, who introduced him to the writer Bruce Benderson, through whom he contacted novelist Joel Rose, writer Laurie Stone, editor Karen Rinaldi, and agent Henry Dunow. By the age of 16, he was being published in Nerve, the New York Press, Spin, and various anthologies, and by 17, he had a book deal, brokered by Rinaldi and Dunow, at Crown. That novel, Sarah, was followed by a collection of stories in 2001 that was recently made into a film by Asia Argento. Still just in his twenties, JT had been translated into twenty languages, was making movie deals, and was writing the lyrics for a band, Thistle. After the 2000 reading, I began to collect other pieces of the story. Ewert, Cooper, and Benderson had never seen him in person, and neither had his agent nor his editors. (When we spoke in May, Eric Wilinski did not mention having met JT before 2001, but during final edits of this article, he said he had met him earlier.) According to Dunow, he and Rinaldi discussed the idea of bringing JT to New York to meet other editors at Crown, but JT reacted to the idea with such anxiety that it became clear it was never going to happen. On a trip to San Francisco, Dunow arranged to meet JT in Washington Square Park, but JT didn’t show up. Another editor, Panio Gianopoulos, worked with JT for years; in 2002, they met for the first time in San Francisco—on a street corner, through a car window. JT wore a wig, and his friend Emily did most of the talking. We can never know for sure who’s on the other end of a screen name or a phone line, and given that these were JT’s two chosen media, the possibilities of his identity seemed endless. I didn’t believe that he was either Ewert or Cooper, although it seemed reasonable that he wasn’t exactly whom he claimed to be either. I spoke to the writer Brian Pera, who’d traveled the country on his own book tour in 2000. Everywhere he went, he’d met other writers who were in contact with JT by e-mail and phone; JT had bonded via extensive, often contradictory revelations, but was never able to meet these carefully cultivated confidants in public or in private. Then in 2001, a person claiming to be LeRoy began appearing in public, usually decked out in wig and http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Who+is…etro%2Fnews%2Fpeople%2Ffeatures%2F14718%2Findex.html&partnerID=73272 Page 2 of 9 Who is JT LeRoy? The True Identity of a Great Literary Hustler 10/10/2005 11:39 PM Then in 2001, a person claiming to be LeRoy began appearing in public, usually decked out in wig and sunglasses. But the rumors persisted. Editor Ian Philips of Suspect Thoughts Press says, “Every time I’m alone with another San Francisco publisher, editor, author, reviewer, bookseller, I get asked one of three questions: Who does your distribution? What do you think of Dave Eggers? And who writes as JT LeRoy really? And no matter which question we start with, we always end up on the third—and the conspiracy theories fly.” These suspicions were bolstered by the precociousness of both JT’s networking skills and his confessional fiction. LeRoy claimed to have bounced around truck stops, through youth shelters and rehab, and to be a junkie. In interviews, JT would claim to be spreading the rumors himself that Dennis Cooper or the director Gus Van Sant was the real JT LeRoy; he suggested that this was the defense mechanism of an abused child, a web of arrows pointing in multiple directions to protect the writer from public exposure. The one irrefutable aspect of his story was that he had an incredible knack for self-promotion. Every other aspect, a mounting pile of evidence suggests, is part of an elaborately wrought fiction. The literary hoax is an ancient form, dating back at least to the 1700s, when teenage poet Thomas Chatterton got his work published as that of a fifteenth-century monk. A good hoax is like a good con. Though a con liberates the mark from some of his material things, it also teaches him how easily he was tricked, how ready he was to believe certain stories. To “wizen the mark” is to send him back into the world a little less wide-eyed, a little more jaded, his vision now penetrating beyond the surfaces of things. But to enlighten us, a good hoax or a good con must eventually be revealed. In the early days, the mid-nineties, LeRoy built a core of literary supporters—Cooper and Benderson and Olds, Mary Karr and Mary Gaitskill, among others—engaging in lengthy, intimate phone conversations and correspondence with them. His biography seemed tailor-made for their interests. Like Olds, he had a strict family background; like Cooper’s characters, he was a boy who had fantasies of being beaten up; like Benderson’s characters, he was a hustler; like Gaitskill’s characters, he was involved in S&M and prostitution. Eventually, he moved on in his affections to music and movie stars. Those who spoke to him in the beginning affirm that he certainly came across as a disturbed teenager, and they didn’t doubt that aspect of the story. JT used to break into other personalities on the phone, Cooper says. Over time, his publishing friends experienced his transformation from a stammering, freaked-out child to a “cocky, sassy, ambition-driven megalomaniac,” as one literary contact put it. But how had a homeless teen developed both the writing skills and that endless ambition? How could somebody so pathologically shy be working as a prostitute? And how did he manage to send those faxes? It seems LeRoy himself is keenly aware of the implausibility of some of his claims and in interviews goes to some pains to explain, for instance, how he picked up his literary tastes from his Polk Street johns. He explains how he was given a fax machine by a trick and how he managed to send faxes from public WIGS AND restrooms—the rare restrooms where junkies fix but that also have phone jacks hidden in the corners.

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