JT LeRoy Hoax

Well I got totally suckered by this one. I had read "her" best selling book, "The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things." This was a collection of stories about a young boy on the run with a black female prostitute. The boy starts turning tricks himself while dressed in drag and hanging out at truck stops. These were very convincing stories and the books were showered with praise. Better yet, the elusive JT LeRoy, would make rare, carefully staged appearances at certain events. The supposed drag queen trannie former hooker was gorgeous in an exotic way, sporting a big blonde wig, a hat and blood red lipstick.

The hoax was wildly successful. "Her" books were best sellers in 20 countries. The writer was embraced as a hero to the gay and trannie communities and also appeared at some benefits for AIDS prevention.

The first shoe dropped about a month ago when New York Magazine came out with an article that JT may be a hoax. I read the article but it seemed to generate more questions than answers. One of the questions was why didn't you ever see JT LeRoy with Laura Albert, who claims to have helped discover LeRoy? Laura is suspected of writing the books and orchestrating the entire JT LeRoy mystique, purely for a profit motive. As you might guess, the article was met with derision by the LeRoy camp, who insisted that not only did LeRoy exist but "she" could also prove that she wrote every word.

So it was still kind of open to debate. But then yesterdays' expose in The New York Times pretty much drove a stake into LeRoy's heart. The Times article was helped by a few Internet sites that spotted a picture of a young woman, Savannah Knoop, at a store promotion in 2002, who bore a remarkable resemblence to the mysterious JT LeRoy when in mufti. Then when they discovered that this young woman was actually the half sister of Laura Albert's boyfriend, the jig was up.

I really have to hand it to Laura Albert. She kept tons of people fooled for a very long time. This is the biggest book hoax since Clifford Irving almost got away with publishing a fake biography of Howard Hughes. He would have succeeded and made a lot of money had it not been for Hughes getting so upset that he agreed to go on TV to refute the claims in the book. I think Irving did some time for this stunt. Wonder what ever happened to him?

I think that Laura Albert got overconfident about pulling it off. I'm sure the New York Times was very alarmed by the New York Magazine expose of JT LeRoy, especially since they had hired LeRoy to do a travel piece about DisneyWorld Paris. So Laura Albert submits the article to the Times and in it LeRoy mentions being a party of four as they visit the theme park. However when the expense account documents are submitted the accounting dept. notes that there were only three people staying at the hotel, none of whom are named JT LeRoy. It looks like the gravy train just stopped for Laura Albert. But it had a long run.