I owe my recent fascination with false knowledge to a person I never met – a person that nobody, as a point of fact, ever really met. This garrulous yet evasive person was called JT Leroy, a former street hustler, a gay teen runaway from West Virginia and – as it turned out at last – an elaborate fictional construct from the mind of an older woman writer who had invented him.
Writers have used pseudonyms before. But Laura Albert manufactured a whole person who had friendships with people. It seems likely to me that this was the whole reason she invented him – to get close to some of the writers she admired who she accurately guessed would be more interested in someone like JT than they'd ever been in her. I had a couple good friends who "knew" JT. They were young gay guys close to "his" age and they emailed him regularly; they talked to him on the phone. They were completely willing to accept that, on occasion, JT told lies– that he'd carried around a fax machine while he was living on the street in order to fax pages of a story to the writer Dennis Cooper, for example – and they would admit he was a bullshitter. It did not make them doubt he existed.
You couldn't argue with the sheer number of people who knew him. Even if they had never met him in person, other people had, or were assumed to have had. Like author Mary Gaitskill, who definitely had met him in person, once, very briefly, in a San Francisco bookstore – him departing so fast, according to her later description of the event, that she did not speak to him and could not really describe him physically. Yet everyone knew she had met him. Or what about Dr. Terrence Owens, the noted psychiatrist that JT credited with saving his life and encouraging him to write? He was verifiably real, he was the head of an adolescent psychology unit at a very real hospital that truly worked with street kids. If JT wasn't real, why would he allow his name to be used and abused? It seemed improbable he could be anything but a real boy.
My most personal connection to the story: I spoke to JT just once on the phone, when I was visiting San Francisco on my first book tour. Our mutual friends had suggested I send him a copy of my book and see if he'd review it. Calling him was a surreal experience. The woman who answered the phone transferred me, or put me on hold – a number of odd noises – then, from the bottom of a deep dark well, a pale fragile voice spoke to me, horrifyingly, like a spirit voice through some oracular device. The ghostly voice complimented my writing and then asked me if I would mind writing the review of my book myself, and sending it to him so he could touch it up to make it his own.
I did as he asked, I will admit (though he never published it). As humiliating as it was, he was very hot at that moment. But I knew then that there was something messed up about JT Leroy beyond the things that were supposed to be messed up about him. That was the year 2000. It was more than five years that Laura Albert's increasingly elaborate and increasingly incredible hoax was unmasked.
As a writer, I've been friends with people I've never met – pen pals, we used to call them, across the country. In 1991 I interviewed by telephone a young writer named Joey Manley who lived in Alabama; I did not meet him in person until 1994, but I believed in him from the moment I saw his name on a book jacket and heard his voice on a phone. It never occurred to me that I needed more proof that he existed. He does exist, and Joey Manley is his real name, almost certainly; it's what his mother calls him, if that woman I've met really is his mother; though I have not seen his original birth certificate.
In the first years of our friendship I knew no more about Joey than those friends of mine knew about JT. What would be the use of skepticism? In 2002, when Albert's young sister-in-law began making silent, wigged, sunglassed public appearances as Leroy, my friend Phillip got to meet his pen pal for the first time. The next day he was terribly hurt at how monosyllabic, rude, and unfriendly JT had been to him. He was angry and felt that JT was social climbing – friends with actors and rock stars now -- and way beyond being friends with some unknown young writer. It was many months before Philip was able to imagine that the person he'd met that night was someone he'd never spoken to before in his life.
In the five years it took for the hoax to come to light, I didn't enjoy talking about my suspicion, verging into strong belief, that JT Leroy was not real. It made me feel paranoid -- crazy. And now that Laura Albert's role has been unmasked I still feel – what? dirty? uncomfortable? embarrassed? – talking about it. Only now it seems doubtful that anyone could have really believed.
It was a bubble, I guess – a bubble of belief. Once the bubble's popped, you can't unpop it, and the very fact that it existed suddenly seems improbable. But I learned a couple of things from JT Leroy. One, that each and every day we assume the reality of all sorts of things that, practically speaking, we couldn't begin to prove.
And two, once you begin seeing all the gaps between what you think is true and what you can prove is true, it makes you feel like the world's a slippery place to stand on. And who needs that? Yet here we are, slipping.
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