At the turn of the millennium, you didn’t have to be tight with the literati to know who JT LeRoy was. JT, or Jeremiah, or “Terminator”, was a teenage hustler who’d been dressed as a girl and pimped out as by his drug-addled mother at truck stops across his native West Virginia and neighbouring states.
By 13, JT was a heroin addict hustling in San Francisco. He was HIV-positive and wandering in traffic when he encountered an outreach worker, who introduced the traumatised adolescent to Dr Terrence Owens, a therapist, who encouraged JT to write about his experiences.
For a time, it seemed as though the youngster had found his salvation. By 17, his account of seducing one of his mother's boyfriends was selected for an anthology of short stories, Close to the Bone: Memoirs of Hurt, Rage, and Desire. He also found a makeshift family comprising Emily Frasier (the social worker who rescued him), her husband and their young son.
By 24, JT's first novel, Sarah (1999), and a collection of short stories, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2000), made him a literary superstar. Celebrities of all stripes (Lou Reed, Bono, Madonna, Rosario Dawson, Winona Ryder, Carrie Fisher, Tom Waits, Shirley Manson) queued up to sing the praises of the pathologically shy young writer, who, during his rare public outings, mumbled inaudibly from under a blonde wig and sunglasses.
This enigmatic quality only increased the clamour: the director Gus Van Sant hired JT to write the screenplay for his Columbine-inspired drama Elephant. The New York Times sent him to Disneyland Paris. Abercrombie & Fitch featured him in their catalogue. Juergen Teller, Ash, Marilyn Manson, Nancy Sinatra and Bryan Adams commissioned liner notes and biographical pieces. An adaptation of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, directed by and starring Asia Argento, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004.
Then, by the end of the following year, JT LeRoy was no more.
Junkie fax
In October 2005, Stephen Beachy, writing in New York Magazine, picked apart much of the mythology surrounding the author, noting that even JT LeRoy seemed aware of the implausibility of the JT LeRoy story. "In interviews," Beachy wrote, LeRoy "goes to some pains to explain, for instance, how he picked up his literary tastes from his Polk Street johns . . . how he was given a fax machine by a trick and how he managed to send faxes from public restrooms – the rare restrooms where junkies fix but that also have phone jacks hidden in the corners."
By the following January, the New York Times had unmasked Laura Albert as the real JT LeRoy. Albert, who had been introduced to JT's celebrity chums as either his manager Speedie or as Emily Fraser, the social worker who "saved" him, had written all of JT's fiction, corresponded as JT by fax and email, and had spoken as JT on the phone. She was aided and abetted by her husband Astor, aka Geoffrey Knoop, and her sister-in-law Savannah Knoop, who wore the wigs and sunglasses in public appearances.
This unlikely tale is meticulously reconstructed in Author: The JT LeRoy Story, a new film from Jeff Feuerzeig (The Devil and Daniel Johnston). This isn't the first documentary to look at the strange case, but it is the first to feature extensive interviews with Laura Albert.
Jewish punk
Why Feuerzeig, I wonder? Both film-maker and subject share a “similar dialect”, notes Albert, now aged 50. She, like her director, was forged by New York’s punk scene and by Jewish working-class backgrounds. But there was something else, too.
"Jeff's film The Devil and Daniel Johnston allowed the story to unravel in a delicately organic manner, and that demands intense creativity and craft," Albert says. "It's completely engaging. He immerses you in Daniel's life and art. And, of course, my art was immersive – interactive, really. I wrote fiction books that totally drew the reader into their world, and I wanted their author to live in the world without me. All I wanted to do was hide.
“And yet I also had a longing to be of the world, to go out in spirit with my writing. Jeff wanted to hear my voice, not just make a diagnosis or do a celebrity parade, which a lot of others, who approached me to do my story, wanted to do. It was always about communicating my art.”
Nonetheless, JT’s celebrity coterie are represented by Albert’s extensive library of telephone recordings. Mid-conversation, for example, we hear Hole frontwoman Courtney Love take a little break: “There’s a really small line of coke here and I don’t want to put you on hold.”
She is here
“I was in the habit of recording from childhood,” Albert tells me. “My mother was a journalist and wrote under a male pen name. She did interviews with musical playwrights and she recorded her interviews. When I was little, she set me up with a mic and a reel-to-reel, and it was like a form of diary for me, before I could write. It allowed all in me to flow and say, ‘I am here’, because from a very young age, I felt removed from a core self.
“I felt so out of control of my experience, I needed to try to understand it, to capture it, to share it. The calls I was doing as other people, mostly as boys, started long before Jeremy.”
Even those who are familiar with the story of how this Brooklyn-born housewife became JT Leroy will find Author to be as revelatory as it is riveting. Keeping the camera firmly on Albert – who, unsurprisingly, is a born storyteller – a complex narrative emerges concerning a damaged, sexually abused little girl who grows up to be a dangerously overweight adult. "Jeremy", stripped of notoriety, was just another fugue or outlet for someone who would otherwise have none.
“JT was born from a need to communicate things that I was too ashamed to speak about in my own voice, and he became the fully formed person through whom I could create my art,” says Albert. “You can’t separate the deep shame I felt about my body from the damage caused by being molested as a small child. This was way beyond insecurity. I had no words to express what had happened, I just internalised it and turned my sense of shame on my appearance.
“When I was growing up, there was no discussion of bad touch versus good touch, which thankfully is so prevalent now for kids. And when they did start doing after-school specials about child abuse, it usually featured a boy, a blond hair, blue-eyed, slender attractive boy. When it was about a girl, she was thin and pretty. They were the ones that got the concern, that were loved, that were saved. Not someone like me.
“I truly believed that if I were thin and pretty, everything would be perfect. We’ve been more educated so we understand the mechanics of addiction. But when it comes to food and weight, we still see an overweight child or adult and judge them harshly – they have no self-control, or are pigs. That just compounds the shame and self-hate, even though we know the same components are involved with other forms of addiction.
“It’s ‘okay’ to have a laugh at an overweight person’s expense.”
Always questions
As with all great watercooler- friendly projects, Author raises as many questions as it answers. Why, for example, is Laura Albert so visibly panicked by the New York Magazine story yet so philosophical about the New York Times investigation, which appeared just three months later?
“I would never have been ready on my own for JT to go,” she says. “It’s as if we were conjoined twins, and we shared a lung. Often one twin is stronger, and in the beginning, I felt like the appendage. That changed over time as JT became more externalised.
"Still, I was just starting to practise living in my own skin, and I was never open to him going. Before JT was outed, David Milch asked me how I wanted my name to appear in the Deadwood credits – my opportunity to be more out in the world as a writer. I could not tolerate the idea, and I told him "JT LeRoy". I wrote in my diary that if they take JT, I will die. I could not imagine an after.
“So I never would have volunteered for it, but in the end, I feel it was a gift.”
- Author: The JT Leroy Story opens on July 29th
