I was conned by JT Leroy

Jan. 11, 2006 | There's nothing I find quite as annoying as the phrase "I told you so." But, well, I told you so. Five years ago, after I read Armistead Maupin's "The Night Listener," a novel based on his experience with a literary hoaxster, I started insisting that the real JT Leroy was most likely a 50-year-old Midwestern woman. Turns out I was off by a decade or so.

As everyone by now knows, JT Leroy does not exist. He is a literary hoax. New York magazine outed him three months ago, and Monday the New York Times came through with the rest of the story. The public face of JT Leroy is Savannah Knoop, the sister of Jeffrey Knoop, one of the authors of the fraud, and JT's books and stories were most likely written by Knoop's wife, Laura Albert, singer for their band Thistle, an entity nearly as contrived as JT himself.

Even after I'd decided that JT was not who he claimed, I kept talking to him on the phone. At first when he called he was interested in speaking to my husband, but Michael couldn't stand the guy. After their first interaction -- an aborted interview of Michael by Leroy for the magazine Bomb back when JT was known as "Terminator" -- Michael refused to have anything to do with him. But I let myself be sucked in.

There was something strangely seductive about that breathy voice on the phone. He was fun to talk to; the sheer magnitude of his self-absorption was entertaining. And there was the whole celebrity thing. He was like a breathing version of Us Magazine. He'd just hung up with Julianne Moore, Courtney Love was telling him a story, Gus Van Sant was giving him a hard time about his script.

I went along with it happily, once even listening for an hour or so as he played taped portions of his sessions with his therapist, Dr. Terrence Owens. I never really understood why JT wanted me to hear these unbelievably boring sessions. I assumed back then that it was because we had talked a lot about mental illness and he wanted me to understand the depth of his experience. In retrospect, knowing that JT does not exist, I think those tapes are a marvel. Someone actually went to the trouble of producing elaborate two-person recordings. And for what? What was the point? They were clearly meant to provide evidence of authenticity, and perhaps playing them for me was a dress rehearsal for a bigger, more important audience.

It will probably be hard for people who think of JT as a street kid turning tricks at truck stops to imagine this, but mostly JT and I talked about our kids. Maybe this was the reason JT called me, someone who wasn't famous or a literary celebrity, someone who couldn't help his career in any way, someone whose name it did no good to drop. JT Leroy just wanted to talk to another mom. He said he co-parented his kid -- a young boy -- with Speedy and Astor, the people I now understand are Laura Albert and Geoffrey Knoop. It seems likely that the person I was talking to on the phone was Laura Albert. We had long, meandering conversations about the challenges of combining work with parenting, about what kids are like at different ages, about the dilemma of private vs. public schools.

It was during one of these conversations that I came to my conclusion that JT was, in fact, a fraud. At some point, apropos of nothing, he told me that since we'd last spoken he had gone ahead and had that sex-change operation he'd been thinking about.

I don't remember the dialogue exactly, but it went something like this:

"Really?" I asked. "I thought they made you go through some elaborate hormonal process before they let you have the final surgery."

"Nah," he said. "I'd done so much damage to my penis, hacking away at it. It was no big deal just to take off the stump."

My first thought was, Jesus Christ, ouch. My second was, bullshit. I mean, come on. Hacking away at it? The stump? Not even I was gullible enough to buy that.

Next page: Why, even after I became so suspicious of Leroy, did I still talk to him on the phone?