She is JT LeRoy

How did a 40-year-old woman fool the world into thinking she was teenage prostitute and wunderkind author JT LeRoy? As a punk rocker, porn writer and phone sex operator, Laura Albert had been inventing herself for years.

By Jack Boulware

Read more: Politics, News, Jack Boulware

Photo of Laura Albert from Laura Albert's 1990s Web site, lauravictoria.com

March 8, 2006 | SAN FRANCISCO -- When Geoffrey Knoop confessed to the New York Times in February that his partner of 16 years, Laura Albert, was the one who wrote as JT LeRoy, the jig was up. For over 10 years, Albert, now 40, had fooled the literary world with her invented character, who wrote a confessional novel and stories based on his tempestuous life. The concept was tailor-made for the tragedy-redemption media racket -- LeRoy was a male cross-dressing prostitute whose mother pimped him at truck stops in West Virginia. He ended up a street urchin in San Francisco, turning tricks in the Tenderloin for heroin money, before learning to become a writer.

His books quickly became hipster samizdat. Celebrities like Lou Reed, Courtney Love and Tatum O'Neal gobbled the stories like candy and eagerly volunteered to perform his works at public readings. Movie producers smelled opportunity and bought film rights to his books. The indie film "The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things," based on LeRoy's collection of stories, starring Asia Argento and featuring cameos by Peter Fonda, Winona Ryder and Marilyn Manson, opens this Friday in New York and Los Angeles. And Albert and Knoop's rock band Thistle toured the United States and Italy, thanks to lyrics by LeRoy.

As his fame grew, so did demand for public appearances. And so Knoop's half-sister, an aspiring model and actress, was recruited to play LeRoy in public, wearing a stringy blond wig and sunglasses. With the recent admission by Knoop, persistent rumors of the gigantic ruse were finally confirmed, and the LeRoy saga quickly collapsed and disintegrated into a mist of anger and recrimination.

Albert and Knoop are now split up. The stress of keeping up the JT LeRoy charade was a source of their separation. While battling for custody of their young son, he pursues a movie deal, and she sits in her San Francisco apartment, where the phone rings, the e-mails pour in, and the JT LeRoy empire slowly melts away.

LeRoy's fiction is in many ways Albert's life. Both were fond of aliases. JT LeRoy was known as Terminator and Jeremy; Albert has used many names, including Speedie, Laura Victoria and Emily Frasier. Both engaged in long, late-night phone conversations. Both emerged from desperate lives spent on the streets -- Albert in New York, LeRoy in San Francisco.

The heart of the LeRoy saga beats in San Francisco, the streets where young people roll up on shore and pick up the pieces of a scarred life. "San Francisco flotsam," a friend of Albert's describes the milieu. People don't move to San Francisco to climb the corporate ladder of Manhattan or hitch onto the fast train of Hollywood. They come to choose a new name, take drugs and get freaky with sex, start bands, zines and Web sites. Salvation doesn't come through success and career. It's gained by getting out of your head, having a laugh, pissing off the uptight and knowing you got away with something. And if you happen to make a living at it, hey, that's good too.

If you traversed through San Francisco's underground art and music scenes in the late '80s and '90s, you would have crossed paths with Albert and Knoop. Both of them circled in and out of my own life for over a decade, until last September, when Albert, posing as LeRoy, agreed once more to have "his" work read at an event for Litquake, the San Francisco literary festival of which I'm co-director.

While I was writing this story, Albert and her family did not respond to my calls. Knoop remembered me from the early '90s when I was editor of the San Francisco magazine the Nose, and was initially excited about doing an interview, but said he had to run it past his publicist and entertainment lawyer. He later begged off after his attorney told him the interview could damage his custody case.

A number of the couple's friends and acquaintances agreed to talk to me on the condition that I not use their names. They said they wanted to remain friends with Albert and Knoop. They were also embarrassed. "If you're somebody who's a prominent person, you don't want to be seen with egg on your face," says renowned sex author Susie Bright, who met the couple when Albert was struggling to make a name for herself as a sex writer.

However you choose to view the whole affair -- cruel, obvious, protracted, selfish -- even those who are the angriest will admit that, yes, the whole thing was ingenious. Posing as a bruised young gay man with a lilting Southern accent, 10 years' worth of phone calls, sending hundreds of e-mails and faxes -- it took a lot of courage to pull off such a brazen stunt. Everyone I contacted said Albert was exactly the person who could do it, and when they discovered that she was indeed JT LeRoy, they said they weren't surprised at all. It was an incredible show, and most of the credit goes to a punk-rock mom in San Francisco who wrote porn and did phone sex for a living.

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