Author: The JT LeRoy Story

Author: The JT LeRoy Story

Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary “Author: The JT LeRoy Story” provides a complex and deeply engaging look at one of the stranger episodes in recent American cultural history. It tells the story of a teenage male prostitute in San Francisco who claimed to be HIV-positive and became a minor literary sensation about 15 years ago. He said he was the grandson of a West Virginia fire and brimstone radio preacher whose rebellious daughter, Sarah, grew up to be a truck stop hooker who sometimes sold her child to truckers, dressing him as both boy and girl.

Once in San Francisco, after Sarah’s death, JT sought out a psychiatrist named Dr. Terrence Owens, who says that he advised him to write as therapy. Soon stories about the kid’s life began appearing in various publications under the byline “Terminator.” Then Terminator gave what seemed like a real name J.T. Leroy and published two books of fictionalized memoir, “Sarah” and “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things.”

Both books received serious praise in all the right places, and JT LeRoy became something like famous. He had never been seen before this; only a few vague pictures had been published. But now he could not hide: A short, androgynous teenager always wearing a blond wig beneath a floppy hat beneath big sunglasses became his public image. At this point he said he lived with his manager, Speedy (a British-accented woman who always accompanied him) and her boyfriend Astor; they also had a baby together (Cheyenne) and were in rock bands.

JT wanted to know stars; through phone calls mainly he made friends with many of them. Bono gave him career advice; David Milch let him work on “Deadwood,” Gus Van Sant on “Elephant,” which won at Cannes (Van Sant said JT deserved part of that Palme d’Or). Billy Corgan, Courtney Love and many others were buddies. In “Author,” the extent of the JT cult is suggested by an early-2000s event in New York City where Winona Ryder gushes over their friendship and Lou Reed is among those who read from the young author’s works.

And then it all came crashing down. In 2005, New York magazine reported that JT LeRoy was not a real person but rather a creation of Laura Albert, a New York-born writer in her 40s. According to this account, which was borne out by further reporting in the New York Times, she was the real Speedy with a fake Brit accent; Astor was her longtime boyfriend, musician Geoff Knoop; and the JT who appeared in public was Savannah Knoop, Geoffrey’s sister (Knoop wore wigs and sunglasses and told people she was Leroy’s cousin).

The revelations would seem to relegate the career of JT LeRoy to a file labeled “Hoax,” a label that Albert who appears throughout “Author” rejects as reductive and unfair. I am inclined to agree with her on this point but before we get too deep into things, I should probably lay my cards on the table here:

During the late 1990s, when I worked for New York Press, a publication that came out once a week and was called an alternative weekly, I read some articles by someone who said he was named Terminator and had been a teenage prostitute in San Francisco. I thought they were great stories and wanted to know how to contact him.

My editor told me that none of the staff members knew him personally but that if I wanted to write a letter to the editor praising his work, they would probably print it and hopefully he would see it. He also suggested that maybe instead of sending my letter in with everybody else’s mail at the office, I could send it directly to Terminator at whatever street corner or freeway underpass he called home.

We used to talk every week or so, sometimes for an hour or more. I never once doubted that I was speaking with a teenage boy from the South; not only did he sound like one, but he seemed fragile and damaged in a way that matched up all too well with his writing. And yet he was also charming and smart and funny and sweet: a pleasure to speak with, always interesting.

At one point I asked him what would happen when his mother dressed him as a girl and West Virginia truckers found out he was a boy. “Godfrey,” he drawled, “you’d be surprised how many quarterbacks like a cheerleader with a dick.” (He was right: it hadn’t occurred to me.)

The peak of our correspondence came while JT was writing Sarah (I tried in vain to get him to call it Lot Lizards), and later on he gave me credit for having “midwifed” the book. Not much midwifing went on, really I listened to long sections of it being read aloud and made some comments because it didn’t need my help. It is amazing now and had been amazing then. During this same period I knew that JT was working with other writers, because “Author” suggests that JT recorded every conversation he ever had, but friends of mine who are writers Bruce Benderson, Mary Karr, Dennis Cooper are interviewed in the film. (I’m not sorry.)

In 2000 I was about to fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco when I mentioned to JT that I’d love to meet up there somewhere; he sounded panicked and offered several reasons why that couldn’t happen, which didn’t strike me as suspicious since extreme shyness mixed with psychological fragility has always been part of his shtick.

A couple years after that I crashed the New York event where Winona Ryder showed up near tears because she’d been cast as the woman playing JT in a movie, and where Lou Reed told the audience he had something more important to do than listen to them talk about some problem with their “sound system” (meaning their mental health). I sat down next to the blond person who’d been introduced as JT; there was no reason for him to recognize me because we hadn’t met yet.

I thought of handing him my business card but didn’t because by then I’d decided that this person was actually a girl (the hips were the giveaway), although it seemed like further evidence of both his shyness and his wit that he would have a woman play him in public. When he called me later I told him how sorry I was not to have identified myself. “Don’t apologize,” he laughed. And without missing a beat: “I was having an out of body experience that night.” (I should have asked which body.)

Credit is due to Feuerzeig, who previously made “The Devil and Daniel Johnston,” and editor Michelle M. Witten for one of the most sharply crafted and enthralling documentaries in recent memory. Through all the bizarre twists and turns of JT Leroy’s brief career, they manage to thread flashbacks from Laura Albert’s early life so troubled she might well have produced someone who looked like what she imagined JT looking like, who wrote things like what she imagined JT writing, who needed exactly the kind of writing therapy Dr. Owens prescribed without ever allowing us an ounce less sympathy for any character we encounter along the way.

When the movie premiered at Sundance, some reviewers bashed it for not pushing harder against Albert’s version or interviewing people who were “duped” by her about their current feelings. But that’s as dumb as saying Errol Morris should have interviewed all of Robert McNamara’s detractors for “The Fog of War.” “Author” is a certain kind of documentary: a first person story about how one person made up another person. It raises a million questions about where art, celebrity and mental illness intersect in our media culture, but it also presents us with Laura Albert as a shape-shifting artist of genius-level talent, imagination and resourcefulness.

When the truth came out about JT, I was devastated like if any friend had died. But then and now, I certainly didn’t feel “tricked,” any more than I feel “betrayed” by any novel. I felt I’d been treated to an absolute feast of entertainment, taken on a once in a lifetime imaginary trip with an unbelievably memorable character. And usefully educated about different ways to see reality. To me, JT remains far realer than many people I meet but then Ziggy Stardust is much realer than the Electoral College to me too; and Scarlett O’Hara is more real than Melania Trump.

After the dust settled Laura Albert called me up. She was just as sweet and sensitive as JT had been. I told her that no matter what anybody else thinks or how many Charlie Brown/great pumpkin jokes they make this Halloween, I still believe in JT and always will. She said she understood.

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