The Lies and Follies of Laura Albert, a.k.a. JT LeRoy

When I was little, my father told me not to lie, not merely because it was wrong but because it was too hard to remember the lies and thus have your stories make sense. JT's stories made no sense. Sometimes he was Thor's father; sometimes Thor belonged to a woman named Emily, who was threatening to take the boy away. I read a Michael Musto column that claimed Speedie was a transsexual; I looked through the e-mailed photos — she did have awfully big feet. I was fairly sure the honeyed JT voice on the phone did not belong to the kid I'd met at the party, but I enjoyed the instant intimacy, and the access, however vicarious, to this white-hot corner of the literary world.

And yet the calls grew tedious: I was not interested in phone sex; did not, as JT kept asking, promote the gifts he sent. The conversations dwindled, and then stopped, until about a year later, when he called to say he was sending me a toaster, or maybe a blender, something a friend had designed. I found the call baldly patronizing and told him I did not need a small appliance. There was a pause.

"Nancy, I thought you forgot about me, and you know how I am with abandonment," he drawled, which was when I knew this was not some damaged kid but someone with a Rolodex of responses at the ready to reach the day's objective. But what was the point, to test my loyalty? Get a toaster mentioned in the Times? Whatever it was, with the exception of a short interview I conducted with him (or whoever was playing him), JT and I never spoke again.

In January 2006, following publication of a long New York magazine feature questioning the authorship of JT LeRoy's work, The New York Times authenticated the rumors: The books were written by a woman named Laura Albert, also known as Emily, also known as Speedie. The journalist in me considered calling, but Laura was in the midst of an editorial pile-on, and her boyfriend, Geoffrey Knoop (a.k.a. Astor), had left and gone public in hopes of selling movie rights to his story. So I let her be. Then, in June 2007, Antidote International Films, which three years earlier had optioned the film rights to Sarah, JT's first novel, took Laura to court and won a $350,000 judgment against her. Back in Brooklyn Heights, my mother asked if I knew Laura; I told her that Laura and I had some dealings a few years earlier.

"No, I mean when you were kids," she said, and sent a clip from the local paper, which included a photo of Laura when she was in grade school, putting to rest at least the question of whether she was female. I e-mailed "JT" to say, Hey, I was a Heights girl too.

Laura called back. It was JT's voice, albeit with more Brooklyn, less sugar. "I'm really being persecuted here," she said, explaining that the press had turned against her and gotten the story completely wrong, and maybe I, being from the same place, around the same age, would understand. Then she asked, "Did you know Ray?" I told her that yes, Ray was my brother's best friend.

It goes without saying that each generation gets the celebrities it deserves. When Laura tells me, as she will many times, "JT was my respirator; I needed him to live," she means it literally. By the time I see her again, she is surviving on thin air. W and Vanity Fair no longer come to call; it's the New York Post, which calls her "cranky" and concludes that, with Laura, "it's hard to tell where the reality starts and the show ends."

That, in better days, had been the point: Laura became famous making sure people did not know who she was, but rather who they wanted her to be. After she and Geoffrey moved to San Francisco in the mid-'90s and failed to launch their music careers, she earned a living as a phone-sex operator. Laura also applied the same skills it took to gratify clients — the false identities, the fantasies, the ready recitation of degradation — to build a telephone relationship with a San Francisco therapist, Dr. Terence Owens. Over several years of near-daily conversations, she told him she was a suicidal male teen named Terminator. Owens would later encourage Terminator to write ("because he felt JT had a problem with continuity," says Laura), paving the way for some of Laura's earliest access to readers and criticism.

During the cultural relativism of the '90s, if you wanted to sell your books and be an underground star, you could not do better than the JT confection. Support from those who'd fought the '80s culture wars? Check. Solidarity with, or at least acknowledgment from, the queer and transgender communities? Check. Drugs and sex were expected. Child prostitution might have been a dicier sell, but not if the author experienced it, a well-peddled feature of JT's life. Perhaps best of all, JT was a victim, and victimhood in the '90s meant sales, as long as you'd triumphed over the neglect and abuse and depravity. JT had, through his writing. And the more attention we gave him, the greater his triumph. He was perfect.