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

Before she explains it, Laura goes over some back story, the details of which seem designed, as were JT's, to entice and repel: As a child, Laura believed little girls were not valued enough to be "rescued" and so dreamt of being a little boy. She claims to have suffered repeated episodes of sexual abuse and to have "given my body to my mother's boyfriends." She says she did not fit in at school, spent months in a psychiatric hospital, lived in a girls' home, became a ward of the state, won writing awards, was a skateboarding proto-punk on New York's Lower East Side, and ran the Mafia's phone-sex line, all by the age of 17.

Above Laura's dining table and watching us have tea is a framed photo of her mother, Carolyn Albert, a former New York City schoolteacher and drama critic who ran Underdogs Inc., the corporation set up to receive payments for JT. It is believed Carolyn signed JT LeRoy's name on the Sarah contract, one of the points on which Antidote hung its lawsuit: no person, no contract.

"They bought a novel, which is fiction," insists Laura, noting that when Antidote's Jeffrey Levy-Hinte found out there was no JT, he asked Laura to enfold her life rights into the contract in order to make a "meta-movie," an offer she refused.

"The Washington Post said, 'Her story is more interesting than JT's,'" says Laura. "That's why they want to make a movie of my story, and I dared to say no." What the Post in fact wrote was, "If you are Laura Albert, you just pulled off something pretty amazing, in its own way." But an argument can be made for Laura's life being more interesting than her character's. It certainly took deliberation to be Laura, and JT, and Speedie, and Emily. To coach Savannah Knoop, Geoffrey's half sister, in how to talk and act like JT in order to play him in public. To write books, and run a household, and be a mother, and personally answer, by her own estimation, "tens of thousands of e-mails." To receive only reflected glory; to be treated by people as "the bicycle messenger — they don't even give the time of day," and to keep this up for a decade — not, as she says, from some "control room where I've got my eye on everything," but from a small airless den where, today, towers of CDs and books and tchotchkes appear one good kick from crashing down on the computer.

"They talk about 'the enterprise.' Really, when you boil it down, it was done from that little room, okay?" she says. "We didn't have a publicist, so you needed someone who could be the cunt, who could just set the boundaries. And it was great practice for me. I had to be an advocate by proxy for myself."

She says that JT grew "organically, like a mushroom," out of her history of sexual abuse, but when I ask if criminal charges were brought, or if her mother ever knew, Laura says, "I told her; she was bringing them in! This was the '70s." When pressed, she admits she's not sure what her mother did and did not know.

Nevertheless: "I think the books are pretty truthful about how things look. The books don't fetishize abuse; they don't, either, angelicize the abused child. The worst thing anyone does is compare it to A Rock and a Hard Place, which was apparently written by ... I don't care who wrote it; I don't care if a zebra wrote it. It's a horrible book."

The book to which Laura refers was allegedly written by a 15-year-old named Tony Godby Johnson. In it, Tony claimed to have been pimped by his rich parents and raped from a young age by a group of New York City pedophiles. At age 11, he decided to commit suicide, but was rescued, while wandering the streets, by a goodhearted social worker named Vicki Johnson. (In certain versions of JT's biography, a goodhearted couple named Laura Albert and Geoffrey Knoop rescued him off the streets of San Francisco.) Like JT, Tony had a host of health problems, which robbed him of his left leg, his spleen, the sight in one eye and at least one testicle. He also had AIDS and, in 1991, reached out via telephone to the author Paul Monette, himself dying of the disease. Tony sent Monette a copy of his manuscript, which, with the help of Armistead Maupin, would find a publisher in 1993 and catapult Tony to best-seller fame.

Tony and Maupin would speak daily for years. "He was one of the most sparkling personalities I ever encountered, full of irony and goodwill," said Maupin, in a 2001 New Yorker article. "He called me Dicksmoker, and I thought it was funny." But Maupin was never able to meet Tony, not for lack of trying; Vicki Johnson did everything to prevent it, though she eventually agreed to meet Maupin herself. While Tony had told Maupin his mother was "a babe," Maupin found himself embraced by "an extremely heavy blond woman," a woman whose voice was disturbingly like Tony's. After Newsweek ran an expose claiming there was no Tony, and after the phone calls stopped, Maupin wrote The Night Listener, a novel based on the experience. And yet, "Tony's still more real to me than many people who demonstrably do exist," said Maupin.