Ten years ago?
"Yeah. I didn't know what that meant until you just brought this up," he says. As for Katrina having a death scene back in 1978, Ray says, it didn't happen. "I remember my mother being beside herself, and calling Laura's mother to say, 'I don't know why this dying girl chose my son to comfort her.'"
I tell Ray Laura's contention that when Katrina died, the whole neighborhood was in mourning. "She's full of shit," he says. "Katrina just went back to Europe or faded away or something. She'd told me she was in America because the medical treatment was better, which is pretty clever. But for everyone to suffer and wonder what happened, that is fucked up."
Ray calls me back later, concerned that I'll get sucked in.
"Laura is probably more wicked now than she was," he says. "She's very intelligent and has a very good imagination, and I can see how people would admire her, but she caused a lot of hurt from this. She made a lot of people worry."
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I repeat Laura's assertions, about abuse and having no choice but to create characters who would be loved. And also, perhaps, that the only way she knew how to hurt people was to make the people they loved disappear.
"Yeah, I see it," he says. "She wanted everyone to feel as bad as she did."
The Life and Death of JT LeRoy
1980: He is born on Halloween, in West Virginia. His early life is marked by physical and emotional abuse at the hands of his lot-lizard (i.e., truck-stop hooker) mother, Sarah. JT, who experiences gender-identity issues, himself turns to prostitution and drug use. He winds up homeless and drug-addicted in San Francisco, from where he is rescued, variously, by an outreach worker named Emily Frasier and a streetwise musician named Speedie.
1994-'95: Through his therapist, whom he speaks to only by phone, JT gets his work to poet Sharon Olds. JT claims to be familiar with Olds' work because one of his tricks likes to read her while they're having sex. JT faxes his writing to New York literary agent Ira Silverberg, with the request that Silverberg get the work to client Dennis Cooper. Cooper, 42, begins a telephone relationship with the 15-year-old. Cooper will later say of the boy he helped personally and professionally, "I think he had a really hard time being a prostitute because he's an enormously shy kid and insecure beyond belief. But I think writing his books, he found something to hustle, and it's been very good for him. It's safe."
1996-'97: With Cooper's help, JT develops a telephone relationship with author Bruce Benderson, whom he uses to get in contact with author Joel Rose, editor Karen Rinaldi and agent Henry Dunow. By 1997, JT has a book deal with Crown, and is writing for the magazines Nerve, the New York Press and Spin. He avoids personal meetings, claiming they make him too anxious.
JT nevertheless agrees to meet Mary Gaitskill, who, he will later tell an interviewer, "read my stuff and told me what I was doing wrong. She sent me a bunch of books to read, everyone from Nabokov to Flannery O'Connor." Gaitskill waits at a San Francisco cafe; is rushed by a boy who hands her some writing, vinegar and chocolate, says, "I'm Terminator," and flees. Gaitskill instead finds herself joined by LeRoy's friend Speedie, who strikes Gaitskill as "very bright and very young." Speedie is in fact in her mid-30s.
1997: Under the name Terminator (for Jeremiah Terminator), JT's short story "Baby Doll" appears in the collection Close to the Bone. In it, a boy named Jeremiah dresses up like his mother and seduces her boyfriend. Willamette Week calls the story "especially haunting."
2000: JT's first novel, Sarah, is published. Inside blurbs include Benderson's "Not only does [JT] walk with God, he writes like an angel," and Cooper's pronouncement that the book is "a revelation."
Because JT claims morbid shyness, celebrities such as Mary Karr, Lou Reed, Tatum O'Neal and Courtney Love read his work at public events. JT's phone relationships with celebrities become legendary; sometimes, he calls to gossip; other times, he claims he is conflicted about his upcoming sex-change surgery, that he's ill with any number of diseases, that he's suicidal. In their descriptions of the writer, the media start to report that JT is HIV-positive, a status he does not deny.
2001: JT begins to make appearances in public, always in a Warholian blond wig and dark sunglasses.
The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, a series of interlocking and purportedly biographical stories, is published. The L.A. Times calls JT "an authentic wunderkind," Newsweek pronounces his work "powerful," and the San Francisco Bay Guardian writes that the book is "relentlessly brutal and flawlessly scripted ... LeRoy's prose soars."
Mary Ellen Mark shoots JT, in wig, tutu and toe shoes, for Vanity Fair. While she finds JT extremely cooperative, she also will later say, "I felt she was a girl because I really connected with her as a woman ... I had photographed transgendered people ... and that was very different."
