{"id":92,"date":"2006-01-13T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-13T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/idolchatter\/2006\/01\/how-i-learned-to-stop-feeling.html"},"modified":"2006-01-13T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2006-01-13T12:00:00","slug":"how-i-learned-to-stop-feeling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/idolchatter\/2006\/01\/how-i-learned-to-stop-feeling.html","title":{"rendered":"How I Learned To Stop Feeling Betrayed & Love “JT Leroy”"},"content":{"rendered":"
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[Editor’s Note: Idol Chatter was so confused by news of scandal within the literary world–whom to believe? how to tell fact from fiction?–that we turned to guest blogger Ariana Speyer, a freelance writer with a personal connection to one of these authorial dramas, to help us make sense of it all.]<\/span><\/p>\n

In case you\u2019ve been under a rock this week, there is a fake-writer epidemic going around. There’s Oprah sweetheart James Frey, whose bestselling “memoir” “A Million Little Pieces” was shown to have substantial exaggerations and fabrications<\/a>. Then there’s JT Leroy–the wunderkind author of gay-truckstop-hooker redemption books including “Sarah” and “The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things”–who was definitively outed as a hoax<\/a> by Warren St. John in the New York Times. I say “definitively” because there have been plenty of stories about this over the years, but St. John found a photo of the woman who was enlisted to play \u201cJT Leroy\u201d (stay with me here, the author was known for only appearing in public wearing a blonde wig and sunglasses), identified her as one Savannah Knoop, and just put all the strange pieces together in such a way as to not leave any doubt.<\/p>\n

I know \u201cJT,\u201d or thought I did, until a few days ago. He wrote travel pieces for index<\/a>, a magazine I edited from 2002 to 2004. We talked on the phone. A lot. We emailed. A lot. I even helped organize a benefit reading of his work –that \u201che\u201d attended with all his famous friends, including Winona Ryder and Shirley Manson–with the money going to something called the McAuley Foundation, a charity for troubled kids that \u201che\u201d helped start. So I did feel like I knew the guy.<\/p>\n

True, I never heard that \u201che\u201d had AIDS, which apparently \u201che\u201d went around telling other people \u201che\u201d had. I knew about the sex-change hormone therapy, the deathly fear of public scrutiny, the late-night panic attacks, the money worries. All in that unmistakable, Southern-tinged voice that said, \u201cWe are together now. It\u2019s you and I against the world.\u201d This voice was full of kindness and self-absorption. It could be whiny, playful, or demanding. It had a wheedle that could move mountains. So who did this voice actually belong to? Who wrote those affecting sentences that made you cheer for the tenacity of the human spirit? One Laura Albert, who I always knew as Speedie, one half of the couple that had saved \u201cJT\u201d from the mean streets and with whom \u201che\u201d lived in San Francisco. (The other half of the couple is Geoffrey Knoop, yes, Savannah\u2019s brother, and he was in on the whole deal.)<\/p>\n

So, now that we\u2019re all up to date in this twisted plot, what happens next? First of all, while it\u2019s hurtful and manipulative and a personal bummer, and probably immoral and a lot of other bad things that a lot of people have already commented on, I\u2019m going to say cheers to Laura and Geoff for pulling it off for so long. You know it wasn\u2019t easy to concoct a person out of thin air year after year. Didn\u2019t they ever get \u201cJT\u201d fatigue? Did Laura ever think, \u201cChrist, I\u2019ve got to pretend to be this needy, off-kilter, genius-in-the-rough loser again, and I really just want to read a magazine?\u201d I\u2019m also going to say that, scam or no, someone <\/span>is still responsible for writing those books, stories, and magazine pieces, and that person has a huge, valid talent. (I read “Sarah” and was genuinely moved; I\u2019m now happy to confess that I never got around to reading “The Heart.”) So what if they\u2019re not based on really<\/span> being a gay street kid? The work has power and truth in its own right, and for that, again, kudos to the writer, who seems to also be Laura.<\/p>\n

The $64,000 question is, if Laura had all this talent from the get-go, why the elaborate ruse? Turns out, she always had her heart set on being a rock star but never quite made the grade, or so said Stephen Beachy in a New York magazine article last year. Hmmm, a failed rocker turned plotting deceiver, why does that sound so familiar? Maybe because both Charles Manson and David Koresh got jilted by the music world before they decided to focus on the activities for which they ultimately became famous.<\/p>\n

While some people might put Laura into the textbook psycho category along with those other guys, I prefer to think of her as a Brooklyn gal with chutzpah to spare. When I met her and \u201cJT\u201d while they were in New York for the benefit, I remember feeling strangely put off and disappointed by the face-to-face encounter with this person who I felt so close to on the phone and in cyberspace. When \u201cJT\u201d and I were introduced I was met with a gentle blankness. That\u2019s because I was looking into Savannah\u2019s eyes, and she had no idea who on earth I was. Because, SHE HAD NEVER SPOKEN TO ME BEFORE. Afterwards, I rationalized the strangeness of the meeting by telling myself that of course it would be strange: JT has a rather large fear of being seen in public. So even the cracks in the \u201cJT\u201d fa\u00e7ade somehow managed to substantiate the fa\u00e7ade itself. And that\u2019s a kind of genius. Evil genius, perhaps, but genius all the same.<\/p>\n

Laura, if you\u2019re out there reading this, and I know you are (\u201cJT\u201d obsessively tracked his press mentions, so I imagine Laura has been pretty much glued to her monitor, probably alternating between the thrill of so much ink being spilled on her account and the agony of what the ink is spelling out), I say you deserve some kind of prize. You\u2019ve turned in a tour de force performance on so many levels that it\u2019s a bit hard to fully fathom. Do they give out awards for psychological acuity? If they ever do start giving out \u201cSigmunds,\u201d you should definitely be shortlisted. Brava! (And please seek treatment immediately. You are a very sick person. Maybe you and James Frey can find a nice quiet truth spa in which to recuperate.)<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Editor’s Note: Idol Chatter was so confused by news of scandal within the literary world–whom to believe? how to tell fact from fiction?–that we turned to guest blogger Ariana Speyer, a freelance writer with a personal connection to one of these authorial dramas, to help us make sense of it all.] In case you\u2019ve been…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":285,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fbia_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nHow I Learned To Stop Feeling Betrayed & Love "JT Leroy"<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/idolchatter\/2006\/01\/how-i-learned-to-stop-feeling.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How I Learned To Stop Feeling Betrayed & Love "JT Leroy"\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"[Editor’s Note: Idol Chatter was so confused by news of scandal within the literary world–whom to believe? 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