Outrageous hoax

New documentary recounts the stranger-than-fiction tale of JT LeRoy

In the late 90s, the New York literary world was set ablaze by the arrival of an exciting new writer named JT LeRoy. A West Virginia-born teenager, LeRoy was an abuse survivor who had a history of prostitution and homelessness, was confused about his gender identity, and was HIV positive. 

He first started writing as a therapeutic exercise at the behest of a psychiatrist to whom he spoke only on the phone, but after sending samples of the writing to a few key authors he admired, LeRoy landed an agent and quickly published his first novel, “Sarah,” a fictionalized account of life on the road with his prostitute mother, a lot lizard who allowed her many tricks and boyfriends to sexually abuse JT from a young age.  

The book was a bestseller, received glowing praise from critics and became a favorite of sophistos and celebrities. Demand for the reclusive LeRoy to do public readings became deafening. 

The problem? LeRoy didn’t really exist in a literal sense. He was the avatar of Laura Albert, a 30something San Francisco phone sex worker addicted to calling emergency help lines, during which she would affect a soft Southern accent and pretend to be a teenage boy. 

Albert, a sexual abuse survivor herself, wrote the stories for therapy in JT’s voice, they turned out to be exceptional, and she accidentally made this figment of her imagination a literary phenomenon.

Now, filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig (“The Devil and Daniel Johnston”) has crafted an electric retelling of the scandal with “Author: The JT LeRoy Story,” a documentary, easily one of the best of year, that is both exhaustive in its recounting and unapologetically subjective in its conclusion. 

Was it a hoax or performance art? Was Albert an attention-starved narcissist or a broken survivor coping with the trauma of abuse? Because Feuerzeig allows the author at the center of the scandal to hold court as the doc’s primary talking head, the film’s answers tend to favor the latter explanations on both counts. 

But, rather than undermine Feuerzeig’s credibility as a documentarian, his subjective approach succeeds at raising larger questions about identity, trauma and the nature of storytelling that might have been brushed aside had he populated the film with counter-opining critics and skeptics. 

Albert tells her story in lucid, self-aware, self-deprecating detail.

As “Sarah” became a bestseller, rather than keep LeRoy hidden from the world or confess to the misdirection, Albert recruited her sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop, to don a wig and sunglasses and take on the role of JT LeRoy’s public persona. The ruse worked, and LeRoy’s celebrity only ballooned. As LeRoy, Knoop was soon being courted and fawned over by everyone from Tom Waits to Asia Argento (who wrote and directed a film adaptation of LeRoy’s second book, “The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things,” and who is painted in the documentary as a ruthlessly opportunistic manipulator). He became besties with Courtney Love and received fatherly career advice from Bono. He became a fashion icon, modeling for prestigious designers and photographers.

Meanwhile, Albert rode the coattails of her own creation by taking on the role of Speedy, LeRoy’s hardass British manager. The film’s most touching passage has Albert recalling how, as Speedy, she grew close with Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan and soon confessed to him the entire truth of who she really was, and who Knoop wasn’t. He accepted her confession without judgment and kept her secret until her cover was finally blown in 2006, when the New York Times exposed Albert and Knoop, effectively ending Albert’s career as a writer. 

The triumph of the film is in Feuerzeig’s balancing of the sensational facts—the parade of celebrity anecdotes alone is enough to fill a week’s worth of E! programming—with the harsh reality of Albert’s difficult upbringing, her history of abuse, her need to make her fractured self whole, and the necessity of creating LeRoy. 

The thorny question of how to categorize and judge this outrageous saga—fraudulent hoax versus performance art versus psychological manifestation—is addressed thoroughly, and by the end of the film I found myself believing that it was some combination of the latter two. Unlike literary fabulists such as James Frey or Augusten Burroughs, who garnered and then lost the world’s sympathy by embellishing memoir and representing fiction as truth, LeRoy’s writing was always labeled fiction, and stands on its own regardless of who wrote it. At the end of the day, if the work stands on its own, how much does the creator’s identity matter? “Author” argues: not much at all.

For more from Joshua, read his interview with Broncho's lead singer, Ryan Lindsey.