Is JT LeRoy a Hoax?

"Who Is the Real JT LeRoy?" asks New York Magazine. The answer may be a 40-year-old writer named Laura Albert. Journalist Stephen Beachy searches through interviews, profiles, and photographs of the author of Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things in an attempt to discover if LeRoy is the ambi-sexual wunderkind writer who worked as a lot lizard for his own mother that he claims to be. Along the way, Dennis Cooper, Mary Gaitskill, and the author's own agent debate whether or not the bewigged public persona seen over the last several years posing as LeRoy is, in fact, LeRoy, or if the supposed LeRoy is, in truth, a puppet stand-in for the person who claims to be LeRoy on the phone and in email. In the end, the answer, like its subject, remains enigmatic.I asked to speak to Laura or Geoffrey, but my request was denied. “Astor and Speedie will not say that they are me,” s/he told me eventually. “We are a Von Trapp kind of family. We are a family and we create together in many, many ways, and that is our right. I reserve the right to grow and change my identity.” S/he spoke of JT as a kind of collective and mentioned Andy Warhol’s Factory. By the end of the interview, we were back on a less confrontational basis; s/he even suggested I could read at a “hoax reading” when my article came out. “I’m not sure hoax is exactly the word,” I said. “I think it’s more like a lifestyle.” S/he wondered if I’d seen Todd Solondz’s film Palindromes, in which the main character is played by seven different actresses and one actor. “I love Palindromes,” s/he said. “That is ideal to me.” S/he said, “I would like for this to be a door for other people to get heard.” On that point, at least, we had come to agreement.

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