'I Wanted to Be That Boy': The Long Con of JT LeRoy

After the controversy, Albert faded from public view for several years. In 2007, Antidote International Films sued her for signing a contract as JT LeRoy. (They had optioned the film rights to LeRoy's first book, Sarah.) A jury awarded the production company $116,500, and Albert ended her writing career. "I felt the door close," she told me. "I said, 'I'm done.'"

Now, she's staging a comeback, and it starts with director Jeff Feuerzeig's film. He depicts the saga as more than just a hoax, with more empathy than most were willing to grant Albert at the time: His film is a psychological drama about a shell-shocked and sexually abused woman who must write as an avatar—who was either a gay man or a trans woman, depending on the day, but is most definitely struggling with gender identity either way—to express herself.

In coordination with the movie, HarperCollins has reissued LeRoy's first two books, the novel Sarah and the short story collection The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, and Albert has signed with literary agent Bill Clegg and started writing a memoir—leaving fans, as well as former friends and business associates, wondering how Albert's authorship will affect the literary merits of the writing she published as JT LeRoy.

Visual artists have accepted the work, viewing Knoop's public appearances as a piece of performance art. (Whether it was good performance art is another story.) "If anything, [LeRoy not existing] accentuated [the value of the work] because it was like, wow! There's this other level, this other layer," says photographer Daniel Nicoletta, who is best known for his photos of the gay politician Harvey Milk. "People's imaginations were captured, so it was like, OK. This is really powerful material."

Albert herself accepts these connections to visual art. "We're used to using illusion as a visual medium," Albert says. When I ask if she regrets her decisions, Albert starts singing Frank Sinatra's "My Way": "Regrets, I've had a few, but then again too few to mention." She pauses. "That would be the Sid Vicious version."

She cops to negative responses but stands by the notion of the avatar, which she still believes in. Musicians and actors perceive her work less favorably than visual artists, but they also don't hate her LeRoy writing. "David Bowie wasn't David Bowie," she says. "They're playing a role." Smashing Pumpkins lead singer Billy Corgan even wrote the foreword to the reissue of Sarah, defending the novel's artistic merits: "Mark my words the Terminator [the "T" in "JT"] is as real as you, or I," he writes. "And that is why what few, precious pages we have from his hand through hers ring like sonnets and psalms, and of old gods that took form in the Vanished Age. Truth is truth, and love is love."

Literary writers would probably disagree with Corgan. "You know who had the hardest time?" Albert asks. "The writers, because they're so full of shit, and they don't want to give it up. It was a big reveal about the bullshit of writing and fiction and all of that." But the logic behind the negative reactions of the literary community—especially gay male writers, editors, and agents—is much more complicated than Albert lets on. Prominent gay authors, editors, and agents championed LeRoy because they thought he was a troubled young LGBTQ person who had suffered horrible physical and sexual abuse and deserved a leg up in the literary world. Many LGBTQ people took issue with the fact that JT LeRoy had gotten so much attention while many actually gay authors struggled to get noticed. What's more, over the phone in the 1990s, Albert, speaking as LeRoy, told some of her publishing contacts that LeRoy suffered from HIV.

Lying about HIV hurt the influential literary agent and editor Ira Silverberg in particular. He worked as LeRoy's second agent and is currently a senior editor at Simon & Schuster. He represented and promoted outsider artists that other agents would have ignored, like Dennis Cooper and the estate of deceased gay artist David Wojnarowicz, whose work continues to anger Congress members and the Catholic League.

"Regardless of the quality of the work, manipulating people by saying, 'I'm an HIV-positive teenager who's just come off the street and needs your help,' is a morally reprehensible thing to do," says Silverberg.

Albert denies using HIV to market the books. She says LeRoy himself—whom she often discusses as if he were a real person—was lying about his HIV status, and she says she only discussed HIV on the phone early into her time posing as LeRoy. "If Courtney Love was schtupping for [someone with AIDS], you don't think that would be every word out of her fucking mouth?" she asks, suggesting that the singer, who had a casual friendship with LeRoy, would have bragged about their relationship more if she had believed he had HIV. Besides, she notes, "When did [people] go buy a book because someone had AIDS?"

Today, Albert denies presenting the books as LGBTQ in any way. "They were never marketed that way. They weren't," she says. "The gay community was terrified of these books. They did not cover them till later, because a man having sex with a boy [terrified them]." But in 2004, Warren St. John, the reporter who would out Albert two years later, wrote in the first paragraph of a New York Times profile that LeRoy "spent his youth as a cross-dressing hooker," and Albert had begun maintaining close phone friendships with prominent gay male authors in the mid-1990s. Posing as LeRoy over the phone and speaking in a Southern accent, she talked for hours with people like the author Bruce Benderson, Dennis Cooper, and Silverberg.

"For me, JT represented something in terms of a certain type of writer who means a lot to me as an individual—as a publishing person, as a reader—and that's the outsider who you're rooting for," Silverberg says. "I felt like JT was the end of the line, the line that is maybe William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Cooper, LeRoy."

Silverberg found the books naive, which was part of the charm: LeRoy was supposed to have been just 24 in 2004, when St. John's profile ran. He seemed too innocent to lie. "I remember when JT discovered [Andy] Warhol, which was really cute because it was like, wow, the kid is kind of looking at art movements and characters," Silverberg says. "I mean, this wasn't a very bright person, which is what made it so believable—the kind of innocence and naivety." (Albert maintains that she herself knew about Warhol, but that she and LeRoy learned about culture at different times.)

The revelation that LeRoy was a literary persona—not an actual person—changed the value of the book for Silverberg and other readers. "This was such a beautiful story of someone who'd come from nothing, who'd been abused, who was dealing with HIV, who was dealing with gender issues," Silverberg explains. "You just wanted this person to be well, and I think we really got sucked in. The person was very much a part of that, and this attempt to kind of separate [the importance of LeRoy's backstory] out that she's made is just bullshit as far as I'm concerned. She's not taken responsibility, nor has she apologized.

"My guess is the work's not gonna live on," he continues. "The work was very much about this person who wrote it."

Reactions were different from writers who knew Albert had written the books before the scandal. Screenwriter and actor W. Earl Brown met Albert around the time she visited the set of HBO's Deadwood, where he worked as an actor and writer, to interview the show's legendary creator David Milch in 2005. (He created the procedural drama NYPD Blue.) Milch eventually learned that Albert wrote LeRoy's books and later hired her as a writer for Deadwood. Brown also caught on to the truth, though it didn't affect his love of Albert's work. "It's what Dave [Milch] said: 'The judgment of a writer is on the page,'" Brown says. "[Sarah] was listed as fiction on the back of the book."

Sarah, the first novel published under LeRoy in 1999, presents an unnamed narrator as a child working as a "lot lizard," or a truck-stop prostitute, in West Virginia, and the book presents a bizarre caricature of the South where sex workers wear raccoon penises for sexual potency and pray to a shrine of stuffed jackalopes. Aspects of the book also came from Albert's adult life in San Francisco, where she worked as a phone sex operator and sex writer. "LeRoy" came from a chat line client's name; another client told her about lot lizards. She read about raccoon bones while researching for a sex story, and she knew about jackalopes because of the "Alice Waters food explosion" in the Bay Area.

"I took it [all] and pumped it [for material]—just put it in my bucket," Albert says. "There were all these little finds that I knew I was going to weave into a story. I had no idea it would be Sarah." Southerners would recognize the book as pure fiction—I grew up in Florida, driving past truck-stop prostitutes in the panhandle, and Sarah comes across as about as realistic as the Norway pavilion at Epcot—but the novel about "boy-girl" sex workers didn't really see Southerners as its target audience.

Despite it all, or perhaps because of it, the book has attracted new fans. When Albert visited the VICE office in Venice—VICE Films produced Feuerzeig's documentary with A&E IndieFilms and RatPac Documentary Films—she brought along two girls in their 30s. One carried a copy of LeRoy's second book, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, and the other was named Jasmin. Jasmin wore a Minnie Mouse shirt and drank Fiji Water, a look that matches Albert's new style—Albert was in an off-white hat that flopped over her head and flaunted a green mood ring on one glove-covered finger.

Jasmin, who was hired as Albert's intern a few years ago, first learned of JT LeRoy when her boyfriend gave her Sarah as a gift. "I fell in love with Sarah. It changed my life," Jasmin says. "The books to me—because I guess I'm hetero—spoke to me about abuse—about sexuality and childhood sexual abuse. For the first time I felt like I wasn't alone. I was given the courage to heal. When I found Sarah, I felt like it was the first time that something really spoke to me."

Today, Albert describes LeRoy as an avatar she used to deal with issues she couldn't discuss as herself. "Especially today, when not only do we have gender fluidity, but we have avatar fluidity, having an avatar or being avatar-variant [is not unusual]," she says. "Very few people only go around on the internet as themselves."

Albert, who grew up in New York, recalls experiencing gender confusion early in life and lacking the language to discuss her thoughts; in the documentary, she remembers enduring sexual abuse as a child. She also spent years in a group home, where girls discussed their own extreme childhood trauma. She struggled to write about the abuse and dreamed about living as a boy—experiences that she says factored into her decision to write as LeRoy. Today, she jokes that her preferred pronoun is "you and/or goddess" before noting that her gender identity and pronoun are "interchangeable."

"What I really wanted to be was a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy," Albert says, sounding like she is describing LeRoy. "[The media and society weren't] talking about sexual abuse and physical abuse, and when they started doing an after-school special [about those topics], it was always a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy, and eventually there'd be a cute little girl. I never saw someone like myself represented."

Her dream was to be a young boy in a sexual relationship with an older man. As a child, Albert would pray to become one of these boys. "That was the ultimate protection," she explains. "I wanted to be that boy, because to me that was protection, even though it was a really fucked-up power dynamic."

Albert started writing in a male voice in her teens. As a college student at the New School, she struggled to discuss her vulnerability and childhood abuse in her writing. "I go in really deep, and it's painful stuff—it's not fun," she says. She started writing fiction with a young, male first-person narrator; subjects included abuse, which would also factor into LeRoy's fiction. Albert claims her writing teacher demanded she stop and ordered her to write with a female narrator.

She has told this story to many fans and friends, and it's served to amplify the work for author Nicole V. Gagné. "Once I knew the whole story, I realized this was much deeper and part of a pattern of behavior with her that went back to childhood," Gagné says. "The only thing to me that seemed more interesting than JT's story was the story of the person who had to make him real. I found that even more interesting—like those Russian dolls where there's dolls inside of dolls."

The LeRoy project might have been ahead of its time—an exploration of gender the way we see it in the age of Tumblr and Caitlyn Jenner—or Albert might be a master publicist rebranding herself for 2016. A few weeks before our interview, she direct-messaged me on Twitter to ask me to leave an Amazon review on the LeRoy books. At the end of our conversation, she grabbed my copy of Harold's End, LeRoy's third book, and signed it even after I told her I would prefer she didn't. Who knows how the LeRoy scandal will affect the books' long-term literary merits? All that's clear is people are talking about JT LeRoy again. "It didn't go away," Albert says. "It's like Horton Hears a Who!"