J.T. LeRoy: The Last Literary Rockstar

Missing Pages S01E03

J.T. LeRoy: The Last Literary Rockstar

Producer’s note: Trigger warning: in this episode of Missing Pages, we’ll be discussing suicide, sexual abuse, along with controversial mental health diagnoses. If this sounds like something you’d rather avoid, it might be the episode t skip.  

Bethanne Patrick: People love to laugh at a man in a dress.

TV Clip - Saturday Night Live: Courtney Cox: Now, Cindy, you also work at the Gap?

Adam Sandler: She used to but she defected.

Chris Farley: It is true. I once worked at the Crap.

Bethanne Patrick: For the after-dark variety show, Saturday Night Live, it seemed like a go-to comedic device. 

TV Clip - Saturday Night Live: Tina Fey: Here, with a preview of her work, is Maya Angelou.

Bethanne Patrick: There was something about a male cast member in a skirt that got the live audience going.

TV Clip - Saturday Night Live: Tracy Morgan: As always, you effervesce the sweet aroma of woman in full bloom.

Tina Fey: Thank you. That’s good, right?

Tracy Morgan: Oh yes. 

Bethanne Patrick: From Chris Farley portraying a “Gap Girl” to Tracy Morgan moonlighting as Maya Angelou to Will Ferrell as the deep-voiced US Attorney General, Janet Reno…

TV Clip - Saturday Night Live: Will Ferrell: Welcome to my Dance Party, coming to you live from a deck of a battleship. Psst. It’s really just my basement. 

Bethanne Patrick: …the gag never seemed to get old. And cross-dressing as comedy is nothing new. Even Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, from back in the 1600s, hinges on gender-bending disguises.

Video Clip - Twelfth Night: As I am man, my state is desperate for my master’s love. As I am woman, what fruitless sigh shall poor Olivia breathe? Oh, time. Thou must untangle this, not I.

Bethanne Patrick: Up until recently, gender non-conforming characters were written into stories either as a punchline…

Movie Clip - Mrs. Doutfire: Ah! Look at this. My first day as a woman and I’m already getting hot flashes.

Bethanne Patrick: …or as the more sinister transexual psychopathic serial killer.

Movie Clip - Silence of The Lambs: It rubs the lotion on its skin, it does this whenever it’s told.

Bethanne Patrick: Then there’s Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.

Movie Clip - Ace Ventura: Pet Detective: If the Lieutenant is indeed a woman, as she claims to be…”

Bethanne Patrick: It’s the 1994 comedy classic that launched Jim Carrey’s career, and somehow managed to combine both the man-in-a-dress gag and the trans character as the sociopathic villain trope. 

Movie Clip - Ace Ventura: Pet Detective: Then my friend, she is suffering from the worst case of hemorrhoids I have ever seen. That's why Roger Podacter is dead. He found Captain Winky.

Bethanne Patrick: Two birds. One stone. To say the least, in the late 90s and 2000s, the media was doing a pretty terrible job at humanizing trans people. Transgender characters were either the butt of the joke, or mentally unstable murderers.

But my expertise as Bethanne Patrick: literary critic and voracious reader is here, in the land of books. Books are the medium of nuance and depth. So, you’d think books were doing a better job at trans representation, right? Right? 

Come on! If J.R.R Tolkein’s Lord of The Rings books can dedicate hundreds of pages to Middle Earth’s trees and still spawn a wildly successful film franchise, surely there must be a trans character in the stacks that got an authentic, human treatment.

Mmm. Not quite. Up until recently, there were very few books about the trans experience. I can think of two or three. Maybe Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides? But that’s really about somebody who’s intersex. Or John Irving’s In One Person? Going back aways, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando? But those books, while groundbreaking for their times, were not written by openly trans authors. 

Then, in the late 90s, a new voice burst onto the literary scene. Everyone, from celebrities like Bono, to Shirley Manson, were buzzing about the mysterious presence of the one and only, Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy. He or She or They went by JT for short.

Seemingly born out of thin air, the teenage author was notoriously elusive. And in a departure from the culture’s perception of trans characters I mentioned before, J.T.’s mysterious and potentially transgender identity only made them more interesting and exciting.

VO Actor Recording: Hi there. I’m Jeremiah Terminator Leroy. But my friends call me J.T.

Bethanne Patrick: Marketed as semi-autobiographical fiction, J.T.’s writing was all about a naive teenage sex worker trying to make a name for themself at a West Virginia truck stop. It was playful, overtly sexual, and wickedly hilarious. Naturally, the gender-bending world of rockstar musicians gravitated toward the cult of JT. 

Song clip - “Cherry Lips” by Garbage chorus

Bethanne Patrick: 2001’s LGBTQ anthem “Cherry Lips” by Garbage’s Shirley Manson? 

Song clip - “Cherry Lips” by Garbage chorus

Bethanne Patrick: Shirley wrote the song about the title character in J.T.’s debut novel, Sarah. One of the lyrics of Shirley’s song is “that if such a body was for real, it seemed like rainbows could appear,” which might have been a sign of things to come. 

It appeared as if the heavens had parted and an author writing from an authentic trans experience had emerged. The only trouble was, sadly, our young wunderkind was too shy to attend star-studded book readings of his own work. But as I said, this air of mystery only added to the celebrity writer’s intrigue.

Eventually, as film adaptations of their books and requests to attend star-studded events poured in, someone claiming to be J.T. did step into the limelight. 

Then, almost as quickly as J.T.’s star rose, in late 2005/early 2006, a series of articles from The New York Times and New York Magazine revealed the truth.

Radio clip - NPR: J.T. LeRoy has been a publishing sensation since his first novel came out in 2000. All of his stories are described as autobiographical, which may be a problem because it's becoming clearer and clearer that J.T. LeRoy is a hoax.

Bethanne Patrick: In today’s episode of Missing Pages, we’ll share the wild backstory of what many regard as “the greatest literary hoax” of all time. Who was the real J.T. LeRoy? Where did he come from? And even though the peak of J.T.’s popularity only lasted five short years, why are we still talking about it? Also, are we dealing with someone from the literary community or a rockstar?

Welcome back to Missing Pages. I’m your host, long-time literary critic and publishing world insider, Bethanne Patrick. You can find me tweeting about books, my dog, and G&Ts, on Twitter at The Book Maven.

In Season One of Missing Pages, I’ll be your guide, as we look back at some of the most iconic, jaw-dropping, and just truly bizarre book scandals to shape the publishing world. In every episode we re-examine the headlines and go behind the scenes to give  you the unabridged industry story we all missed the first time around. Because isn’t there always a page that gets cut from the final draft?

On that note, we’ll dive into today’s episode, The Last Literary Rockstar.

Chapter 1: The Hoax

Radio clip - NPR: I think many people were suspicious, many people in this literary world and especially the literary world that J.T. was sort of making his way in, sort of queer, edgy fiction.

Video Clip - Film Courage: The thing is I don’t like the word con. Like, I don’t like the word hoax. I never said I’m going to burst onto the literary scene.

Lucas Celler: J.T. LeRoy was the last literary rockstar. It all just stopped happening after that.

Bethanne Patrick: Are you ready to find out who the real J.T. LeRoy is? Where shall we begin? 

Documentary filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig dug into the complete origin story of the author behind JT LeRoy. Released in 2016 and regarded by critics as one of the more morally perplexing and ethically ambiguous films of our time, here’s Jeff talking to VICE about his documentary: Author: The J.T. LeRoy Story.

Video Clip - VICE: Laura Albert was hiding in plain sight. So within the fiction that she wrote, she had left clues.

Bethanne Patrick: So, who is Laura Albert? And what exactly did she get away with operating under the identity of J.T. LeRoy?

Lucas Celler: I'm Lucas seller and I currently live in Los Angeles.

Bethanne Patrick: That’s Lucas. You heard him calling J.T. LeRoy the last literary rockstar earlier. Lucas spent the better part of two years sifting through notebooks and recordings to help Jeff Feuerzig produce the J.T. documentary. 

Lucas Celler: One criticism that she experienced, I think in the press, was that, you know, she was making all this stuff up. Yes, you know, J.T. LeRoy doesn't have a physical body in the world, but besides that, everything she said is completely true.

Bethanne Patrick: In full disclosure: Laura Albert, AKA the real J.T. LeRoy, who, as you’ll discover later, our producer has been in contact with over the past six months, was the one who recommended we talk to Lucas. 

And while he helps us tell this story, we have to remember he’s also a close personal friend of the author in question.

Lucas Celler: The timeline is such where Jeremiah, Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy, you know, appeared as a voice on the phone in, I believe, 1994-1995, between that kind of mid-nineties era. 

And then in the year 2000, the book Sarah came out, the first book by J.T. LeRoy. And then soon after, I believe it's the next year, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things comes out. And those stories actually predated Sarah. 

Bethanne Patrick: From his work on the documentary, Lucas walked us through the timeline of J.T.’s big career milestones as he remembers it.

Lucas Celler: Then in, you know, the year 2005, Warren St. John released that article that had the smoking gun image of Savannah, who was, you know, the embodiment of the J.T. LeRoy character. And then in 2007, Laura gets sued by a production company for forging J.T. LeRoy on a film contract.

Bethanne Patrick:  Here’s where we need to take a beat and give you, dear listener, the fullest portrait of what the JT LeRoy Hoax is exactly. Fair warning: this is going to sound like one of those serial killer tack boards. Who is J.T. Leroy?

Video Clip - J.T. LeRoy: That was the nice thing about writing Sarah, is that I think it was like this, I was in, it is more fantastical. Like, I did create this in my head. It was things happening in it that never really happened in the South.

Bethanne Patrick: If you followed cool kid pop culture in the late ’90s or early aughties, the name J.T. LeRoy was inescapable. Believed to be an adolescent, drug-abusing, transgender prostitute from West Virginia, LeRoy’s byline began to appear in magazines.

Then, in 2000 and 2001, two works, Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, were published to great acclaim and even greater fanfare. Book publishers had discovered a whole new voice. It was queer and subversive and it spoke with the authority of jaw-dropping experience, because rememeber, the writing was marketed as fictional but pulled from the author’s real life.

And in this post-Bill Clinton, sex scandal-ridden-culture… 

Video Clip - CBS News: I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

Bethanne Patrick: …early George W. Bush, you want a president you can grab a beer with-culture…

Video Clip - CSPAN: And I actually said this, I know that human beings and fish can coexist peacefully.

Bethanne Patrick: …people were just trying to keep up with what the definition of “is” was. Like I mentioned earlier, J.T. began hobnobbing with the coolest scene makers. Here’s the then Beetlejuice star and now Stranger Things lead, Wynona Ryder, talking about him at a book reading.

Video Clip - Muse Productions: I love you, J.T., you are an inspiration and you have profoundly affected so many of us.

Bethanne Patrick: The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things was turned into a movie in 2004, starring and directed by Asia Argento as J.T. LeRoy’s mother, the truck stop prostitute Sarah.

Movie Trailer: The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things: Pay attention. It's not the little boy's fault. Jeremiah, you’re going home. Your grandma is here.

Bethanne Patrick: Then, scandal!

By early 2006, articles from both New York Magazine by Stephen Beachy and from The New York Times by Warren St. John exposed both the actress who played J.T. LeRoy and the real author of the work, Laura Albert. 

Here, Stephen Beachy, the journalist behind the New York Mag article is speaking to NPR back in 2006 about his investigation of JT.

Radio Clip - NPR: When I heard a story told by an old friend of a woman named Laura Albert and a man named Jeffrey Knoop were the ones behind J.T. LeRoy hoax, it sounded plausible to me and I began investigating it. I began looking into whether anybody named J.T. LeRoy had actually existed. I couldn't find any record of him in West Virginia.” 

Bethanne Patrick: Beachy is a San Francisco-based journalist, which is where the alleged teenage author seemed to have taken up residence at some point after living in West Virginia.

Radio Clip - NPR: I spoke to hustlers on Polk street in San Francisco and other long-term denizens of the neighborhood, and nobody had any memory of him. I checked birth records and started talking to people who had known J.T. from the beginning and couldn't find anybody who had met him before 2002. And [I] couldn't find any evidence that he actually existed.”

Bethanne Patrick: There was no Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy. He’d been the creation of a talented, seductive mother and former phone sex-operator raised by Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, who now resided in San Francisco, named Laura Albert.

Laura convinced her androgynous sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop, to don a floppy blonde wig, big, dramatic, dark sunglasses, and a Pharrell-level sized hat to impersonate the pen name she created, J.T. LeRoy. Laura refers to Savannah, the person playing the author, as her “avatar.”

Movie Trailer - Avatar: To drive these remotely controlled bodies called avatars. They're grown from human DNA mixed with DNA of the natives.

Bethanne Patrick: Yes, exactly. Only, this avatar was living and breathing and going on press tours. But it went even further: J.T. LeRoy’s manager, Speedie? 

Clip: VO actor: My friends call me Speedie, but you can just call me J.T.’s manager.

Bethanne Patrick: The one with the suspiciously inaccurate Cockney accent? That was actually Laura Albert working the phones, traveling alongside her avatar to events and film adaptation discussions, lingering backstage at concerts.

And the band, Thistle? 

Music Clip: Thistle at MTV Rock the Vote

Bethanne Patrick: The go-to opening act for those swinging J.T/ LeRoy book parties? Where, sidenote, there was a merch table, including such cultural artifacts as imitation raccoon penis bones like the one the elusive J.T. wore.

Video Clip - A Shaded View/Laura Albert: It’s a very small world. This is the penis bone, this is my talisman, I wear it every time I go out. Something special.

Bethanne Patrick:  Umm…a tee shirt would have sufficed but that’s truly what they sold. Anyway, about that band, Thistle.

Music Clip: Thistle

Bethanne Patrick: It was fronted by a woman named Emily Frazier. Or rather, again, Laura Albert, only following a bit of liposuction and some new hair color.

The band’s guitarist was also her husband of the time, Jeff Knoop. Yes, that Knoop. 

So, let’s see, we have one, two, and three people in on the whole ruse, none of whom are actually J.T. LeRoy, because that person is completely made up. 

What kind of person goes to the trouble to invent such an elaborate three ring circus and then keep up the complex ruse for years? It sounds like more trouble than it’s worth. What motivates someone to do all of this?

The first thing you’re probably thinking is, “Oh, Laura Albert made a ton of money and that’s why this is so bad.” Yeah, that’s not exactly true. Laura Albert allegedly made only $20,000 off of selling her first J.T. novel to Bloomsbury, and even factoring in the parties, the movie rights, and the deal for the second book, we’re not looking at a lot of money.

Plus, after the true author was revealed, Laura Albert found herself in more than one expensive legal battle over identity fraud allegations. So, if Laura wasn’t getting rich, what was she getting out of all of this? Here’s Lucas again with a window into why Laura wrote under the J.T. pseudonym.

Lucas Celler: Yeah, no, I mean, I spent 16-18 months of my life completely absorbed in Laura world. There's a journal that I found in Laura's archive that had to be when she was maybe 12 [or] 13 years old, and it's like one page. And I think she wrote it in pink, which is kind of interesting. It was like, kind of the only page that was written in pink. And she talks about this boy named Jeremiah, who is like, suffering abuse at home. 

Bethanne Patrick: Lucas points to this journal entry, in pink, as early evidence of JT’s existence within Laura.

Lucas Celler: And that was like, one of these kind of like holy grail moments where I found that page, and I was like, “Wow.” So, she was already thinking about Jeremiah, which J.T., the J of J.T. is Jeremiah, she was thinking about this character already when she was 14 years old. This is, like, 40 years ago. And I thought that was so astonishing, that she was already coming up with different personas in her writing.

Bethanne Patrick: It appears Laura invented the J.T. persona early on as a coping mechanism to help process a harrowing childhood. 

Lucas Celler: It also felt like this form of self-therapy that she was committing herself to where she was able to speak about her own pain and her own traumatic experiences in a way where she didn't have to be herself to do so.

And in the books, [there are] a lot of parallels between Laura and the J.T. LeRoy character as depicted in the books where, you know, yeah, like, Laura was never forced into sex trafficking or she never was addicted to heroin or any of those things, but she did, you know, for instance, you know, experience a lot of physical abuse and sexual abuse growing up in Brooklyn in the seventies.

Bethanne Patrick: Here, Lucas, who, again, Laura introduced us to as someone capable of speaking on her life, extrapolates why Laura may have invented J.T.

Lucas Celler: And so, she had a really difficult time being able to communicate about those types of feelings. And now it's a little bit different. It's a little bit more, you know, okay for, you know, people going to therapy. Like, I think back in the day, [it] was a bit more like, “Oh my God, you're going to see a therapist, like, you have to be, like, crazy. You're a crazy person. Like, why would you ever go see a therapist unless you feel like you're schizophrenic?” 

You know, it's a different time completely back then. And I think very, like, fluently, she was able to find a way to communicate about her experiences through fiction, through writing about other people besides herself. And she would prefer using the male gender because what's more opposite [from] a female than a male. 

Bethanne Patrick: This all sounds pretty harmless, right? We’re talking about a woman who used writing to process her trauma and also pranked Bono and some hoity-toity book buyers with a few dollar-store wigs. Who cares? Why were people upset? 

Lucas Celler: She also had an amazing, completely alternative reality on the telephone.

Bethanne Patrick: In fact, Laura’s chameleon abilities on the phone were referenced in almost every one of our conversations.

In the next chapter of our story, we’re going to talk about that feeling of dread – you know the one, when you get a call from the person who always keeps you on the line for hours but you feel guilty hanging up because they need you. Now, imagine if that person never existed in the first place. 

Coming up, here’s how the people in book publishing who got duped into hours and hours of phone calls with a non-existent teenage boy responded. 

Chapter 2: Playing With Fire

Here’s a quick recap: J.T. LeRoy was thought to be a trans, former sex worker/teenage author who published two groundbreaking works of semi-autobiographical fiction in the early 2000’s. 

But by early 2006, it was revealed that Laura Albert, an adult woman from Brooklyn, now living in San Francisco, was the real author, operating not only under a pen name but also bringing on her sister-in-law to play the character of J.T. LeRoy at events and disguising her voice as Speedie, the teenage prodigy’s manager, and as Emily Frazier, the frontwoman of the band hired to play at all the J.T. LeRoy book parties. 

Everyone we talked to mentioned how much Laura loved the phone.

Sammie Veeler: We just talked on the phone for like an hour. And she was like, you have to read Sarah.

Lucas Celler: So she's like, on the phone constantly.

Marc Eliot Stein: And She was in the middle of a court case and talking to me on the phone.

Bethanne Patrick: And when it comes to similarities between the invented J.T. LeRoy and the real author, Laura Albert, she did have a background in sex work as a phone sex operator.

Video Clip - Phone Sex Operator: I know you want to call me, just do it. Call me now.

Bethanne Patrick: Both phone sex and J.T. LeRoy exist because of our very human capacity to want to suspend reality, wade into the land of disbelief, and give into pure imagination.

Music Clip - Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory - Pure Imagination: Come with me. And you'll be in a world of pure imagination

Bethanne Patrick: Crisis hotline, party lines, and early phone sex 900-numbers were big in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, right around the time Laura was growing up in Brooklyn, so it may have occurred to Laura then,or later on, that phone skills were not only an escape from her reality but potentially a way to monetize her skills. 

Lucas Celler: For her, I think the telephone was like inventing fire because she was so traumatized at this young age. And she had a really difficult time being herself in the real world.

Bethanne Patrick: Lucas again, speaking to how his friend Laura used the telephone to survive.

Lucas Celler: Her only line to the outside world was the telephone. And she would use this thing, I couldn't imagine, I remember, like, even seeing, like, a telephone bill from the year 2000 something, and it was like, a thousand dollars.

Bethanne Patrick: Laura’s background with the telephone helped explain just how the character of J.T. LeRoy was first invented.

Lucas Celler: You know, she would call party lines and she would basically create these [kinds] of personas. And at some point, she discovered, you know, well during this time, you know, she felt, you know, very, like, suicidal, because her life was, like, really horrible. Like, her mom one day wanted to get Laura to get out of her room and she refused to get out of the room. And then the mom took some sort of, like, kerosene and some flammable solvent and, like, poured it, like, through the crack under the door and then lit it like to smoke her out. Like, fucked up shit, like, really fucked up shit.

Bethanne Patrick: The stories about Laura’s home life that Lucas shared with us were bleak. From kerosene drenched bedroom doors to sexual abuse, it’s no wonder Laura was searching for a life raft. And it’s clear that for much of her life, Laura’s survival hinged on her access to the telephone.

Lucas Celler: I couldn't imagine having to go through that. And so, you know, her life was basically hell, hell on earth. And she needed to find some sort of way to solve these problems that are stirring within her. And I think around this time, that's when she discovered crisis hotlines.

So, she would talk about her pain, but she would have some boy character that she would create, and call on those hotlines and talk about how she felt like committing suicide. It was her only outlet, [it] was to go on the phone and call these crisis hotlines and speak about her pain. And it's amazing that she even found a way to do that because I couldn't imagine a scenario where she didn't discover fire and discover the fact that she can embody a different person than herself. I couldn't imagine what the outcome would've been [for], like, young Laura at that time, because you don't just call, like, a suicide hotline for fun. I mean, no one does that. That's fucked up. She was truly in trouble.

Bethanne Patrick: In her late twenties, while living in San Francisco, Laura Albert once again found herself considering suicide. So, she turned to the coping mechanism that had kept her alive in the past. Laura started calling a children’s crisis hotline and reached a psychiatrist named Dr. Terrence Owens.

Based on interviews with Laura in the 2016 documentary, Author: JT LeRoy, Dr. Owens actually encouraged her to lean into the JT LeRoy and Speedie characters. Laura said that it was his professional opinion that these alternate identities allowed Laura Albert to heal, process, and mission critical for a suicide prevention team, survive. 

Lucas Celler: So, she was kind of live writing along with being suicidal, and she would kind of be able to feel good and feel okay after communicating some fictitious analog of her own pain, which was always very similar. But she obviously changed the gender and often these kids were, you know, street kids or drug addicts or, you know, experienced more severe pain than she has.

Bethanne Patrick: If Laura only inhabited these alternate identities in therapeutic settings, that would have been one thing. But phones can call all sorts of people. J.T. LeRoy, along with Speedie and eventually Emily Frazier, were personae that grew legs. 

It was picking up the phone to call New York City writers and editors like Dennis Cooper, Ira Silverberg, or Mary Gaitskill where J.T.'s charming but disingenuous West Virginia twang first started to get noticed by the literary community. J.T.’s story of adversity, which was littered with morsels of truth from Laura Albert’s own life, tugged at the heartstrings of our publishing elites. 

Video Clip - Magnolia Pictures and Magnet Releasing: In my dreams, I'm a rock star and I'm miss America and I'm a tap dancer, there's so many things I'd like to do.

Bethanne Patrick: Listening back to the J.T. phone voice, it's kind of schlocky. Y'all I live in Virginia, so I know a good southern drawl and that ain't it. So, why did so many seemingly smart people buy into this character? Here’s where we have to remember that most people operate in good faith. They don’t walk around assuming other people use false identities. Plus, the swirl of mystery and intrigue around J.T. didn’t hurt. Descending into a fantasy world of your own imagination is quite alluring for lots of people.

Also, the writing was good. And for book people, there’s something fabulously compelling about a true teenage prodigy with a fresh editorial voice who writes to overcome unthinkable trauma.

But there are a few things that don’t sit right. 

First, there’s the question of the time, emotional energy, and resources that normal, everyday people invested in Laura and J.T. For example, Dr. Terrence Owens was likely correct in encouraging a creative outlet for trauma. Dr. Owens was running a children’s crisis hotline in San Francisco when the nearly thirty-year-old Laura Albert called as J.T. LeRoy, her fifteen year old alt identity. 

Was Laura taking advantage of a community resource built for children? Or is that a moot point, since this hotline saved her life? It’s tough to say. What we do know is that Dr. Owens spent hours on the phone with Laura and helped her survive suicidal ideations and self harm. 

According to Laura, Dr. Owens viewed her alter, J.T. LeRoy, potentially as evidence of D.I.D. or Dissociative Identity Disorder, which is more commonly referred to as “multiple personality disorder” in the movies or television. 

Dr. Gerald P. Perman: I'm Dr. Gerald Perman. I'm a psychiatrist in private practice, so I've seen patients with many different psychiatric diagnoses, and in the 1980’s and into the nineties, as many of you know, the diagnosis of multiple personality disorder became, [it] got a lot of attention.

Bethanne Patrick: To better understand and empathize with someone living with Dissociative Identity Disorder, we consulted with a psychiatrist of more than thirty years, Dr. Gerald P. Perman. We’d like to acknowledge upfront that D.I.D. is a pretty controversial diagnosis in the psychiatric community. 

Dr. Gerald P. Perman: In essence, dissociation represents a failure to integrate aspects of perception, memory, identity, and consciousness. Minor instances of dissociation, such as highway hypnosis, transient feelings of strangeness, or spacing out are common phenomena.

Bethanne Patrick: D.I.D. follows a pretty consistent path with patients. And based on what Lucas shared about Laura’s childhood, Dr. Perman corroborated how D.I.D. has the potential to manifest in trauma survivors.

Dr. Gerald P. Perman: Extensive empirical evidence, so research that's been done, suggests that dissociation occurs especially as a defense against trauma. So, people who are traumatized, whether it's a childhood trauma, sexual or emotional, or in war situations, or people who've been in a fire, or something like that has been documented, [D.I.D] especially occurs as a defense against trauma. 

Bethanne Patrick: Movies and TV shows present people with multiple personalities, the dated term for Dissociative Identity Disorder, as people capable of seamlessly flipping in and out of different characters.

Movie Clip - Fight Club: Answer me. Why do people think that I'm you?

TV Clip -  Mr. Robot: If you want me to talk to him, just let him come to me.

Bethanne Patrick: But as Dr. Perman explains, “alts,” as he calls them, don’t operate like that at all.

Dr. Gerald P. Perman: For Hollywood, it would be kind of boring to watch a session with a psychiatrist of a patient with multiple personality disorder.

Bethanne Patrick: We’d like to note here that Dr. Perman used air quotes around the term “multiple personality disorder” since it’s not the technical diagnosis.

Dr. Gerald P. Perman: There would tend to be subtle changes in the patient's posture, their voice quality would change and whatnot. And it may last 10 or 15 minutes and then they might revert back or switch back to their main “alter” and whatnot. 

Bethanne Patrick: It does sound like in the circus of J.T. LeRoy, she was able to turn characters on and off and recall interactions, which as my producers found out, is unusual, or rather implausible, for this disorder.

Dr. Gerald P. Perman: You're not going to see the person going out in public, say, totally dressed one way for hours or days at a time [and] the next day, [be] looking and dressed totally different. It’s just not going to happen. Generally, they're not going to be this autonomous self that's portrayed in movies where they go out and do this, and go do this and that in another personality. Generally, we don't see that.

Bethanne Patrick: This is all interesting analysis. And I promise, I can completely empathize with someone struggling with mental health challenges beyond their control. Still, Dr. Perman’s input only left me more confused. Why would somebody go to the lengths that Laura Albert did if it was all a ruse? And whether Laura’s long, meandering phone calls in character were D.I.D. or theater, I can understand why the people caught in her crosshairs were so upset. 

Here’s where I really want to talk about the blowback, by which I mean both the fallout and the outrage. For Laura, the telephone was not only like discovering fire, as Lucas told us, but it was also a lot like playing with fire.

And we all know what happens to a fuse once it’s lit. There’s an old saying and it goes a little something like: don’t piss off the people who control the media. So, what happened when Laura Albert got found out?

Marc Eliot Stein: Well, that is the big question, right? I mean, I do think I'm a defender of Laura Albert. I think that she was railroaded, she was treated terribly – terribly – by the press at the time. She recovered, but there was a time when I felt this is a writer whose life is being destroyed.

Bethanne Patrick: That’s Marc Eliot Stein, New York City-based editor and founder of Literary Kicks, which has been running continuously since 1994.

Marc Eliot Stein: So, you know, here I am. Suddenly, I'm the owner of one of the oldest literary archives on the internet. And I'm proud of that. It's, you know, when I created it, my idea was to represent alternative literature, experimental literature, fun literature, rock and roll literature, punk literature, you know. I was never into proper, you know, I wasn't going to chronicle what the New Yorker was publishing.

Bethanne Patrick: This was back in 2008, only a few years after J.T. LeRoy’s true identity was revealed, and when Laura Albert found herself embroiled in a drawn out legal battle over misrepresenting her identity. Marc, then writing under his own pseudonym, Levi Asher, examined whether Laura Albert’s treatment by the media was fair in his piece, “Can Laura Albert Be Forgiven?”

Marc Eliot Stein: When I talked to her, she was in a court case where she was being sued. And she was in the middle of a court case and talking to me on the phone in, you know, in the evening. And I just felt, “Oh my God, fire your lawyer, change your strategy. They're not understanding you, you know, like you're – what you should say is that, ‘I'm a fiction writer.’” A fiction writer is allowed to lie. Your writing fiction, you're allowed to invent an identity. You know, I mean, and some of this is what I wrote about on Lit Kicks at the time, but, you know, I pointed out from Daniel Defoe to Miguel de Cervantes, the great novels were all hoaxes.

Bethanne Patrick: Laura Albert defenders make the legitimate point that all of J.T. LeRoy’s books were labeled as fiction and lots of fiction writers operate under a nom de plume. In fact, it’s a rich literary tradition.

Marc Eliot Stein: But the fact is a fiction writer is a fiction writer, and she's also a good fiction writer. So, she deserves the same respect. When I had a pen name, I found that people saw that as a reason not to trust me, that if you introduce yourself with two names, you're showing yourself to be two-faced. And so, it's sort of like tipping your hand.

Bethanne Patrick: In full disclosure, we did speak to the lead attorney on Laura Albert’s appeal, which ultimately reached a settlement out of court. The lawyer took on the case pro-bono because he believed a great wrong had been done, not only to Laura, but to the whole literary community, by punishing an author for using a pseudonym.

Marc Eliot Stein: If you're lining up the evidence for or against the idea that Laura Albert was a bad person to create J.T. LeRoy, you could take, you know, putting a wig on her friend as evidence for the side that there was duplicitous behavior. My answer to that: I have to refer to the whole tradition of Andy Warhol, actually.

Bethanne Patrick: Here, Marc is referring to not only Andy Warhol, the artist known for pop art prints of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe and the guy credited with saying, “In the future everyone will get their 15 minutes of fame,” but also to Andy Warhol the collective.

Andy surrounded himself with intellectuals, artists, and deviant street kids. “The Factory,” the place where all the radical, alternative creatives within Andy’s scene met, was churning out multidisciplinary art under Warhol’s name, but it was produced by a collective of people. 

There’s actually a tradition of doing this in the art world, from Jeff Koons and Kehinde Wiley, both working artists today who have huge studio teams working on pieces. Kehinde goes so far as to outsource some of the painting to teams in China. Marc suggests that maybe Laura Albert was following this kind of production tradition.

Marc Eliot Stein: When J.T. LeRoy showed up, there was no picture. There was a name and there were a couple of stories. I was like, “Oh wow. There's somebody here with a little bit of New York edge. There's somebody here who really knows Andy Warhol.” That's one thing I thought. And when I say Andy Warhol, I'm talking about Velvet Underground producing Andy Warhol, you know.

And you know, when I say edge, I mean danger. We call it an edge because you can fall off the edge. So, you know, I think that when I first heard of J.T. LeRoy, I immediately knew this was a pen name. You couldn't not know this was a pen name. How do you get a name like J.T. LeRoy. It's a first name. And the name was supposedly Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy.

Bethanne Patrick: There were other parallels we can draw between J.T. LeRoy and Andy Warhol. For example, Andy was the original “send somebody to the event in a wig on my behalf” guy.

Marc Eliot Stein: One of the main characters in the Andy Warhol scene was Jeremiah Newton. So there's a Jeremiah. And you know where it comes, what I'm bringing this back to, the mask and the glasses and all that, one thing Andy Warhol used to do is when he would do speaking engagements, because he was a tremendously popular speaker in the sixties, he got so bored doing speaker engagements that he sent other people out with Andy Warhol wigs and Andy Warhol glasses to go appear as Andy Warhol.

Now, it's wrong, but it's art. It's art. I'm sorry. Art is art. Fiction is fiction. When you are a famous artist, you know, Dali can do what he wants. Picasso can do what he wants. Warhol can do what he wants.

Bethanne Patrick: Another possible parallel between Laura and Andy worth sharing is that recent retrospectives on Warhol indicate the artist lied constantly, “almost recreationally,” but public knowledge of his dishonesty didn’t destroy his reputation, as it did Laura’s. But maybe, unlike J.T. collaborators, denizens of Andy Warhol’s scene benefitted with separate careers, given their association with the venerable star.

Here’s Marc talking about why the media response to Laura Albert’s wrongdoing may have been a bit outsized.

Marc Eliot Stein: She was engaged in, probably had psychological roots in, you know, trauma. And I believe that in her court case, now I never attended her court case – which I have described as, I think it was disastrous for her because there were a lot of reporters there just trashing her, writing articles, destroying this person – in her court case, I think she tried to explain her life of abuse to the jury. And for some reason, it didn't go over and it was treated as if she were a liar when she was telling the truth, and that's really painful.

Bethanne Patrick: The truth is, the wrongdoing wasn’t professional, it was personal. Our producer, Caila, actually found this all out first hand.

Caila Litman: If I search Laura Albert in my inbox, 88 messages come up. So, 88 messages between now and, like, the past five months or so, five or six months

Bethanne Patrick: To date, she’s received close to a hundred emails from Laura Albert, the author behind J.T. LeRoy. But that’s not all.

Caila Litman: We really didn't get on the phone until we started talking at the end of October. We hopped on the phone [in] probably mid [to] early November. And these were long phone calls, Bethanne. And they were not really, like, scheduled. So, she'd be like, “Yeah, like, why don't we talk this afternoon?” And then I would call her and she'd be like, “Hey, I'm actually at the grocery store. Can't talk right now. I'll give you a call back in a little bit. Are you free tonight?” And I'm like, “Sure.” You know, you really want to be accommodating in order to build trust and, like, get people's feedback and hopefully get an interview with them.

Bethanne Patrick: The hope was that we’d include Laura’s voice in this episode, and by doing so, share a balanced and nuanced perspective on the J.T. LeRoy story. That’s why Caila got in contact with Laura. Now, journalists are familiar with the whole “hurry up and wait” idea when securing a source, but Laura Albert took it to a whole new level. 

Caila Litman: I would wake up in the morning to a wall of emails from Laura where she's on the west coast. So, she could have been sending me, forwarding me things, and they were a lot of anecdotal things, like look at this interaction with this person, look at the way this person talked about me, they got it all wrong. And there was a bit of a [feeling like] we were on a team together. Like, we were on a team together, dispelling this terrible narrative that had taken hold of everybody in the culture that we could challenge.

Bethanne Patrick: My producer experienced firsthand what editors and publishing agents may have felt more than twenty years ago when they first started corresponding with Laura, or rather, J.T. LeRoy. 

Caila Litman: I wanted to, I really, really wanted to empathize with her. I wanted to see the scandal through Laura's eyes and understand, you know, what it must have been like to be in her shoes. But I realized when she blew me off for the second scheduled podcast interview in a row, and this was after, like, six or eight months, Bethanne, maybe I had been charmed or duped or whatever like so many people before me. And I just felt like an idiot.

And I think my theory is that the payoff for her was that this game of cat and mouse where I was just always wanting a little bit more, that was what it was about. I mean, finally, the EP shut down pursuing the interview because, I mean, we're a small operation and this had been months. It was too costly and made no sense to keep pursuing it.

Bethanne Patrick: Caila got a taste of what all the people who had spent hours and hours on the phone with J.T. LeRoy, way back when, may have felt. They no longer cared why she did what she did as a trauma response. They felt wronged for pouring so much time, energy, and genuine care into a person who never planned to be honest with them.

And remember: women and non-gender conforming people rarely get a free pass in our society. So, when the tides turned for J.T., or rather, Laura, they really turned.

At the end of the day, whether you’re outraged or a passionate defender of Laura Albert, we have to revisit the question of trans representation. Does J.T. LeRoy’s work belong in the trans canon?

Imogen Binnie: I mean, yeah, totally. Right?

Bethanne Patrick: More answers and more questions, after the break

Chapter 3: Cannon Fodder

Imogen Binnie: Have y'all talked about Garbage and how Shirley Manson was like, friends with, quote unquote, “friends” with J.T. LeRoy? I want to see when that one came out, because for whatever reason, they're kind of intertwined for me.

Bethanne Patrick: That’s author Imogen Binnie. She wrote the award-winning, cult classic novel, Nevada. 

It’s about a thirty-something trans woman working at a bookstore in Brooklyn who tries to stay true to her punk values while her life sort of implodes. It’s a fabulous read.

Imogen Binnie: So, I took one writing class when I was in college, the rest were lit classes. And in that writing class, there was this guy who was, like, writing gay stuff. And I thought that was cool, but I wasn't out as trans yet.

Bethanne Patrick: Here, Imogen is talking about her own experience coming out as trans while also trying to remember the first time she ever heard about J.T. LeRoy. 

Imogen Binnie: It would be a couple more years until I came out as trans, but I remember bumping into him on the train platform. I think I was probably going to take the train from New Brunswick into New York City for something, probably going to a concert or something, bumping into him. And he was super stoked because he was talking about this book, and in my memory, this is all so blurred together. I should have put together a time frame in advance, but in my memory, it's also very associated with the third Garbage album.

Music Clip: “Cherry Lips” by Garbage

Bethanne Patrick: We talked about this earlier but that queer anthem “Cherry Lips” by Garbage’s lead singer, Shirley Manson? The lyrics and story of the song are about J.T. LeRoy’s novel, Sarah. And this was one of Imogen’s entry points to the world of JT.

Imogen Binnie: That was part of what's exciting. This, like, gay boy who I was sort of, like, drawn to queerness without really understanding, like, having really figured out why yet – at some level I had figured out why and been blogging about it for a long time, but on another level, I had not – I was just, like, stoked on J.T. LeRoy and the fact that Shirley Manson was friends with him.

I have such a clear memory of, like, J.T. LeRoy being a thing and associating it with that Garbage album. And it seems like that timeframe lines up.

Bethanne Patrick: While working as a bookseller at The Strand in New York City, Imogen devoured J.T.’s work, but from the beginning, she wasn’t convinced that J.T. LeRoy was a real person or that the work was autobiographical. 

Here she is talking about the author photo on the back cover of Sarah.

Imogen Binnie: But it seemed like such a clear thing that, like, this is not a real picture of the author, unless this author is a model who's, like, doing book covers or, like, art photography or something. And reading the book, it was just so clear that, like, yeah, this was not, like, trans autobiography in any sense. Or if it was, it was, like, extremely, it was through some kind of, like, very intense filter, you know what I mean?

Like, just something about the tone, the like, intensity of doing, like, truck stop sex work in contrast with the fact that even when bad things were happening, I feel like I was never super worried about this protagonist. It always felt like they were going to come out okay, and there were, like, magic raccoon penis bones.

Bethanne Patrick: Okay, so if a genuine, totally real, trans reader wasn’t convinced that J.T. LeRoy was a legitimate person, did that impact the value or meaning of the work for Imogen?

Imogen Binnie: It was interesting, like the thing, the smart thing that I've been excited about saying for this podcast since you contacted me is, are you familiar with Men, Women, and Chainsaws by Carol Clover? Does that book mean anything to you?

It's a non-fiction book from the early nineties. It's kind of a classic in, like, feminist horror studies. She, I think, came up with the idea of the final girl.

Bethanne Patrick: If you’re unfamiliar with the horror movie trope of “the final girl,” which I promise Imogen is getting to a really mind-blowing point here, it’s the last woman standing to confront the killer, or more [importantly], the person left behind who gets to tell the story from her perspective.

Movie Clip - Scream 3: He's right there. It's your turn to scream, asshole.

Bethanne Patrick: In Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film…

Imogen Binnie: It's a strong title. 

Bethanne Patrick: …author Carol J. Clover suggests that audiences go from seeing the story through the killer’s perspective to identifying with the final girl who survives, which is a powerful leap, especially when thinking about it as a metaphor for survivors of sexual abuse who’ve struggled to be believed.

Imogen Binnie: She's writing a lot about rape revenge movies, and one of the points that she makes that I hadn't realized until I read this book was that, you know, in retrospect, we tend to look at rape revenge movies as, like, pretty fucked up, like, really intense and like, why would I want to watch that thing?

Bethanne Patrick: If you’re unfamiliar with the rape revenge genre, a good example of this is 2020’s Promising Young Woman starring Carey Mulligan and Bo Burnham.

Movie Trailer - Promising Young Woman: I go to a club, I act like I'm too drunk to stand, and every week a nice guy comes over to see if I'm okay.

Imogen Binnie: But one of the things she talks about is that at the time, like, sexual assault was not being taken very seriously. And so, having a movie that took it seriously and showed a woman having such a strong response that she goes on, like, a murder spree, was actually, like, a pretty interesting decision in terms of the culture.

Bethanne Patrick: And here’s where, as I promised, Imogen brings it back to why the work of J.T. LeRoy ultimately matters.

Imogen Binnie: And so like, yeah, going back to my ongoing look for trans representation and stuff, like, when Sarah came out, it didn't matter that I, like, didn't believe for a second that J.T. LeRoy was a real person, like at all. It was really like, “Whoa, this is cool. These are, like, trans people who get to do stuff that's not just like, you know, beg for approval from cis people or, like, you know, tell a story about how much pain they've been in,” so that people will believe that being trans is real or like, I don't know, these are, like, really strong critiques of trans autobiography at the time.

But like, I was pretty frustrated with the fact that that seemed to be the only voice that trans people could have. And so, in a way, Sarah really felt like it was taking trans experiences seriously despite all the other stuff that seemed kind of wild or, like, yeah, unrealistic

Bethanne Patrick: So, for Imogen Binnie, an emerging trans author, J.T. LeRoy’s work was powerful and impactful in a way that might seem subtle to the untrained eye, but meant the world to the trans reader.

Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things depicted a trans character who was more emotionally complex and nuanced than their gender presentation or sexuality. And as with the “final girl” metaphor…

Movie Clip - Halloween Kills: Come and get me.

Bethanne Patrick: …J.T. LeRoy's books moved audiences to shift their perspective; to identify with the universally human aspects of a trans character’s journey. It was Imogen’s perspective that regardless of whether you think what Laura Albert did was right or wrong, her work undoubtedly belongs in the trans canon.

Imogen Binnie: Yeah, totally. Right? Canon is not about value. Like, things don't get canonized because they're good. They get canonized because they made an impact and people are still talking about them, right? Which is not to say, like, there's no value in Sarah, but like, if you're talking about the trans canon, like yeah, we're talking about books that made an impact and, like, we're kind of talking about, I don't know, historicity. Can I say that?

Bethanne Patrick:  Remember, context is everything. And if you recall, for decades trans characters were getting the raw end of the deal on the cultural stage. For better or for worse, J.T. LeRoy or rather, Laura Albert, inched our primitive cultural notions of the trans experience forward – in a more human direction. And you can feel JT LeRoy’s influence when looking at the more complex depictions of the trans experience available today.

TV Clip - Orange is the New Black: I made my own. Couture. Commissary doesn’t carry a size 13. 

Bethanne Patrick: The popularity of J.T. and even the ensuing controversy ultimately nudged open a door that had been boarded up. By creating space to reimagine the gender binary and pulling the likes of celebrities and the literati into the whole ruse, it made a statement. Sure, nobody liked being duped and Laura Albert’s path to publication was fraught in many ways, but like Imogen said, it isn’t about being “good” or “morally correct,” it’s about its cultural impact. 

And J.T. LeRoy certainly has had a ripple effect.

Now that you know all about the cockamamy story of J.T. LeRoy, it’s time to check out titles with genderbending characters from authors, who, to the best of our knowledge, have physical bodies.

Looking for another angle on JTL? Girl Boy Girl by Savannah Knoop is that Savannah’s memoir of her time incarnating J.T.

Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters has quickly entered the trans literature canon; it’s buzzy, funny, and occasionally scandalous.

And of course there’s our guest, Imogen Binnie’s, recently reissued Nevada, which is extremely queer and extremely funny. Keep an eye out for Imogen’s takes on a certain, over-merchandised, New York City bookstore. Wink. Wink.

Showrunner: Caila Litman

Producer, Researcher, and Writer: Jordan Aaron

Producer: Matt Keeley

Production, Mixing, and Mastering by Chris Boniello

Legal Review by Alexia Bedat and Louise Carron at Klaris Law.

Marketing by Joni Deutsch, Morgan Swift, and Madison Richards. 

Social Media by Sylvia Bueltel. 

Art by Tom Grillo. 

Fact Checking by Kathleen Hennrikus.

Voice over work by Han Van Sciver.

Production and Hosting by me, Bethanne Patrick. 

Executive Produced by Jeff Umbro and the Podglomerate. 

Special thanks to Dan Christo, Lucas Celler, Imogen Binnie, Donald David, Sammie Veeler, Kelsey Osgood, Laura Albert, Dr. Gerald P. Perman, Marc Eliot Stein, Stephen Beachy, Gary Shteyngart, Nicole Gagne, Jo Healey, and Alex Remnick.

Special thanks for Dan Christo, Camila Osorio, Jessa Crispin, Dr. Jose Apud, Dr. Gerald P. Perman, Luis Urrea, and Ian Parker. 

We have included links to a lot of the background stories we used for this episode in the show notes. 

You can learn more about Missing Pages at thepodglomerate dot com, on twitter @misspagespod and on Instagram @missingpagespod, or you can email us at missing pages at the podglomerate dot com. 

If you liked what you heard today, please let your friends and family know and suggest an episode for them to listen to. I’m Bethanne Patrick, and we’ll be back next week with another episode.