Virtual Hillbilly: Musings on JT LeRoy by a Flesh-and-Blood West Virginian

Abstract

ARTICLE Virtual Hillbilly: Musings on JT LeRoy by a Flesh-and-Blood West Virginian Ann Pancake So it turns out that the most famous West Virginia writer in history (well, at least in recent history) is not only not West Virginian. He doesn't exist at all. As you know if you've run across any of the million and a half items Google coughs up for "JT LeRoy," many if not most written in just the past few months, the story goes like this: our author was born in 1980 in an unspecified West Virginia town. After a wildly abusive childhood in the state, distinguished by his mother prostituting him at truck stops, young JT escaped to San Francisco. There he lived on the streets, still hooking and at some point developing a heroin addiction, until he was rescued by a social worker named Emily Frasier in 1993. While in therapy with psychologist Dr. Terence Owens, JT began to write. Owens immediately recognized JT's latent genius and put him in touch with the first of many well-established writers and editors. By the time JT was sixteen, his work was appearing in popular magazines and journals—not bad for a formerly homeless hillbilly who was sexually abused as a child—and at the tender age of twenty, LeRoy published, to considerable acclaim, an autobiographical novel set in West Virginia entitled Sarah. Sarah was followed a year later, in 2001, by a collection of short stories, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, also set partly in West Virginia, and it too received an enthusiastic reception and has just been made into a film. A novella, Harold's End, this time with a San Francisco backdrop, came out in 2005. Not surprisingly, JT didn't achieve this spectacular literary ascent single-handedly. Drawing on self-promotion skills unprecedented in any Appalachian adolescent I've ever known, at fourteen JT was already in touch with edgy writer Dennis Cooper. From there, he cultivated intimate friendships/ mentorshipswith scadsofotherliterary celebrities, agents and editors. Sarah's blurbs and acknowledgements page read like a Who's Who in Contemporary Hip Writers and include Mary Karr, Sharon Olds, Mary Gaitskill, Tom Spanbauer, Art Spiegelman, Lewis Nordan, Tobias Woolf, Chuck Palakniuk, Joel Rose, 35 and Suzanne Vega. Vega prefigures JT's more recent batch of friends, because even the hippest of hip writers is less hip than a movie or music star. Eventually, JT's networking prowess had him hanging out with Winona Ryder and Gus Van Sant, Carrie Fisher and Tatum O'Neal and Courtney Love. Few could resist this vulnerable damaged genius boy, his need for support and nurturing, and his considerable charm in phone conversations and e-mail exchanges. Because—and here our tale takes a darker twist—phone conversations, faxes, and e-mails were almost exclusively how these relationships were conducted. Only a couple of his rich and /or famous friends ever met JT face to face, and those who did were presented with a mysterious figure in a wig and sunglasses accompanied by a woman named Laura Albert who did JT's talking for him. JT, friends and then fans were told, could not make public appearances because he was "pathologically shy;" because he was confused about his gender; because as a transgendered person, he might be attacked; because he had contracted HIV. After a while, some people got suspicious. Rumors about JT LeRoy's real identity were circulating pretty early on, but many of his closest supporters—those who spent hours with him on the phone—insisted that JT had to be exactly who he claimed he was. In October 2005, however, journalist Stephen Beachy published in New York magazine a meticulously researched piece making an awfully good case that JT was an imaginary construct most likely created by none other than Laura Albert, a forty-year-old middle-class white woman originally from Brooklyn. (During his research, Beachy examined all available public records and found no evidence of LeRoy's being born in West Virginia—or anyplace, for that matter—in 1980.) Then, in January 2006, a Warren St. John piece for The New York Times revealed that the...