JT LeRoy, Laura Albert and the Story that Keeps on Giving

In the wake of two documentaries about Laura Albert/JT LeRoy — Marjorie Sturm’s The Cult of JT LeRoy (2014) and Jeff Feuerzeig’s Author: The JT LeRoy Story (2016), and, last week, the announcement of another JT film in the works, I have been asked to comment on the enduring fascination with this story, which I wrote about in No Exit Plan: The Lies and Follies of Laura Albert, a.k.a., JT LeRoy, for the LA Weekly. Some thoughts therein.

Laura has kept herself in the public eye; she has kept coming up with new or amplifying old reasons why she deserves love and understanding and to be seen as both the victim and the conqueror here.

Let’s talk an example: people refer to her performance for The Moth, its rawness, how she was willing to expose her pain and make art from this pain. This strikes a big nerve in some people. They, and in my experience especially young women, will point to this performance and say, this proves that Laura was a victim of abuse and explains everything that came after. To which I have responded, remember who is telling you the story. Watching The Moth performance, I saw what I always see when I see Laura, someone whose particular genius is to pierce you at your most tender point, with the aim of gaining whatever reaction it is she wants from you. When I stated something along these lines on-stage, after a screening of “The Cult of JT Leroy” (which I appear in), a young woman in the audience yelled that anyone who felt this way was, in essence, a condoner of child sexual abuse. Then she walked out. She had no need to question what she had learned from Laura herself.

If you take the time to look at what abuse Laura might or might not have suffered, it’s hazy. Trying to pin it down is like trying to pin a bead of mercury — whoops! There it goes. I can tell you, at least when I was there, Laura kept a photo of her mother over her kitchen table. Her mother was part of the JT Leroy enterprise (certain legal documents were in her name) and also the person Laura accuses, sometimes, of having instigated whatever abuse Laura suffered as a child. When I asked Laura if criminal charges were brought against anyone, or what her mother knew, she said, “I told her. She was bringing them in! This was the ‘70s.” When I pressed her for details, she said she was not sure what her mother did and did not know. Which to the journalist might be seen as discrediting, and to the person who believes Laura a victim, confirmation.

The Laura/JT story was interesting from the get-go. Long before the “reveal,” there were rumors in the literary and editorial worlds that there was no JT; that the books were a confection of, maybe, Dennis Cooper and Mary Gaitskill. I became more interested upon meeting Speedie, in a suite at the Chateau Marmont; during the release party of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. With the exception of a few lovers and perhaps my daughter, I have not had anyone approach me with the look of hot ardor that Speedie — Laura in a stick-straight flame-orange wig — gave me when she heard I was writing for the LA Times; she saw something she wanted, in terms of publicity. This led to a phone relationship with JT, who knew exactly how to work me, appealing to my instincts as a mother. As I mentioned in the piece I would eventually write about Laura for the LA Weekly, JT overstepped, or perhaps forgot my tender point, with his offer to engage in phone sex and his continual requests I write about him and his band and his friends and whatever, and it became clear whoever was on the phone was trying to hustle me. You can choose to be hustled or not, takes two to tango and all that; people will stay in the relationship for as long as they are getting something return.

Which has of course been Laura’s contention since the reveal; that people had no problem with JT when they were getting something, solace or cash or fame or selling books or magazines; they were feeling good about helping a kid in need, and if there was no kid, well, Laura felt unloved and suicidal, and so, she asks, are you sorry you saved a life? (Talk about a loaded question.) And to anyone who feels they were hustled, Laura insinuates that’s on them; that they are anti-intellectual, or a misogynist, or a liar, or a pedophile; she made accusations to me, about a writer who for years had helped JT, that were so inflammatory my paper refused to print them. I don’t think Laura will run out of contentions as to why she is right and anyone who challenges her, or feels hurt by her, is wrong. And she’s not alone. There are plenty of people who ask for sympathy and that you believe what sounds too bad (or good) to be true is true, as well as plenty of people susceptible to these stories, or else what would be the point of telling them? And that’s what makes this story fascinating; that it’s as much about us and what we choose to believe as it is about whatever creation or con (we can debate that) Laura pulled off — and is still pulling off. As evidence of this you have the new documentary. You sit two reviewers in the theater and they will have opposite reactions: she’s “fascinating”! She’s “a faker”! And on and on we go.

Readers have responded in several ways to the feature I wrote for the LA Weekly, “No Exit Plan: The Lies and Follies of Laura Albert, a.k.a. JT Leroy.” Some saw it as a kind of comeuppance — you have to remember Laura and I grew up in the same small Brooklyn neighborhood, and that, in addition to my experience as a journalist with JT, I had some insights into the past, and these added another view into the story, for instance, the first fake-person Laura created at age eleven, a beautiful young girl, she created to gain the affections of a boy, a boy who was my brother’s best friend. (I had not known of these connections until 2007.) Being able to report the story as both an observer and a participant had some resonance with readers.

The other reaction was anger. The rationale here: if you are not fully in Laura’s camp, then you are further victimizing her. Also, sometimes, that you are an enemy of art. (I wish I had on camera the look Asia Argento gave, at the Heart is Deceitful party, when I asked if JT existed, a glorious Italian pout of disdain for the rube that was me.) I don’t think this divide will ever close. I have a good friend, a famous film reviewer, who gave the new documentary a rave review; who sees Laura as a brave truth-teller and a survivor. I wrote her an email saying, boy, are we going to have an interesting conversation the next time we meet.

Because it is interesting; it’s fascinating, and I credit Laura with giving us a story that keeps on giving, keeps us talking, while at the same time I appreciate the betrayal people feel, and why they blame Laura for the betrayal. Whether Laura sees her hand in any of it, I cannot say. When I saw her speak not long ago, everything was still everyone else’s fault. Her own “pain,” she has time to talk about, but yours, not so much.

The takeaway from all this is that humans are fascinating. As far as the world changing — a sort of, “ah! We’ve seen the light!” moment: all these years later, and still nothing like consensus on whether what Laura Albert pulled off is right or wrong or glamorous or despicable. This tells us something about ourselves, doesn’t it? As I did in the piece, I will quote Mary Gaitskill on the idea of JT, whom she called “Jeremy”: “It’s occurred to me that the whole thing with Jeremy is a hoax… that exposes things about other people, the confusion between love and art and publicity. A hoax that would be delightful and, if people were made fools of, it would be okay — in fact, it would be useful.”

There will never be a last word, there can’t be, and huzzah for that.