In 2005, JT Leroy died. Technically, of course, JT Leroy never existed. The transgender, HIV-positive, homeless child prostitute-turned-bestselling author was the fabrication of two San Francisco women whose machinations were exposed by journalists in 2005. But during the nine years that Jonathan “Terminator” Leroy “lived,” he presided as the little prince of U.S. literati and glitterati.
In last year’s excellent The Cult of JT Leroy, director Marjorie Sturm exposed the smoke and mirrors of this story, treating it as the country’s biggest hoax this side of War of the Worlds. As a San Francisco local who’d worked with mentally ill homeless people, Sturm had begun the documentary as an earnest homage. BUT upon the revelation that forty-year-old San Francisco resident Laura Albert and her twentysomething sister-in-law Savannah Koop had posed as Leroy (the former woman wrote his books and spoke as him on the phone; the latter posed as him in person), the filmmaker had whipped off her rose-colored glasses to give voice to the many who felt betrayed and manipulated. Continue Reading →
