my pal bullshit
So I just found out today that JT Leroy, a twentysomething ex-male-hustler/teen runaway from West Virginia who was among my favorite authors for awhile, is actually a middle-aged, middle-class mother from Brooklyn looking to promote her band. The story begins with this article, which does some investigation but doesn't fully prove it; this was followed a couple months later by the real author's ex-boyfriend's confession, which is detailed here and here. Leroy befriended a number of respected "underground" writers before becoming a hipster it-child and switching his focus to famous actresses and musicians, and the accounts of authors Susie Bright and Dennis Cooper (who remains one of my all-time favorite writers) regarding this deception have been posted online.
This discovery came about at the same time as the James Frey scandal, so I'm surprised I didn't learn of it sooner; but it does bother me a lot as I used to be a fan of his. In fact, for a couple of years, I was a member of the JT Leroy Yahoo group (called "Terminator2"), in which a number of core members seemed almost painfully genuine: at least a couple of the strongest core members still staunchly insisted that JT Leroy was a real person--"I've met him! I spoke to him on the phone!!"--after the initial story broke out. (I quit reading the group's postings when I started college and stopped using my AOL address. By that time, the atmosphere seemed almost oppressively precious, sentimental, and "nice" to my cynical self--we mustn't say anything remotely critical about each other lest we scare the horses!--plus, Leroy was turning into something of a starfucker, with half his posts about phonecalls from Madonna and in-jokes with Asia Argento, the other half focusing on writing lyrics for some band I didn't care about.)
The thing is, I first read Leroy's work at age 16 when I didn't know anything about his public persona--in fact, I knew nothing at all of the author beyond his reported youth, and that Shirley Manson of Garbage had mentioned his name in some interview or other. The book I read was Sarah, which has obvious elements of magic realism and which I just took as fiction. Then I read that the author really had been pimped out by his mother as a 12-year-old transvestite prostitute in Appalachian truck stops and the story took on new meaning. I later read his book The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, a collection of stories about Leroy's abusive childhood, and "knowing" that these stories were true could make it emotionally difficult to take in at times. His latest novella, Harold's End, was a little too sentimental for my tastes, especially since it was about a bunch of homeless teen prostitutes and a john who liked to give hustlers enemas. It's been a few years since I've read any of his work, so I really don't know if I would still consider it good these days--though I must say that I read with a more overtly critical eye than I did five years ago, when I was still largely just enjoying this vast world of literature that I knew I would never be assigned in school.
As with the James Frey scandal, some people's response to this has been something along the lines of OMG ITS JUST BOOKS HOO CARES?!!!11 So you really don't give a shit if something is passed off as truth when it isn't? Does this also mean you don't care when your government lies to you about its reasons for going to war, the amount of torture it secretly administers, and all sorts of other scary shit I won't even go into? The truth is important, just as history is important--this is why, if you want a real education, you have to seek it out for yourself, not sit back passively with the rest of Generation Y as the public school system blandly tosses facts and theories at you. But I digress.
Some people, including some authors, proclaim that the Leroy scandal doesn't matter because "it's just a pseudonym" and lots of writers use pseudonyms, so what's wrong with that? But it wasn't "just a pseudonym." Names alone have a lot of power: against my parents' wishes, I had my full name legally changed the summer after I turned 18, because the name on my birth certificate was not who I was, nor had it been for some years. I also use a pseudonym myself--The Propagandist, obviously--and no part of my real name has ever appeared anywhere in this journal. This is for various reasons: I don't want my parents (or campus police, for that matter) to come across this page and discover some of the many, many aspects of my life they don't know about, such as my substance use and sexual proclivities, as I am still financially dependent on them; also, people tend to make fast and strong judgments about others' personalities without ever having spoken to them, based on gender, race, physical attractiveness, style of dress, etc. People who only know me from the internet, who have never seen a picture of me or heard my voice, inevitably have very different ideas about my physical form and external personality than people who know me in real life, who are aware of what a visible person I am and how that can skew people's judgment of me. Here, I am judged solely by my opinions, interests, and style of writing--and it can be a relief.
"JT Leroy" was not just an invented name, it was also a whole persona with an extremely loaded back story involving HIV infection, teen prostitution, homelessness, drug addiction, lifelong struggles with sexual and gender identity, and pretty much every kind of child abuse you can imagine, and the fact that this was used as a sort of "mystique" to help promote the Leroy name is not only exploitative, but highly disrespectful toward people who actually have gone through any of those things and possibly looked toward Leroy as someone they could identify with. (An example of this is shown in a Salon article about the hoax, in which Leroy claims to be a post-op transsexual but shows extreme ignorance of actual gender reassignment surgery.) I agree with Dennis Cooper (in the blog entry linked to above) that if an artist's work is truly viable, his/her biography shouldn't be a factor, and if a genuinely good writer such as Rimbaud or Burroughs (also two of my all-time favorites) happens to have had an interesting life as well, it should only be icing on the cake.
It's also much different to openly take on another persona for artistic reasons, to explore certain aspects of your own personality or to temporarily bring fiction to life; popular musicians have been doing this for decades, from Ziggy Stardust to Slim Shady. But in such cases, the public knows that this is acting and appreciates it as such.
The only really positive thing I can think of that came out of this scandal (for me personally) is that now I'm no longer jealous of Leroy for being first published at age 16, since s/he would actually have been twice that age at the time and it was far from the real author's first published work. Though, frankly, I shouldn't whine about not being published yet since I never submit outside of the occasional school publication. Which reminds me: a short story of mine was accepted to the Purchase creative writing program's official journal last semester and I've heard nothing of it since. The best short story was supposed to get $100 and I want to know who won! I was told by one creative writing major that people originally thought my story was a faculty submission, then when they discovered it was written by a student, initially thought it has been plagiarized (which doesn't say much for their creative writing program!). I suppose that's flattering, since I wrote it in a week and there were a couple of phrases I wanted to change after submitting it, plus I thought the style would be too old-fashioned as student lit mags often favor choppy sentences or stream-of-consciousness about trite political observations or childhood fears or people fucking and such.
This discovery came about at the same time as the James Frey scandal, so I'm surprised I didn't learn of it sooner; but it does bother me a lot as I used to be a fan of his. In fact, for a couple of years, I was a member of the JT Leroy Yahoo group (called "Terminator2"), in which a number of core members seemed almost painfully genuine: at least a couple of the strongest core members still staunchly insisted that JT Leroy was a real person--"I've met him! I spoke to him on the phone!!"--after the initial story broke out. (I quit reading the group's postings when I started college and stopped using my AOL address. By that time, the atmosphere seemed almost oppressively precious, sentimental, and "nice" to my cynical self--we mustn't say anything remotely critical about each other lest we scare the horses!--plus, Leroy was turning into something of a starfucker, with half his posts about phonecalls from Madonna and in-jokes with Asia Argento, the other half focusing on writing lyrics for some band I didn't care about.)
The thing is, I first read Leroy's work at age 16 when I didn't know anything about his public persona--in fact, I knew nothing at all of the author beyond his reported youth, and that Shirley Manson of Garbage had mentioned his name in some interview or other. The book I read was Sarah, which has obvious elements of magic realism and which I just took as fiction. Then I read that the author really had been pimped out by his mother as a 12-year-old transvestite prostitute in Appalachian truck stops and the story took on new meaning. I later read his book The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, a collection of stories about Leroy's abusive childhood, and "knowing" that these stories were true could make it emotionally difficult to take in at times. His latest novella, Harold's End, was a little too sentimental for my tastes, especially since it was about a bunch of homeless teen prostitutes and a john who liked to give hustlers enemas. It's been a few years since I've read any of his work, so I really don't know if I would still consider it good these days--though I must say that I read with a more overtly critical eye than I did five years ago, when I was still largely just enjoying this vast world of literature that I knew I would never be assigned in school.
As with the James Frey scandal, some people's response to this has been something along the lines of OMG ITS JUST BOOKS HOO CARES?!!!11 So you really don't give a shit if something is passed off as truth when it isn't? Does this also mean you don't care when your government lies to you about its reasons for going to war, the amount of torture it secretly administers, and all sorts of other scary shit I won't even go into? The truth is important, just as history is important--this is why, if you want a real education, you have to seek it out for yourself, not sit back passively with the rest of Generation Y as the public school system blandly tosses facts and theories at you. But I digress.
Some people, including some authors, proclaim that the Leroy scandal doesn't matter because "it's just a pseudonym" and lots of writers use pseudonyms, so what's wrong with that? But it wasn't "just a pseudonym." Names alone have a lot of power: against my parents' wishes, I had my full name legally changed the summer after I turned 18, because the name on my birth certificate was not who I was, nor had it been for some years. I also use a pseudonym myself--The Propagandist, obviously--and no part of my real name has ever appeared anywhere in this journal. This is for various reasons: I don't want my parents (or campus police, for that matter) to come across this page and discover some of the many, many aspects of my life they don't know about, such as my substance use and sexual proclivities, as I am still financially dependent on them; also, people tend to make fast and strong judgments about others' personalities without ever having spoken to them, based on gender, race, physical attractiveness, style of dress, etc. People who only know me from the internet, who have never seen a picture of me or heard my voice, inevitably have very different ideas about my physical form and external personality than people who know me in real life, who are aware of what a visible person I am and how that can skew people's judgment of me. Here, I am judged solely by my opinions, interests, and style of writing--and it can be a relief.
"JT Leroy" was not just an invented name, it was also a whole persona with an extremely loaded back story involving HIV infection, teen prostitution, homelessness, drug addiction, lifelong struggles with sexual and gender identity, and pretty much every kind of child abuse you can imagine, and the fact that this was used as a sort of "mystique" to help promote the Leroy name is not only exploitative, but highly disrespectful toward people who actually have gone through any of those things and possibly looked toward Leroy as someone they could identify with. (An example of this is shown in a Salon article about the hoax, in which Leroy claims to be a post-op transsexual but shows extreme ignorance of actual gender reassignment surgery.) I agree with Dennis Cooper (in the blog entry linked to above) that if an artist's work is truly viable, his/her biography shouldn't be a factor, and if a genuinely good writer such as Rimbaud or Burroughs (also two of my all-time favorites) happens to have had an interesting life as well, it should only be icing on the cake.
It's also much different to openly take on another persona for artistic reasons, to explore certain aspects of your own personality or to temporarily bring fiction to life; popular musicians have been doing this for decades, from Ziggy Stardust to Slim Shady. But in such cases, the public knows that this is acting and appreciates it as such.
The only really positive thing I can think of that came out of this scandal (for me personally) is that now I'm no longer jealous of Leroy for being first published at age 16, since s/he would actually have been twice that age at the time and it was far from the real author's first published work. Though, frankly, I shouldn't whine about not being published yet since I never submit outside of the occasional school publication. Which reminds me: a short story of mine was accepted to the Purchase creative writing program's official journal last semester and I've heard nothing of it since. The best short story was supposed to get $100 and I want to know who won! I was told by one creative writing major that people originally thought my story was a faculty submission, then when they discovered it was written by a student, initially thought it has been plagiarized (which doesn't say much for their creative writing program!). I suppose that's flattering, since I wrote it in a week and there were a couple of phrases I wanted to change after submitting it, plus I thought the style would be too old-fashioned as student lit mags often favor choppy sentences or stream-of-consciousness about trite political observations or childhood fears or people fucking and such.