Thursday, July 11, 2024

The Strange Case of J.T. LeRoy

When we launched a new city magazine for San Francisco called 7x7 in 2001, we gathered a wide variety of talented writers to help carry out our mission, which among other things was to differentiate ourselves from the traditional genre as much as possible.

One of those writers was a mysterious and reclusive character called J.T. LeRoy, who penned short essays for us about his supposed adventures in the city.

His backstory was intriguing -- a gay homeless abused kid from West Virginia who ran away to San Francisco, where he became a male prostitute who met various celebrities, closeted or out, in his line of work.

His novels included one, "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things," that had received critical acclaim nationally, and a number of well-known authors vouched for him.

His essays for 7x7 captured that certain oddity that has always struck me about this city — how many people here seem to be trying to reinvent themselves, with varying degrees of success.

If there were a Harry-Potter-type fantasy land with witches and wizards and strange creatures at the bars, surely it would include some of the haunts of San Francisco that J.T. described.

In my role as editor of the new magazine, one of my many tasks was to talk through the first draft of each essay with J.T. He asked that we do this by phone; I was busy so that was fine by me.

Part of his allure, I discovered, was that he almost never showed himself in public, sort of like Thomas Pynchon.

Instead, we would have long rambling conversations on the phone -- his voice was high-pitched with an Appalachian accent -- and those conversations were delightful. He took criticism well and would make any revisions I requested rapidly.

We had an understanding that we would eventually meet up in person as part of my due diligence but that never seemed to happen.

Eventually a woman he identified as his sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop, started showing up around town as his stand-in. He told me he chose her because he felt too crippled by social anxiety to come out in public himself.

By this point, I’d suspected that J.T. might be toying with me, but we had bigger problems at 7x7 than finding out his true identity. After the 9/11 terror attacks, San Francisco’s economy had crashed. The tourist trade basically evaporated overnight. Local businesses wanted to advertise in our magazine but couldn’t pay for the ads until the economy rebounded.

In turn, the magazine had to defer paying me, so I was working for free. After a year of this, I left for a visiting professorship at Stanford. With that, I also left the unsolved mystery of J.T.’s true identity behind.

It was several years later when the bombshell came. J.T. LeRoy was actually a writer named Laura Albert, and she had gotten some of the details of her supposed backstory by illegally taping phone calls to a suicide hotline for troubled kids. She was by then in France and had finally come clean in an interview with the Paris Review. 

Through mutual friends, she got word to me that she felt very bad that she had deceived me during our time at 7x7.

I never could bring myself to actually resent what she did, however, even though I was embarrassed about the scandalous nature of it and my failure to ferret out her true identity.

In the end, however, I rationalized that J.T. LeRoy’s little essays for 7x7 were a valuable refection of one of San Francisco’s enduring realities, and that is that there are quite a few characters out here trying to create new identities for themselves, much like in the mid-1800s’ Barbary Coast.

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