Saturday, June 28, 2025

The Strange Saga of J.T. LeRoy

My topsy-turvy career had plenty of low moments. Below is one of the most embarrassing of them all, but it was also funny is weird ways…

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 (published) backstory was intriguing -- a gay homeless abused kid from West Virginia who ran away to San Francisco, where he became a male prostitute and met various celebrities, closeted or out, as a sex worker.

His novels included “Sarah” and "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things," both of which had received critical acclaim nationally, and a number of well-known authors vouched for his credibility. 

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, some in outrageous ways, 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 city’s haunts 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 knew, 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 without objection.

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

After a while, 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 into the public himself.

By this point, I wondered whether J.T. was toying with me, but we had bigger problems at 7x7 than ferreting 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. I took an equity loan out on our house, my marriage was failing, and I was meeting too many friends in too many bars. among other distractions. 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 truth came out in bombshell fashion. 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 was embarrassed about the scandalous nature of it and my failure to force out her true identity. The truth is that I — the well-known investigative reporter — had fallen for her hoax because I had fallen in love with her story-telling.

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