Generation 90210 Moment: Exaltation Upon Finding Out JT Leroy was a fraud

Before there was James Frey (A Million Little Pieces). Before there was Margaret Seltzer/Jones (Love and Consequences). Before there was Nasdijj/Tim Barrus (Geronimo’s Bones). Before all of those other pseudo-memoirists were found to be fakes and many of them forced to endure the pop culture version of waterboarding – interrogation at the vengeful hands of Oprah-- there was JT LeRoy.

JT LeRoy was an early 2000s sensation who authored two novels, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things and Sarah, and one novella, Harold’s End, about a nameless teenage male prostitute with a pet snail named Harold and an older client who wants the narrator to dump the contents of his enema over his head. Ramona knows this because it is the one thing she read by LeRoy and it was enough for her to decide that she didn’t need to read more. Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things both center on a male child’s experiences as the son of a lot lizard (truck stop prostitute) whom his mom dresses up like a girl and pimps out. CONT.

The crazy thing was that LeRoy was twenty and twenty-one when the novels came out. All of the usual "look at us, we're quirkY!" folks -- Gus van Sant, Winona Ryder, Courtney Love – wanted to hang out with him, and he developed intense phone relationships with literary heavyweights like Mary Gaitskill, Dennis Cooper, and Mary Karr. He was known for being extraordinarily odd, rarely materializing in public at all, and on that rare occasion when he did, appearing always with huge sunglasses and a wig. He was not too shy, however, for a Vanity Fair pictorial and interview with Tom Waits.

Ramona and a friend learned of Leroy in the spring of their senior year in college. Sitting at a PF Changs, they all of the sudden became aware that, if they wanted to do something meaningful with their lives, the clock had started ticking; our generation’s prodigies were emerging. Sarah had come out the summer before and a major publicity whirl had been kicked into gear for The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. They were already feeling anxious about their post-graduation plans and now this? Really? Someone younger than them had already written a critically acclaimed novel, with another coming out? We thought we had until we were thirty (ha!).

Well, shit.

But here’s the thing – several years later some nosy reporters got it in their minds that something seemed off about the whole JT LeRoy thing and did some investigating. Turns out there is no such person as JT LeRoy. It was a pen name for a forty year old woman named Laura Albert. She had her ex-boyfriend’s little sister, Savannah Knoop, play the role of JT.

There was massive fallout over this situation. But to be fair, Albert may have lied to friends and to the public, but the books were always labeled as fiction. It’s not like she was Misha Defonseca who made up an entire childhood that included surviving the holocaust, killing a German soldier, and living with wolves. Or even poor James Frey, who turned a few hours in jail into a several month long sojourn in prison. Besides, after watching Oprah cut Frey’s balls off and hand them back to him in a jar on television, we figure he’s paid his penance. We wanted to put a clip up of that particular show but, alas, it’s not available; Oprah keeps her shit locked down, you know?
A PS about Oprah, one that Ramona warns her parents, friends’ parents, and all other easily offended adults to definitely avoid.

Ramona believes that Oprah once uttered the best line on television ever to be delivered throughout the history of the medium. She was doing a special on women who were sex addicts. While one woman was detailing her sexual preferences, Oprah interrupted her and said, with an uparalleled degree of disgust,

“You mean, you let strange men cum on your face?”

When Ramona is feeling sad or like she hasn’t accomplished enough or like she will never be a writer, she just remembers that JT LeRoy was actually a forty year old woman and that Oprah once used the expression “cum on your face” and all feels right in the universe again.