Happy Fake Writer Day, JT Leroy
In case your short-term memory is as fried as ours, an October article in New York suggested (perhaps more loudly so than previous suggestions from other outlets) that successful young author JT Leroy — the former West Virginia truck-stop hooker with a history in the San Francisco drug scene and a solid case of AIDS — didn't exactly exist. Leroy, the piece maintained, was merely a fabrication of Laura Albert and Geoffery Knoop, the couple who are said to have rescued Leroy from his tragic life and helped him to become a "brilliant" dark writer.
Since the New York article, there's been a miniature hullabaloo questioning the existence of the ambiguous and androgynous boy wonder, resulting in the Times, having significant doubts about whether Leroy was who he claimed to be, deciding to 86 a costly travel piece Leroy had been working on.
Now Times sexy style sleuth Warren St. John has claimed to "unmask" Leroy, at least regarding his public persona. More specifically, the wigged person pretending to be Leroy appears to be Savannah Knoop, the half-sister of Geoffrey Knoop. St. John showed pictures of Savannah to several people who had personally worked with Leroy, including his agent Ira Silverberg, who identified the person in the picture as Leroy.
In short: Leroy is Knoop, Knoop is Leroy, and Dil is a bloke.
Next up on Fake Writer Day: James Frey!
