CARNAL NATION

Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy
By Savannah Knoop
Seven Stories
$17.95, 223pp.

If you followed the literary, entertainment, and sex scenes over the past decade, you might feel you know everything there is to know about JT LeRoy, one of the longest-running literary hoaxes of all time—and quite likely the one that's garnered the most ink. But Savannah Knoop's memoir, Girl Boy Girl, looks at things from a different angle, that of the young woman who for six years was LeRoy's public face.

LeRoy was supposedly a young, drug-addicted transgender street hustler in San Francisco who, as a boy, has been pimped out as a truck stop prostitute in West Virginia. In 2005-2006, investigative reporters for New York magazine and the New York Times revealed that LeRoy's articles and books—including Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things—were written by a 40-year-old woman, Laura Albert, and that Knoop, her sister-in-law, played LeRoy in public.

In many ways, Albert's story is the more intriguing one, as her fertile imagination spawned LeRoy—giving voice, she later claimed, to her own experiences of sexual abuse and living on the streets—and it was she who developed phone relationships with a host of literary luminaries, plying them for advice and free editing.

As Jack Boulware documented in a March 2006 Salon article, Albert was a phone sex worker, a wannabe "sexpert" (who never achieved the renown of contemporaries like Susie Bright and Carol Queen), and was featured on the 1995 Cyborgasm 2 audio anthology.

Back in the late 1990s, it seemed as if everyone who was anyone in San Francisco's hipster/queer/sex worker/artist community had gotten—or knew someone who had gotten—a late-night phone call from Albert posing as LeRoy.

In a blog entry from January 2006, soon after the hoax was exposed, Bright admits to being a member of the LeRoy Dupe Club. "I published JT. I defended him in public, performed for him, responded to every editorial and hook-me-up request," she writes. "I have to say, it feels like a punch in the stomach."

As LeRoy's renown grew, he moved beyond that small pond to the world of movie and rock-and-roll stardom, palling around with the likes of Winona Ryder, Courtney Love, and Marilyn Manson. By the time Knoop entered the picture—resembling nothing so much as a blond Michael Jackson with her square jaw, cleft chin, hat, and large sunglasses—LeRoy had become a bratty celebrity hound. The whole thing was more intriguing when LeRoy was unseen, and one wonders how long the ruse might have continued if he had remained disembodied.

What started as a one-off favor to Albert—after she failed to recruit Polk Street urchins and a young butch lesbian for the role—soon became an obsession for the 18-year-old Knoop, who had no idea what she was going to do with her life. Though she made a few attempts to end the ruse, she admits she never really wanted it to stop, addicted as she was to the attention, the celebrities, the posh hotels, and the tours of Europe.