JT Leroy

[rm]

I find the continuing saga of Who is JT Leroy really sad and confusing. Eventually, it's something I hope I can find a way to write eloquently about. As someone with a creative interest in matters of commerce, there is a great deal to be said about two women working together to create a literary and physical fictional identity, masquerading as true, in the form of a young, male prostitute. Fantasy or fame grab? Part of the art or outside of it?

The DVD edition I have of My Own Private Idaho contains an interview conducted by JT Leroy, whoever and however that may be. And it makes me sad while also being a strange and suitable footnote to that movie both in its content and surrounding mythology -- dead movie stars and people who never existed. Someone is supposed to argue about whether there is much difference there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/09/books/09book.html

Comments

[orobouros.livejournal.com]

I read Sarah, but that's as far as I got in the whole thing.

Have you seen Susie Bright's piece, too?

[rm.livejournal.com]

I hadn't. Thanks for linking that. the whole situation is outrageous.

[miep.livejournal.com]

i have no idea what you're talking about. maybe i will once i follow the link, but am i horrendously out of touch?

[rm.livejournal.com]

JT Leroy was ostensibly a male, who might have been in the process of transitioning to a female, who was a celebrated fiction writer, largely for drawing on his supposed experiences as the son of a truck stop hooker and child prositute.

Turns out, JT Leroy is the nom-de-plume of a middle-aged woman, and is played in physical world by her step-daughter (I think? I keep getting confused).

Anyway, the whole thing has been among other things, a big con, and effectively illuminates some very fucked up things about women, fame and victim-culture, both seperately and in a nice big blender of woe.

[roadnotes.livejournal.com]

I'd seen some of this a few months ago, as suspicion mounted, but not really tracked, as his fiction didn't strike me as interesting enough to pursue at the time. But jeeeez.... screwing over friends like that for fame and money....

And still, I wonder just how one pulls something like that off, and if I could.