JT LeRoy: The Famous Writer Who Wowed Bono and Courtney Love – But Didn't Exist

The imaginary thirteen-year-old boy who became the famed author JT LeRoy emerged from the body of Laura Albert one day in 1993. Albert was curled up on the bathroom floor of her tiny apartment in San Francisco when she called in to the Child Crisis Service. She was in her midtwenties, a struggling musician who lived in poverty and had a history of childhood sexual abuse and mental illness. Phoning suicide hot lines and talking in the voices of teenage boys was a compulsion for her. Voices emerged from Albert constantly, hundreds of them living inside her, boys in peril who needed to share their woes with the well-meaning strangers on the other end of the line. The boy that emerged from Albert that day was poor and white, a soft-voiced kid with a Southern drawl. The call was answered by Dr. Terrence Owens, a psychologist who worked at the crisis center. Gradually, as Owens gained his trust, the boy revealed that he was the son of a truck-stop prostitute who traveled the country plying her trade. A street hustler, he said he turned tricks in the Tenderloin and dumpster-dived in Golden Gate Park. The only name he gave was "Terminator" ? an ironic play on the fact that he was fragile and frightened and harmless.

Albert tells me this story as we sit in an upscale organic restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Or, more accurately, she doesn't tell me, not in any narrative, chronological sense. Over a period of weeks, in New York and then in San Francisco, she laughs and weeps and screams her way through the first complete recounting she has ever offered of the decade-long transformation of an HIV-positive, transgender street kid named Terminator into the celebrated fiction writer Jeremiah "Terminator" LeRoy. Depending on your point of view, Albert is a con, or an artist, or a con artist who created one of the greatest literary hoaxes of all time. The imaginary author she passed off as real became a darling of the gay literary world, an icon in the hipster art scene, and the weird and brave inspiration for countless people who suffered child abuse. LeRoy wrote three books, including The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, and scripted an early draft of a screenplay that later became Gus Van Sant's Elephant. He was profiled in The New York Times and Vanity Fair and was celebrated by noted authors like Michael Chabon and Dave Eggers. His orbit of famous friends and admirers was a who's who of dysfunctional celebrity: Courtney Love, Winona Ryder, Tatum O'Neal. Today, more than a year after Albert was outed as the woman behind LeRoy, she continues to defend the "reality" of her creation. LeRoy, she says, is not merely a voice in her head but a presence, an actual being trapped inside her body, an inner manifestation of the mental illness brought on by the abuse she suffered as a child. Dr. Owens, now aware of the real identity of the "boy" he spoke with over the course of thirteen years, has diagnosed Albert with a variety of personality disorders. "She shields herself with various other personas," he testified recently. "She is a very disturbed individual." Albert prefers a more literary explanation: Her disorder, she says, is a little-known variant of the illness suffered by the protagonist in the book Sybil. Instead of her own personality going to sleep while JT LeRoy or one of the hundreds of other voices takes over her body, Albert remains conscious that she is being inhabited by another being. Thus, she is both out of her mind and perfectly aware of what is going on at the same time.

"The thing is, I have the road map to crazy," says Albert. "You can say it's a fucking hoax. But a hoax you can't explain — there are going to be huge gaps. I can explain it. I have the road map to crazy."