"A good hoax is wonderful thing," literary agent Ira Silverberg emailed me this morning. "I'm all for it if doesn't hurt anyone." The false identity that "JT LeRoy" presented to the world, however, is the furthest thing from a "good" hoax in Silverberg's mind. "People were deceived in a brutal way: playing the AIDS card to elicit support, money, connections. That is simply unacceptable. It is morally reprehensible."

As LeRoy's literary agent, Silverberg had close contact with the person now identified as Savannah Knoop, but he never suspected any trickery in "JT's" self-presentation. "The New York piece [from last October] was harrowing yet I maintained my faith," he recalls, and he didn't concede the deception until NYT reporter Warren St. John showed him the photograph of Knoop. But even if LeRoy is really a 40-year-old woman who sends her sister-in-law out to impersonate her in public, LeRoy wouldn't have acquired so many fans, nor impressed so many reviewers, if there wasn't something to the stories. "The work absolutely stands on its own. There's no question about that," Silverberg maintains. "I think these books will continue to have an audience."

To some extent, Silverberg (undoubtedly like everyone else who worked closely with "LeRoy" during his literary career, or looked upon the author and the stories as a validation of the possibility of overcoming their own emotional and physical traumas) is still sorting through his reactions. Going by his final statement to St. John, and his description in the email to me of the deception as "morally reprehensible," I had to wonder, is he going to continue as "LeRoy's" literary agent? This morning, at least, Silverberg is playing those cards close to his vest. "I haven't spoken to anybody out there [in San Francisco] yet," he told me during a follow-up call, offering no clues as to what might happen once he gets on the phone with Laura Albert later today.