You Won’t Fool Warren St. John Twice
Warren St. John, retroactively describing his 2004 profile of JT LeRoy as the work of a “credulous reporter,” drops a bombshell in this morning’s NYT arts section by unmasking LeRoy as Savannah Knoop. “A photograph of Ms. Knoop at a 2003 opening for a clothing store in San Francisco was discovered online,” St. John reports. “Five intimates of Mr. Leroy’s [sic], including his literary agent, his business manager and the producer of a coming movie based on one of his books, were shown the photograph and identified Ms. Knoop as the person they have known as JT Leroy.”
You be the judge: At left and right are the pictures the Times ran to accompany, respectively, John’s 2004 profile and his 2006 exposé; in the center, a cropped version of the photo of Knoop. Remember that it’s already conceded that LeRoy wore a blond wig in public to conceal his identity.
Knoop’s the half-sister of Geoffrey Knoop, whose partner, Laura Albert, is described as the mastermind of the LeRoy hoax and, St. John claims, presented herself as LeRoy while researching a travel feature the Times ran last fall. “When hotel employees told Ms. Albert they were under the impression that JT Leroy was a man,” he reports, “she told them that she had had a sex-change operation three years before and was now a woman.”
Of course, questions remain: Is Albert the actual author of the stories, or are other writers involved? And although LeRoy’s current publisher stands by him, what will his/her fans within and beyond the literary community make of the ruse, which not only elicited sympathy for LeRoy’s transgenderism but for a diagnosis as HIV-positive? Will an insistence on judging the work not the writer be sufficient to stifle the backlash?
Susie Bright doesn’t think so. “It’s a cruel con, straight up,” Bright writes on her blog, “and the whole writers’ community suffered for it.” Including herself:
“I published JT. I defended him in public, performed for him, responded to every editorial and hook-me-up request. I took drunken late night phone calls and tendered his frightening tantrums…[F]rom listening to him, I believed the childhood he described surviving would have killed anyone else. The very least I could do was show compassion.”
Now, she says, “I feel like going out and renting that movie, The Grifters.”
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