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

Thanks to Laurie for this:

--Excerpt from Rolling Stone, Issue 1040

GUY LAWSON Posted Nov 15, 2007 7:12 AM


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.

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