I read with interest Warren St. John’s continuing investigation as to the “true identity” of J.T. LeRoy. You’ll remember the little dustup about a month ago when New York magazine raised doubts about the real identity of LeRoy, suggesting a person of that name does not actually exist. LeRoy, who has been writing professionally for ten years, had recently written a lovely piece for the New York Times magazine, which had led to another assignment writing about a television show. But the Times, feeling a bit woozy from all the recent scandals among its writers and reporters, is now in the habit of drowning the dog to get rid of the fleas. They cancelled the assignment. Or, as St. John says so delicately, they “reassigned the piece.” (I’ve already bitched about this at length elsewhere. This is an area where the Times really does not cultivate much respect or sympathy from the general freelancing community, but no one wants to speak out loud and piss off editors at the World’s Greatest Newspaper. Like this: The ethical thing to do is to honor an agreement and pay a kill fee.)
My main point here is that no one seems to have gotten the memo on post-modernism. Folks, read the text and forget the author. LeRoy has written dozens of fascinating stories, critical reviews, essays, short stories, and novels, and any nitwit can apprecite the consistency of voice and sensibility.
St. John’s piece today provides the service of identifying the person who has “portrayed” the camera-shy LeRoy in public. St. John writes:
“It is unclear what effect the unmasking of Ms. Knoop will have on JT Leroy’s readers, who are now faced with the question of whether they have been responding to the books published under that name, or to the story behind them.”
I guess my view is that St. John is here part of the problem rather than the solution. If I were to attempt a translation of what he’s saying, it would go something like this: We are a culture that remains obsessed with celebrity, with the cult of personality, and a person like J.T. LeRoy exists in an uneasy limbo–celebrated for his actual work, but increasingly persecuted as a person (of whatever basis in reality) because of his unwillingness to play by the rules of modern celebrity (be a real, pinchable, and charismatic person who spends as much time as possible in the klieg lights).
LeRoy’s agent, Ira Silverberg, is himself apparently feeling duped by the public imposter, and his point (as quoted in the Times) seems to be a more serious moral one:
“To present yourself as a person who is dying of AIDS in a culture which has lost so many writers and voices of great meaning, to take advantage of that sympathy and empathy, is the most unfortunate part of all of this,” Mr. Silverberg said. “A lot of people believed they were supporting not only a good and innovative and adventurous voice, but that we were supporting a person.”
The point is well taken. But, hypothetically speaking, I wonder who is more cynical: The person who claims to have HIV but does not actually exist, or the one who needs a bona-fide celebrity to be infected in order to care about the plague of HIV. More to the point, every day our sympathies and empathies are cultivated and manipulated by fictional characters in literature, film, art, and theater. It is our obsession with celebrity that has us worshipping the beautiful talking heads that pronounce the words and dance the dance of the culture’s true prophets, its (normally anonymous) artists.
It seems to me that reaching a final verdict on the reality of J.T. LeRoy is a reductive process of slowly subtracting Big Truth in order to sell a smaller truth, one that will fit in a Monday morning newspaper. It is still an interesting whodunnit, of course. But I worry that the current environment of vigilantism in journalistic circles will unnecessarily put an end to the career of a worthy and interesting writer, whatever his or her true indentity.
Full disclosure, for what it’s worth: I’ve spoken to J.T. LeRoy, and I think I know the answer to the Question At Hand, but I intend to keep it to myself. Why? Because it’s not particularly useful to anyone–not me, not LeRoy, and not his readers. Is LeRoy who he says he is? To me, it is not an essential element of the narrative, except among the most superficial sort of literary ambulance chasers. I suspect most of LeRoy’s acquaintances feel the same way, which explains why this modern mystery has persisted for as long as it has.
Leave a Reply