JT Leroy

Everyone is freaking out over the JT Leroy hoax. I really love JT Leroy, the writer of “Sarah,” “The Heat is Deceitful Above All Things,” and creator of the myth of the beautiful boy hustler turned literary genius. The stories weave a grubby tapestry of lot lizard life, the perilous misadventures of teenage prostitutes working the interstate. It is an existence I don’t know much about, but find utterly fascinating and intensely sad. I believe we are all forced to engage in some sort of prostitution every now and again, of our souls and our bodies, our hearts and minds, and so the experience is far more common than anybody realizes. Therefore, we all totally relate.

Now it seems, JT Leroy might not be a beautiful boy hustler at all, not a precocious teen wordsmith, but in fact, a woman! I don’t think it matters. Writing is writing, and if it is good, if the story is exciting, if it makes you want to read it, then who cares who the writer is? What makes it better if it is from a boy hustler? Can’t a woman step into those filthy Converse and slouchy tube socks and walk a mile, or as long as it takes to make a book deal?

I love JT Leroy whether he is she, whether he/she rolled johns or publishers, whether the stories are true or make believe. Gender has no absolutes, and life is all just elaborate drag. We create ourselves from nothing,
and we all return to nothing in the end. Why not be whoever we want to be until then?

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