Laura Albert

Laura Victoria Albert (born November 2, 1965) is an American author who invented the literary persona JT LeRoy, whom Albert described as an "avatar."

She published various works of purportedly autobiographical fiction under the LeRoy name before being revealed as the true author.

Albert has also used the aliases Emily Frasier and Speedie, and published other works as Laura Victoria and Gluttenberg.

After the true authorship was revealed, Albert was sued for fraud for having signed a film-option contract as the fictitious LeRoy; a jury found against her.

The damages to be paid to the film company were settled out of court.

Albert grew up in Brooklyn Heights, the child of two educators who divorced when she was young.

She left her mother’s care as a teenager, spent time in a group home for troubled kids, and took fiction classes at the New School in Manhattan while taking part in the early-80s punk scene in the nearby East Village.

She later moved to San Francisco and worked for several years as a phone sex operator and by reviewing sex sites and products on the Web, as well as writing erotica such as "Vicious Panties" and "Down."

She achieved some degree of fame as a freelance sexpert, under the alias "Laura Victoria", using that name to write columns for Future Sex and later the Rolling Stone website.

As a teen, Albert would call suicide hotlines for help, sometimes speaking to the operators as though she were a young male.

She said she felt more comfortable speaking with strangers as a boy because of past sexual abuse and claimed to find counselors to be sympathetic when she called as a male.

Albert continued making these calls into adulthood, sometimes posing as a young male from an unstable background nicknamed "Terminator."

As Terminator, she began receiving treatment from Terrence Owens, a psychologist with the McAuley Adolescent Psychiatric Program at St. Mary's Medical Center in San Francisco.

Owens, who conducted his sessions with Terminator/Albert exclusively over telephone and never met her in person, is credited with encouraging Terminator, who later became known as JT LeRoy, to write during their therapy sessions.

Owens eventually gave some of this material to a neighbor of his who worked as an editor, who put LeRoy in contact with other figures in the San Francisco literary scene.

The character of Jeremiah "Terminator" (JT) LeRoy, as presented by Albert, was an underage, gay, male prostitute who started working in Appalachian truck stops while still a boy.

"Baby Doll", JT LeRoy's first published story, appeared under the byline "Terminator" in a September 1997 anthology.

Albert published three books of fiction under the JT LeRoy pseudonym – Sarah (2000), The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2001), and Harold's End (2004).

According to The New Republic, Sarah was the second book Albert wrote but the first one published.

The narrator is an adolescent among a group of lot lizards (teen male prostitutes at truck stops).

The narrator aspires to move higher in the ranks of prostitutes like his mother, Sarah.

The book is by JT LeRoy but LeRoy's character is never directly named, being referred to instead as 'Cherry Vanilla' or, more regularly, Sarah, after his mother.

The novel is written in a magical style that contrasts with its narrator's gritty and unconventional lifestyle.

SF Weekly's literary critic described The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things as "essentially the prequel to Sarah."

"This novel is a collection of ten stories that describe a "chaotic, nomadic, and abuse-filled childhood." In the opening story, "Disappearances," a young boy named Jeremiah leaves a stable foster home to reunite with his biological mother, Sarah, an 18-year-old drug addict. The stories begin in Appalachia and follow the characters to California. Jeremiah's grandfather beats him while invoking judgmental Christian dogma. The abuse is the most consistent form of physical touch Jeremiah knows, and he comes to interpret it as a form of love.

To disguise LeRoy's true identity, Albert, when speaking as LeRoy, communicated exclusively via phone, fax, and email, citing LeRoy's overwhelming social anxiety as an excuse to avoid in-person meetings or public appearances.

When meeting face-to-face, Albert would adopt the additional persona of Emily "Speedie" Frasier, a well-travelled woman with a Cockney accent who purported to be JT's friend and roommate.

According to author Mary Gaitskill, at a dinner date in which she and LeRoy were to meet, Albert, in the guise of Speedie, arrived instead, and the two engaged in a long conversation.

"She struck me as very bright and very young," recalled Gaitskill.

In 2001, a person claiming to be LeRoy began appearing in public, usually decked out in wigs and sunglasses.

This was later revealed to be Albert's sibling-in-law Savannah Knoop, whom Albert had enlisted to portray LeRoy in public.

Knoop continued to appear as LeRoy for several years, often accompanied by Albert posing as Speedie/Emily Frasier.

A friend, Steve O'Connor, said that he knew Laura Albert had written the books.

Star photographer Mary Ellen Mark claimed that when she photographed Savannah Knoop for a Vanity Fair shoot she was certain that Savannah Knoop was a woman and recalled the costumed JT LeRoy persona as "a masquerade that a lot of fancy people fell for...A put-on that didn't harm anybody."

A 2005 New York Magazine article by Stephen Beachy called JT LeRoy's existence into question and implied that Laura Albert was the true author of the stories.

The New York Times later confirmed that JT LeRoy was Albert's invention.

Vanity Fair also publicly announced that Laura Albert wrote all of J.T.'s books, articles, and stories, corresponded as J.T. by e-mail, and spoke as him on the phone.

Savannah Knoop stopped making public appearances as JT LeRoy and Laura Albert has not published under that name since.

Laura Albert explained the circumstances of JT's existence in a Fall 2006 Paris Review interview with Nathaniel Rich, attesting that she could not have written from raw emotion without the right to be presented to the world via JT LeRoy, whom she called her "phantom limb."

She has also referred to JT LeRoy as "my shield" and compared him to "the mechanical hands that manipulate materials too dangerous to be touched directly."