Dan and Dave. This has me outraged. I am all for tricksters and fakes, ala Orson Welles (even Genet understood the power of the fake), but this is something else. It appears that a straight, white, middle class woman pretended to be a homeless, abused, junkie, whore, HIV positive gay man/transgendered person in order to sell books (and, apparently, some crappy cd's). The damage that this does to people who have experienced actual traumas and worked hard to give expression to their experience in a literary and artistic form is incalculable. Laura Albert aka Emily Frasier and company should be ashamed of themselves and issue an immediate apology, as well as donate any profits from this scam to charities that serve the people they've harmed. This is not poetic license. This is not a "good hoax." This harms every abused person, every homeless person, and every at risk transgendered person who strives to express themselves in a culture that would rather consume "reality" images than deal with real life. While I've never read any of JT Leroy's work, I hope the hipsters run these people out of town. If Dennis Cooper caught on a long time ago that this was a fraud . . . that should have given people a clue. Incidentally, one has to wonder what the give away was? Was it Leroy's story of lugging a fax machine down Polk Street and plugging it into invisible phone connections in shooting gallery bathrooms? Please! This is such a huge embarassment for so many people. And, as funny as hell as this story is (wigs and glasses), I think people should be reminded that this goes way beyond the travesty of faking hate crimes. This is using trauma and abuse to sell hip, indie product. FUCKERS. Fuckers, fuckers, fuckers, fuckers. Goddamn middle class str8 white fuckers who never experienced anything even remotely traumatic, and who don't have the slightest idea what it's like to actually live through something traumatic AND try to express yourself on top of it. Fuckers. That's what these people are.

One of the things that's worst about the JT Leroy scam is the world-view "he" personally sold to several of at least one of my friends: speaking as a man, that men were generally abusive and sick, and that the only source of nurturing in the world was from women. After interviewing Leroy a few years ago, Paula Gilovich told me about "his" adolescent experiences as some of them bore some resemblance to my own: I felt then the conclusions "he" drew were entirely at odds with mine. People look to literature and the deep revelation of speakers' lives as some guide to a guess as to how the world really IS. That, and the misuse of sympathy for this society's castoffs, is what 'JT Leroy' really abused. Otherwise, this would have been a funny trick.

"It appears that a straight, white, middle class woman pretended to be a homeless, abused, junkie, whore, HIV positive gay man/transgendered person in order to sell books"

being straight, white and middle class doesn't exclude one from a fucked up life. Bitter freaks don't own misfortune.