The invention of JT LeRoy - Necessary? Scandalous?

After reading Sarah, I began to read Girl Boy Girl. I couldn’t understand why Laura didn’t publish the novel as Laura; why did she feel a need to create JT LeRoy and claim that Sarah related to the author’s experience? As I read Girl Boy Girl, I noticed Laura’s habit of saying things about JT’s personality that would embarrass Savannah/JT. (For example, she tells Mike Pitt that: “ ‘JT did a photo shoot last week for the first time and he put on lipstick. It was fucking brilliant! And you didn’t fuck the photographer. I was so proud of you, JT.’ Then she said in a conspiratorial tone as if I weren’t there, ‘He used to have sex with anything that paid him a compliment’” (80).) Laura is an example of an author who misrepresents who she truly is to her readers. Don’t all authors - and politicians, movie stars, anyone who has a very public career – recreate themselves to some degree? Usually, that might just mean downplaying their flaws. Laura might think that by creating a very flawed JT, she is doing the opposite of that – she is creating a more complex, believable character. With that line of reasoning – it’s impossible to truly know any author – I started to wonder why the public was so disturbed when JT LeRoy turned out to be a fake. Of course, the reason why JT LeRoy became a mass media scandal is blatantly obvious – hoaxes are often newsworthy.

The question of why Laura felt the need to create JT LeRoy sparked other questions for me, as well. What would have happened if Laura had published Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things as herself? I’m willing to bet that critics would have dismissed her, claiming that she didn't know what she was talking about. People would have scrutinized her slang and her buzz words. She was a married woman, not a transwoman or a prostitute; how could she possibly write an accurate portrayal of a trans character who is a truck stop prostitute? The fact that JT LeRoy speaks from personal experience seems to be all that people needed in order to praise the novels without questioning them. What perplexes me is that both of the novels are fiction – why would they need an authority of truth? I’m assuming that Laura’s novels, though very interesting, wouldn’t have gotten as much publicity if they weren’t marketed as written from true experiences. This could, of course, be a wrong assumption. Watching Gus Van Sant’s rendition of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things perhaps helped me see why people would hypothetically care if the novel was rooted in the author’s experience. Almost every single scene in that film was difficult to watch. I watched these horrible abusive scenes played out on screen, and I wondered who would be sick enough to even think about some of these scenes. Perhaps hearing that the author who thought of the scenes was writing from actual childhood experiences would make me a little bit more sympathetic; if experience wasn’t at the root of the scenes, I would maybe think that the author is sick in the head and shouldn’t be around little children. I understand this point, but I’m still thinking about pseudonyms and alter egos – was JT LeRoy necessary for the success of Laura’s novels? Was the scam that Savannah and Laura concocted really much more than an extremely exaggerated version about the fabricated personalities that most public figures have?