He was a rags-to-riches writer adored by everyone from Bono to Madonna. But JT LeRoy was actually Savannah Knoop in a wig. As the scam becomes a film, the performer tells allSavannah Knoop and I meet up at a hotel in London - on April Fools´ Day, a date so ludicrously apt I can´t resist commenting on its suitability. `Oh yeah,` they say, with a slightly strained grin. (Knoop identifies as gender neutral and requests they/them pronouns.) Knoop believes what they did was not so much a prank as a performance: `Although someone recently described it to me as a caper. I liked that,` they say, making the rigid wide grin so familiar from the millions of photos of them, back from when the public knew them not as Knoop, but as the cult author JT LeRoy.What Knoop and their then sister-in-law, Laura Albert, did is most commonly described as a hoax, or more specifically, `the greatest literary hoax of modern times`, to cite one headline. Back in the headily weird days of the late 90s and early 00s, when celebrities from different milieux mixed to such an extent that it was hard to distinguish between hype and hero, there was none as credible as Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy, the son of a truck-stop sex worker, who became an author and object of international fascination. Winona Ryder gushed about their friendship, Bono mentored him and Gus Van Sant wanted to work with him. Madonna wanted to convert him to Kabbalah and Garbage wrote a hit song about him. He was on the cover of Vanity Fair and every zeitgeisty figure of that era, from Liv Tyler to Courtney Love, spent hours talking on the phone to him, enthralled by his tales of sexual abuse. Asia Argento had an affair with him (he denies all . Everyone wanted proximity to LeRoy´s edgy realness. Continue reading...
|
