Laura Albert - My Avatar and Me

 

 

Tom Waits loved the novel JT LeRoy had written called Sarah. He wanted to do an interview with JT LeRoy for Vanity Fair magazine, and he wanted JT's input on who would photograph the spread because JT LeRoy was notoriously shy. One of the reasons why JT was so shy was because JT didn't have a body. JT was an avatar. So, let me take you back some years. I was 16, 17 years old, and I was a ward of the state in a group home in New York City. Eight girls, one bathroom. And the girls had all had stories being-- some had been raped, stabbed by a parent, sold into slavery. Everyone had secrets. At nighttime, we'd tell our secrets that you couldn't tell. And I was the one they would come to and tell their stories.

 

And if you asked me why I was there, I don't know. All the intakes, dysfunctional family. I dropped out of school, I don't know. But I was always interested in "How do you tell?" There was this movie, Streetwise. It was a documentary by Mary Ellen Mark about homeless kids in Seattle. And I gathered up some of my friends, my best friend Lauren, from the group home. We had been institutionalized together prior to the group home. And we went and saw this movie, and we saw ourselves on the screen. Now the street can seduce you, and these kids were getting swallowed, and we knew we were just one step removed. And when we left the movie, I saw how people looked at us. Right before they were kind of scared of us. And I got off on that because we had street all over us. 

 

But after the movie, they looked at us with this kind of curious compassion. And suddenly, I didn't want to be the victim in the movie, I was interested in, "How do you make that bridge so people suddenly care, and you're curious enough to maybe care? How do you do that?" And in the group home, everyone's telling their stories, and I don't even know how to tell mine. I don't even have the tools to tell mine. 

 

And I would go to buy a little relief to a street corner. There's a phone booth right on the corner. And I would remove it from me. I'd be a boy, and I'd call hotlines and I'd tell them all the stories, my story, my pain, everyone's stories, the house parent who survived the Biafran wars and would say to me, "Laura, your job is to tell our stories." Because in the group home, my job was-- I was a translator. So, some girls having some problems with a house parent, they'd come to me and I would translate between what each other was saying. Again, if you asked me, I don't know. All I knew is if you heard what my story was, my deepest belief was that you would say, "Well, you deserve it. You're disgusting, you're horrible."

 

My deepest hope was that you wouldn't. But I never, ever gave you the chance. But I wanted to learn the tools to tell, because that's the bridge. And I won a scholarship to the New School for Social Research. And they let me in without the SATs. I said, "I can't take the SATs. My last grade of completion is six." And they let me in with an essay. And I'm taking every writing class I can get my hands on. And I wrote this piece in this class about-- you can tell a kid that's not going to survive long on the street because the scars run this way. And the kids are there wrapped, enwrapped, and everyone's looking to see whose exterior matches the story. And everyone's looking at this one cool guy, he's all raggedy.

 

And I'm in the group home and I'm just looking. I'm looking at him too. And I want it to be him because he matches the voice. And I don't want them to know it's me because it's going to ruin it. I want it to be him. And then when they leave, because they don't know it was Anonymous reading the story. And then when we leave, I hear people talking about, "Wow, I never thought of it that way. I didn't know that about this scene and that." And I'm like, "That's what I want." How do you get people to see what they never saw before, they never knew before? I keep writing, but never as myself. The writing gives me a little more relief. I start writing under the name Jeremy, which becomes JT.

 

For me. I buy myself another day every time I can find a way to tell. But as long as it's not coming from me, never as a woman. So, when I get asked by Tom Waits, when he asks JT LeRoy who he wants to photograph, Mary Ellen Mark. My sister-in-law, came over one day and she just shaved her head. And I'm looking at her and she looks like the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, little boys that I would see in the after-school specials when they were just starting to talk about abuse, sexual abuse, always a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, cute little boy that you would forgive and love no matter what they did, no matter how transgressive and bad they were. You just loved them. 

 

I never saw myself represented in any of that. So, she looked. She was JT and she agreed to be my avatar. Now, Mary Ellen Mark said that the person she was photographing did not feel like somebody who had suffered. It felt like someone who maybe came from privilege. But she said the books needed to be in the world, that the books showed a world she had never seen, that she wanted the books to be out there. And she photographed the avatar.

 

I continued to publish under the name JT LeRoy. I wrote the book Sarah, which was received with great acclaim. I published it as fiction, all my work as fiction. Came to pass that this book that explored the wilds of West Virginia, a state I had never been in, in this kind of magical. I play with gender and identity and the spirit, everything that I had experienced, all the pain, all the suffering, the joy, the hope, the holding on to finding the possibility of being saved, no matter what, the spirit, the humor, it was all in there, turned upside down. In this book, Sarah came to pass that I am revealed as JT LeRoy. The articulation in the New York Times is, "Hoax, perpetrator, culprit. The jig is up. Come clean. Liar. Fake fiction writer." No [beep sound] New York Times fake fiction writer. [audience chuckle] Oscar Wilde said, "Give a man a mask and he'll tell you the truth."

 

I received death threats, hate mail, was blacklisted, sued in federal [beep sound] court. People didn't understand why I wouldn't apologize. "She won't apologize." I wouldn't-- How could you apologize for what kept me alive? I couldn't do it another way. I knew no other way. Slowly, the fan mail came back. I would get letters where people would talk about what the work meant to it, how it transformed them, how it saved their lives, how it allowed them to see a world that they had never seen before. I got invited to speak, welcomed back into the community of artists to speak all over the world. In spring, I did a sold-out reading at Foyles in London. And I'm signing books as me and these collectors are there. And you know, I'm signing books, editions in languages that I didn't even know existed. And, "Sign this, sign this, sign this." And I'm leaving my body.

 

And all of a sudden, the crowd is kind of part, and this girl comes walking towards me. She's big and she's got cuts all over her arms. She's carrying a bag. And I know what's coming. It's what I've been preparing for my whole life. She reaches in her bag and I know she's going to stab me. And she takes out a book and she tells me that she came to my work after the reveal. She asks me to sign her diary. I realize that everything that had happened up to that moment had prepared me for this. And I got up and I held her. Thank you.