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JT LeRoy and the Fakester Genocide

I’ll get on to talking about our song The Fakester Genocide in a minute. First, though, a bit about a recent fakester murder.

Wasn’t the JT LeRoy trial fascinating? Laura Albert, a female writer in her late thirties, writes a series of books and articles using the pseudonym JT LeRoy, pretending he is a real person. Leroy, a psychologically scarred teenage prostitute, becomes a literary sensation, as much for his colourful, traumatic life story as his writing. Celebrities like Winona Ryder and Courtney Love – once damaged teenagers themselves - strike up correspondences with ‘LeRoy’, not realising they’re actually talking to Albert. For radio appearances, Albert pretends to be LeRoy, putting on a different voice. On TV, she pays her ex-boyfriend’s stepsister to pretend to be LeRoy. For a while, this painstakingly constructed hoax fools everybody. Asia Argento makes a movie based on one of Leroy’s books, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. Another, Sarah, is set to be filmed by a company called Antidote International.

Then, slowly but inevitably, the truth comes out. When it does, Antidote want their money back, accusing Albert of fraud. Albert, now 41, refuses to pay, arguing that it’s irrelevant whether the author of the novel was who she said it was or not; what Antidote paid for, after all, was the rights to the novel itself, a work of fiction. This is, as she knows very well, only partly true. Antidote were buying into the JT LeRoy ‘brand’ as much as anything else, and certainly would have exploited it to help promote the movie. Perhaps knowing that they’re on shaky ethical ground here, they respond by claiming Albert exploited the JT LeRoy brand just as much as them. The question is, what’s worse? A film company using what they think is a teenager’s hellish true-life story to sell a movie? Or an author lying repeatedly, and exploiting other people’s sympathies, to sell her books?

In the eyes of the law, at least, Antidote turned out to be in the right. The really interesting part, though, is the extent to which JT LeRoy arguably WAS real. Like JT LeRoy, Albert experienced what sounds like a hellish childhood – abuse, time spent in an institution, and 13 years of therapy, in which she spoke to a psychiatrist on the phone in the adopted persona of a teenage boy, Jeremy, a kind of early version of JT LeRoy. So there was something of her in JT LeRoy, and something of her in Sarah too. She was simply doing what any author does, taking elements of herself and reshaping them as fiction; she just went a bit further, creating a fictional author as well as a fictional book. Inventing JT LeRoy, from that perspective, wasn’t fraud but performance art, a creative act.

Which is why a lot of people, myself included, find their sympathies are instinctively more with Albert than Antidote. The internet is full of people role-playing, making up alter-egos for themselves for all kinds of reasons - to overcome inhibitions, as therapy, or as a creative act. There’s a bit of JT LeRoy in anyone who’s logged on Second Life, or in a lot of the people on MySpace or any other ‘networking’ site (you know who you are). It’s intriguing that Courtney Love was unknowingly exchanging emails with a woman about her own age, who possibly had as much in common with her as JT LeRoy did. It’d be fascinating to know what was said, what truths were told among the lies.

This kind of ‘performance’ becomes an ethical problem, of course, when someone is getting hurt (like children, to pick an obvious example, tricked by paedophiles posing as someone younger). But how much harm was done by JT LeRoy, really, beyond making quite a few celebrities and newspapers look stupid? Not that much, as Antidote were sensible enough to realise. Outside the courtroom they expressed admiration for Albert’s ingenuity, and insisted that this court cast wasn’t about money, just about the truth – a speech which was, of course, a performance in itself, an act of face-saving PR.

The problem is that truth, when it comes to people’s personal identities, is a fluid, complicated thing. A name is an arbitrary thing given to you by someone else when you’re born. A personal history is a series of events cherry-picked from a life, to try and put it in some kind of order. Any description of a life is at least one step removed from the life it describes. Even an autobiography is a performance.

A friend of mine, the theatre performer David Leddy, recently put on a show called Home Hindrance. It was a story about a man called Rory, who has died from an unspecified illness, as told by the wife, ex-girlfriend, sister and friends whose lives his illness affected. The twist was that the play was performed in David’s flat, where he’s been living for several years with his partner, Calum, who has a failed kidney (and who nearly died last year due to complications arising from that). David and Calum acted as hosts, letting the audience (six per performance) into their house each night. It was a little like a dinner party, but with a play thrown in.

‘For me,’ David told me, ‘the question that should run through your mind when watching this show is the degree to which it’s about us (David and Calum).’ Home Hindrance was a fiction, of course, but it was also sort of true, given that many of the details in it were taken from David and Calum’s own life. And, as David argued, ‘In many ways the fiction that we create, what we choose to talk about or not talk about, is much more revealing than describing the things that have happened in our real lives.’ So, I asked him, could someone who came to see this fictional show theoretically learn as much about David and Calum as they would if David had just written their own true story? ‘Yeah, I think so,’ David replied, ‘if they’re paying attention.’

By the same token, Laura Albert arguably revealed as much about herself in Sarah, or in her performances as JT LeRoy, as she would if she had written an autobiography. And yet people get very het up about the ‘truth’ of stories. “There’s this huge power in the idea of ‘based on a true story,’” David told me, describing how he’d watched the Coen Brothers’ film Fargo on DVD while writing his show. The film, famously, is entirely fictional, but a title card at the beginning claims it is based on a true story, simply because the Coens thought this would be a funny and subversive thing to do.

Fargo’s star William H Macy, David was fascinated to discover from the DVD, had been shocked to discover the film’s story wasn’t true as claimed. “He said to them, ‘this isn’t ethical,’’ said David, ‘and they said, ‘why not?’ These aren’t real people. Who do we have an ethical obligation to?’ For me this play is about the same thing. There does seem something ethically dodgy about telling people a story is true when it’s not, but in many ways the ethical obligation should be the other way around. I think we don’t often enough question our obsession with the fictionalising of real people’s lives.’

In theory, we should be better than we ever have been at telling truth from fiction. We are more and more sophisticated in the way we understand and use the media. We know all about political spin. We seem to prefer reality TV to fiction, because we have convinced ourselves it is more ‘real’. If we can watch someone’s unedited life for 24 hours at a time, instead of some TV producer’s edited version, or watch something unscripted instead of something scripted, we think we’ll experience something more pure and real and truthful. But actually all this has just made us into better performers, and blurred the line between life and performance more than ever. The cast of Big Brother now blatantly plays to the camera (and are, of course, chosen for that reason). Victoria Beckham, Paris Hilton, Jade Goody, Jordan and others like them are effectively performance artists – their day-to-day life is the show, and they are performing it in a particular way in order to tell a story of their choosing (Princess Diana was one too, of course, a pioneer even). The fun, as in many books, is in working out how reliable the narrator is. The racism row on Big Brother earlier this year wasn’t ultimately about racism at all; it was about Shilpa Shetty being a more talented performance artist than Jade Goody. Yes, of course racist remarks were made, but Shetty, a seasoned professional performer, was no victim, and manipulated the situation very skillfully. This is not necessarily a criticism. Anyone else with her media skills would have done the same - and more and more people, thanks to watching shows like Big Brother, now possess those skills. It’s not as easy as it looks, by any means, but across the world there are people working hard to learn how to do it.

I was intrigued by a quote from Antidote’s man in court. The outing of Laura Albert as a fakester was a blessing in disguise, he argued. With her alter ego gone, “she’s liberated, in a way. It’s quite wonderful.” Really? The assumption this makes is a very common one - that, when you peel away the performer, there’s something true and pure exposed at the centre – the ‘real’ person. I’m not sure I believe this. Our personalities are more like onions – all skin, right to the centre. Each bit of skin presents a different version of ourselves to the world, but the one at the top says as much about us as the one in the middle.

The Fakester Genocide, the song, was inspired by a story I read a few years ago about Friendster, a dating website on which so many people were registering under fake identities that the site eventually decided a purge was necessary. Hundreds (thousands possibly, I forget how many) of identities were deleted, an act that became known on the net as the ‘fakester genocide’. I was fascinated by this act of virtual violence, and felt strangely sad for all those murdered fakesters. What if you’d met someone on Friendster using a fake name, shared all kinds of intimacies you could never share if you were using your real name, fell in love, and then your soulmate, your fellow fakester, was suddenly gone? How would you ever find them again? And if you did, how on earth would you know it was really them?

And so, as songwriters do, I wrote a song about it (or rather, I wrote a lyric and a melody, which happened to fit beautifully with a guitar demo Hamish had already written, with the addition of a second section we worked on together). It’s the story of someone grieving for their lost fakester love, and clinging on to the possibility that somewhere out there they’re still alive. It’s a new riff, I suppose, on the idea that somewhere out there someone is waiting for you, who will love you and keep you safe. In this version, though, perhaps you have more options – if everyone has several identities, maybe there are more people out there (more regional variations, if you will) with whom you can make a connection.

And, until you find them, you can perhaps take comfort from a crowd of fellow fakesters singing to you: ‘Don’t give up yet, swim for shore you’re fine. They can’t kill us off quite so easily. Trust us, she’s alive.’ Because, frankly, we’re never going to kill the fakesters off. We’re going to have to learn to love them instead. There are going to be many, many more JT LeRoys. Perhaps you’re reading one right now.

Andrew

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How dare you suggest I’m not real! You’ll be hearing from my lawyers

(Good song though)

Posted by JT LeRoy on 07/04 at 02:12 PM
No, it is YOU who will be hearing from MY lawyers, how dare you pretend to be me?

JT LeRoy

Posted by JT LeRoy on 12/17 at 03:53 PM
The legal system itself is a virtual construct which will never be able to encapsulate the problems of identity and ownership. I myself, am both Laura Albert and JT LeRoy.

Laura Cameron Lewis is not the name my parents gave me either.

Posted by Laura Cameron Lewis on 12/17 at 04:22 PM

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