J.T. LeRoy
Laura Victoria Albert is the author of writings that include works credited to the fictional teenage persona of JT LeRoy, a long-running literary hoax in which LeRoy was presented to the public and publishers as a gender-variant, sexually questioning, abused, former homeless drug addict and male prostitute. Albert described LeRoy as an “avatar” rather than a “hoax,” and claimed that she was able to write things as LeRoy that she could not have said as Laura Albert. Albert was raised in Brooklyn, and she and her former partner Geoffrey Knoop have a young son. She has also used the names Emily Frasier and Speedie, and published other works as Laura Victoria and Gluttenberg.
Albert did not publish her writing as “memoir” – she published her writing as “fiction.”
Albert attests that she could not have written from raw emotion without the right to be presented to the world via JT LeRoy, whom she calls her “phantom limb” – a style of performance art she had been undertaking to deal with experiences even as a little girl, according to a 2006 interview in The Paris Review.
In November 2010, Laura Albert appeared at The Moth to tell her story on video.
Laura Albert has also written for the acclaimed television series Deadwood. She collaborated with director and playwright Robert Wilson for the international exhibition of his VOOM video portraits, and with the catalog for his “Frontiers: Visions of the Frontier” at Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM). In 2012 she served on the juries of the first Brasilia International Film Festival and the Sapporo International Short Film Festival; she also attended Brazil’s international book fair, Bienal Brasil do Livro e da Leitura, where she and Alice Walker were the U.S. representatives. Brazil’s Geração Editorial has re-released the JT LeRoy books in a boxset under Laura Albert’s name, and she and JT are the subjects of the hit Brazilian rock musical JT, Um Conto de Fadas Punk (“JT, A Punk Fairy Tale”).
She has taught at Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia and the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and has lectured with artist Jasmin Lim at Artists’ Television Access with SF Camerawork's Chuck Mobley, in conjunction with a window installation about her work. She has also written for dot429, the world’s largest LGBTA professional network, and been an invited speaker at their annual conferences in New York.
“I remember when I saw Peter Pan when I was little. After all the other kids wanted to reenact the battles of the lost boys, pirates, and Indians, and all I could think about was the part where Peter Pan sits still while Wendy takes a sharp needle and, with concern and maybe love, sews his shadow onto his feet. And I wonder if the pain excited him as much as it excited me to watch. I hang here, the voices still bleeding in my ears. I watch my shadow, solid like a murdered body's outline, and I pray. Maybe one more slice, just one more, will sever it forever.”