EDITOR'S NOTE: Literary wunderkind JT LeRoy's recent unmasking as a literary hoax (google the name and 'hoax' for all the background you'll need or read this) has caused many people to reexamine how they got conned by the supposed transgressive life of a West Virginia boy prostitute. LA-based performer Ann Magnuson, a Mountain State native, tracks back to how she got sucked into the hoax, courtesy of e-mails, readings and racoon-penis necklaces. Part 1 of a 2-part article. To read Part 2, click here.

By now anybody who is somebody has a “JT LeRoy Story.” It’s the latest fashion accessory, like the new Gucci shoe or Prada bag. But wait a minute. Gucci isn’t ‘in’ anymore, is it? Is Prada? Maybe JT Leroy is ‘out’ by now, too. Who can keep up with all these literary hoaxes and scandals?

I don’t have a personal James Frey story, the author of the gritty “memoir” best-seller “A Million Little Pieces,” an Oprah selection whose supposed autobiographical details become more unraveled by the week. But I did go to Denison University, as he did, and the idea of fratboy Frey being a badass in the Mayberry-esque hamlet of Granville, Ohio is nearly as absurd as how The Smoking Gun blog ultimately proved much of the book to be untrue. It’s not hard to raise a ruckus at that conservative college. Mister Rogers would have been a badass in Granville.

Maybe the concept of JT LeRoy as former-cross-dressing-West Virginia-child-prostitute-turned San Francisco-street-hustler-turned-transgressive-literary-wunderkind was just as ridiculous. But after re-reading the email correspondence I had with this faux Rimbaud in the summer of 2001, I have to admit: it was a pretty convincing hustle.

Up to a point.

Homeboy JT?

I first heard of JT LeRoy through a musician friend, Roddy Bottum, who was in the San Francisco-based bands Faith No More and Imperial Teen. He was organizing a reading in July, 2001, of stories from JT’s new book, “The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things,” at Skylight Books, the hipster book store of choice in the trendy L.A. area of Los Feliz. Since JT rarely traveled and was too pathologically shy to read his own work in public, would I read an excerpt from the book with Roddy and actor Brad Renfro at Skylight?

I knew very little of LeRoy’s work, but the more I heard about the reclusive author the more intrigued I became. Yet the real allure was that LeRoy was from my homestate of West Virginia. Most of his writing was either about or set in the place I grew up in (and continually feel compelled to return to). I don’t meet many teenage hustlers from West Virginia, at least not ones who are lighting the literary world on fire. I got excited.

I dove into JT’s first novel, “Sarah,” which Roddy lent me. The book came highly acclaimed and anointed by literary folk like Dennis Cooper and Mary Gaitskill. It’s a Flannery O’Conner-style saga of a teenage hillbilly prostitute or ‘lot lizard,’ as JT describes himself, who services truckers at truckstops. He’s forced to masquerade as a young girl by his pimpin’ ho of a mother in the fashionably f**ked up, post-modern purgatory known as West Virginia. Hollywood was already buzzin’ with word that Gus Van Zandt (who specializes in the fashionably f**ked up) was slated to direct the feature film version.

My motives for doing the reading didn’t extend much beyond doing something fun with Roddy and getting to meet some interesting people. I must admit, in the back of my mind I thought it would be nice to try to get a part in the movie. I always dreamed of playing a hooker with a heart of coal. But good sense told me the role would go to a ‘star’, if not to the person the character most resembled: The Widow Cobain. Still, maybe I could play a waitress at a local Bob Evans, slinging grits ‘n gravy ‘n turkey gizzards.

“Sarah” was surrealistically tweaked yet seemed a bit far-fetched to me -- especially the part about the raccoon penis necklaces given to young ‘lot lizards’ as a souvenir from their rites of initiation. While I never knew any teenage prostitutes growing up in West Virginia, I did hang out with some pretty wild folks in high school in Charleston, W.Va. Back in the ‘70s, if you smoked you were automatically part of a club that crossed all the economic barriers. Whether you lived in a big house in South Hills or a tiny shack in Loudendale it didn’t matter -- all stood side by side in the George Washington High School smoking area. And if you smoked pot .... well, then those barriers that separated the Hillers (the ‘rich’ kids) from the Crickers (those who lived in the hollers near the Creek, or ‘crik”) were completely obliterated as everyone united deep in the woods over the hill behind the school, each of us beholden to whomever was ‘holding’ the killer weed that week. Hence, kids whose parents would cross the street to avoid one another bonded in a haze of Acapulco Gold.

As I said, I met all kinds of folks in West Virginia and being a girl of a highly inquisitive (often reckless) nature I think I might have heard something about these here raccoon penis bone necklaces that JT Leroy was presenting to the world as something as uniquely West Virginian as eating ramps. I mean, I’d heard first-hand accounts of pseudo-Satanic animal sacrifices done by drunken redneck teenagers, not to mention real honest-to- God snake handling and strychnine drinking in local Pentecostal churches – so why not raccoon penis bone necklaces?

And I’d seen the tapes of Jesco White, the “Dancin’ Outlaw” of Boone County, West Virginia, that circulated around Hollywood some years back, among the same kind of folks who would later be ‘titillated’ by JT’s transgressions. So, heck, wasn’t ANYTHING possible in the place that also brought the world Hasil Adkins and The Amazing Dolores?

Just because I hadn’t heard about these mythic raccoon penis bone necklaces didn’t mean they weren’t real. I hadn’t lived in W.Va. in a while. Things change. Plus, I reasoned, I had never eaten ramps either so.... I had a lot to learn. Keeping an open mind, I read on.

Poor, abused hillbilly naif

JT’s mom, Sarah, was probably the worst mother to have ever birthed a baby outside of a Charles Dickens novel. I don’t think I’ve read anything that made me want to rescue a young child more from his ‘primary caregiver’ than JT’s awful tale of abuse. I think it was this instinct to mother poor little hillbilly waif JT that sucked a lot of people in.

I mean, the books weren’t all that groundbreaking in terms of subject matter. But, like Oprah’s reaction to Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” the idea that all these horrible abuses actually happened to someone real, someone who actually survived and lived to tell about it.... well, speaking as a person who would one day like to develop enough discipline to write a book of any length, I was impressed that this severely damaged ‘child’ had managed to put two words together, let alone write a novel! And I was outraged at what his mother had done to him. I wanted to help in anyway I could.

Roddy told me that JT apparently knew of me from the Bongwater records I sang on, which were immensely popular with the freaky folk who live on the fringe in San Francisco. JT was excited I was doing the reading. And I was anxious to meet him. But you didn’t meet JT. You could, however, e-mail him. Which I did, about the time I was shooting the movie “Panic Room.”:

hey, JT: Almost done with "Sarah" - reading it in between takes. Wild and Wonderful (as in WV) --can't wait to see how it all ends. Now just how much of all this true ( am i allowed to ask???) guess what?? I never did eat no ramps!! can yo believe! i ain't no true west virginny. Do they really blind you?? Like the way the plant in Nitro used to smell??? Are you originally from West Virginia?? If so, me too. If so, where? If so, do you ever want to go back?

Yes, I am embarrassed at the faux hillbilly “accent’ I used in some of my e-mails. But I do that more than I care to admit in a lot of correspondence. Hell, at least I’m really from the region! (And can prove that I at least used to have an authentic West Virginia accent thanks to an audiotape my Dad made in the early ‘70s of the Kanawha Player’s community theater production of “Our Town” where I played young Rebecca Gibb -- and pronounce the word “moon’ with at least three separate syllables.)

Even so, I’d later find this sort of cheap pandering to hillbilly culture annoying as all git-out as my correspondence with JT wore on. It was an annoyance that turned to downright disgust towards the end of the ruse when I got a mass e-mail that utilized the same kind of heightened-for-effect faux Appalachian ‘voice’ to ask for donations to JT “son’s” fancy private Lycee school in San Francisco. (This son was one he was raising with the couple who supposedly ‘rescued’ JT from the streets -- who everyone now believes were the ones, especially the mother Laura Albert, behind the whole hoax.)

Ramps don’t blind you

But at the beginning there was no reason to believe JT wasn’t who ‘he’ said ‘he’ was. Or that he wasn’t from West Virginia. He even wrote back in the same hillbilly vernacular in e-mails that, had the whole thing not been unmasked as a hoax, I would never think of sharing with anyone. Should I even be reprinting JT’s words here? Even if “he” doesn’t really exist? Does one unethical act cancel out the other?

Whoever is behind all this -- and most people think it is 40-year-Emily Albert -- then that person will no doubt soon be putting out a press release, owning up to the hoax as an elaborate piece of performance art, followed by a coffee table book full of all the phony emails sent back and forth between the grifter/artist and her famous marks/suckers. Luckily, most of the suckers are far more famous than I will ever be. Hopefully, I’ll get cut out. Please God. Either way, it’s a book I might actually pay to read. Or skim at the local Barnes & Noble.

I’m sure it will be chock full of clues that those who weren’t taken in will find obvious and will make those who were taken in look more ridiculous than we already are. Clues like the ones embedded in JT’s emails back to me. JT wrote:

Ramps don't blind you. That is Ficcionaye or fiction. Most of Sarah is fiction. I mean it all is. Just where it comes from is not. My brain is not fiction. At least not when I am not on mushrooms.

(Note: My earlier email described the show I was doing at the time called “Rave Mom” that included a series of escapades involving Hollywood stars, one dot-com embezzler and a big ending involving doing mushrooms at Burning Man. Hence the ‘shroom reference)

When ya read the other book you'll see where Sarah came from. The other book aint fiction. Thanks for yer Yeehaws!

(Note: My last email ended with a big Yeehaw! -- something I learned to do in high school with my hellraisin’ pals while drinking Mad Dog 2020. The first time I got to NYC and let out one of those Yee-haws at the bar at CBGBs, all those supposedly world-weary, streetwise punk rockers looked at me like aghast country clubbers. Seems that only a fellow Mountaineer -- or someone from Texas -- ever understands a good ‘yee-haw!’ bellowed at the top of your lungs.)

Is your show playin NY? I can interview ya for NY Press Any luck gettin any one else to read. I am gettin nervous. How long I got to get ya a book for Ms. Foster. I really wanna give her one. Thanks about that. My WVA rocket to tha stahs... yours, JT

At the time, I was doing re-shoots of “Panic Room” with Jodie Foster. JT seemed obsessed with the actress, especially Jodie Foster as a child prostitute in “Taxi Driver.” Looking back, perhaps it was that movie that informed the JT character the most. I also wonder if the deceiver studied Foster’s W.Va. accent in “Silence of the Lambs” before doing an interview with Terry Gross on the NPR show “Fresh Air." A not-wholly convincing accent, but then again, the poor child had been dragged all over the place -- how could one expect him to have a consistent accent?

JT didn’t interview me, but he did write a bizarre piece in an alternative magazine that was pure fantasy -- some cockamamie story mixing up elements of my bio with a tall tale about us meeting in a coal mine. It didn’t bother me that the personal facts were completely fraudulent. What did bug me were all the West Virginia stereotypes -- they were obvious, unimaginative and not very funny to boot. But it only helped to solidify my belief. Man-o-man, this kid is really f**ked up! He needs help.

Not so unconvincing

I ended up getting “The Heart is Deceitful” to Jodie Foster, telling her it was: “Southern Gothic in nature with what seems like more than a little magical realism. Not nearly as good as something by Flannery O’Conner but interesting given how young the author is.” I didn’t follow up on it beyond getting a mailing address for her. I pray she didn’t get suckered in.

Though I did think “Heart..” was very uneven, I found it more psychologically harrowing than the first book. Especially since JT had told me these stories about his mother -- unlike much of “Sarah” -- were true. I wrote him instantly:

I am 1/3 thru "the heart is deceitful...." and I can hardly find the words to tell you how much your book is affecting me. Mostly in it's ability to pick the lock on that Pandora's box of Appalachian memories. Mind you, nothing quite as intense of what you've been thru ---Damn! I wanna give you a big Eminem Motherly HUG!!!

I had just been sent the script for “8 Mile,” inspired by Eminem learning to rap in Detroit, and had shared riffs with JT earlier on the absurdity of me auditioning for the part of Eminem’s mother, a part that --’natch-- went to Kim Basinger. She’ll probably end up playing Sarah, too, I thought. Sigh, you gotta be a multimillionaire beauty to get cast as a skag in this town…

Now, some folks will say the writing in JT’s books is crap and anyone who was hoodwinked by his saga is a damned fool to begin with. But those well acquainted with the gender-bending fabulosity that is San Francisco (known affectionately to some as “The Island of Misfit Toys”) or have done any kind of therapy (12 step or otherwise), know that no story regarding child abuse is too outrageous to believe. Just read the details of any FBI child pornography investigation. (Which perhaps the real author of the JT Leroy novels had).

One soon discovers truth is always more bizarre than fiction. And often too unbelievable to believe. In fact, considering all the horrible things human beings really do to each other it’s a wonder anyone resorts to making stuff up. (Or -- why we are talking about this instead of the war in Iraq?)

That’s why it’s so odd that someone like James Frey, who apparently fabricated his criminal record as well as his hair-raising experiences in rehab for alcohol and drug addiction, would be the one to make millions. Why not Jerry Stahl instead? His book “Permanent Midnight,” a chronicle of battling a horrendous heroin habit while also writing for the TV show “Alf,” is not only harrowing but hilarious. And completely true. In fact, I bet any ‘rigorously honest’ Fourth Step from any garden variety AA, NA or Crystal Meth Anonymous member would make millions if Oprah put her stamp of approval on it.

The point is, if you’ve done nothing more than just taken a casual stroll on the wild side you’ll come to the conclusion that no story is too crazy to be true -- including the supposed JT LeRoy’s. And having heard some incredible true stories, I was easily convinced this kid had endured real abuse. (In fact, I’m convinced that whoever made all this stuff up has some definite “issues” not being dealt with.)

PART 2: TUESDAY in thegazz.com: Off Notes and Bad Jokes from JT.