At SFist today, where I’m a columnist, there has been a lot of activity about the whole JT LeRoy unmasking thing. (Read all the comments.) I found out today when I read the Gawker post over my morning coffee, but then several people forwarded me Susie Bright’s extremely revealing post about beiung duped and used, and even it seems treated almost abusively, by the privileged people behind the pseudonym — people who even played “the AIDS card“. I’m not totally shocked, as being someone who survived a childhood similar to that of a LeRoy character, the whole presence of LeRoy in San Francisco seemed fishy and weird; too many cliches, and things like LeRoy’s column in local 7×7 magazine was always about something like shopping in expensive, exclusive botiques with a tiny crumb of “street cred” thrown in at the end. I’m a writer, so I know the tricks. Then again, I don’t trust anyone I don’t know. But still, it didn’t change the way the “Heart” book was way too close to home for me to even get past chapter 3, and it doesn’t change how burned Susie must feel after putting her reputation at stake for someone who could only live up to the characters in her (his) books.
It’s weird, and it really pisses me off. Not as a writer. *As a survivor.* I lived the very real horrors of my childhood to get where I am now — alive, articulate. I didn’t fuck anyone over to get my book deals, and I certainly didn’t exploit very real experiences (like of myself and my friends) to get my books published. I certainly never had the elite privilege of celebrity benefactors. I had a mother who was a drug addict, a compulsive liar, who gave and received regular beatings. She was raped in a room next to me when I was ten; I saw her have a knife held to her throat, I saw her get beaten by boyfriends I had to call “daddy” more times than I can count. She beat me with a belt; she inhaled cocaine like a vaccum and dealt it like a pro; she dumped me off every chance she got with strangers for weekends and sometimes weeks at a time. She left me in places so dangerous that by the age of 13 I was comfortable pointing her baretta at anyone who came in my bedroom door — and it happened. Then crack, which she taught me to cook for her, and a drug bust where she snitched on all her friends, and they wanted to kill us so we moved around the Bay Area *a lot*. I hit the streets of San Francisco at 14. I begged, I stole, I ate out of gabage cans, I slept in abandoned cars and on rooftops, in parks, at people’s houses. I never whored, though my friends did, and I did sell drugs a few times. I was a “gutter punk”; I stayed away from the dope and speed but got in a lot of fistfights. A gay couple ran a cafe; they took in a lot of us young runaway punk kids and let us sleep there sometimes and we could eat and hang out if we worked — my first job skills, and a place to use as an address to get ID. Gay men saved me: men who are now dead. Pretty much everyone I knew from that time is dead or disappeared; heroin, aids, even the first Gulf War. My friends are really fucking dead, and those things really happened to me, and more, and worse than I’ll tell you. It took me a long time to learn how to be normal, but some things remain, and I was on the streets for almost four years. Reading LeRoy’s book brought so much back for me that I didn’t see why I should re-live it. I’m okay now; it took me years before I could even tell anyone about my life prior to the age of 20. But I do remember one thing very clearly right now. On the streets we had a word for people like so-called LeRoy. It was “poser.”
It’s just not fair what people get away with sometimes.
