October Spotlight - Laura Albert

Cover Art By Hannah Tutor

A sense of duality: the poetic and the profane, the sacred and the salacious, the masculine and the feminine permeates the work of this month’s artist, whose main vehicle of expression is the written word.
Laura Albert first burst onto the literary scene as both spectacle and spectator, when her first novel Sarah was published in 2000 under the pseudonym of JT LeRoy, it was met with both critical and cultural acclaim. Sarah, a beautiful, brutal, and phantasmagoric account of a young, gender fluid, male truck stop hustler (lot lizard) was said to be a semi-autobiographical account of the life of its author JT LeRoy. Which it was, his voice, channeled through Laura’s hand.
The voice of Jeremiah “Terminator” LeRoy was born of Laura’s conversations with Dr. Terrence Owens via a crisis hotline in the late 1990’s. She had been calling crisis hotlines for years by this time, always as a boy, and at this point it was her major avenue of emotional, mental, and spiritual exploration. This would be the incubator for the germ of what would become JT. From the first call there he was, fully formed and crystalized. When Dr. Owens asked for a name Laura said “Terminator”. She would later state that: “He was my respirator. My channel for air”, and it was through her conversations with Dr. Owens that she would express herself and explore the avatar of Terminator.
When Dr. Owens identified continuity problems in Terminator’s thought processes, he suggested that writing would help. What initially resulted was Balloons, a story in which a presumably adolescent boy collects the balloons that the heroin he buys is packaged in. The use of language in Balloons has echoes of Rimbaud in its ability to clearly create a visual image within the mind’s eye of the reader. It was more than fiction, it was poetry. Populated by phrases like: “No one knows about my collection, and I won't tell until The Time. I've had my plan forever, and I can't just go buy balloons; they have to be special magic balloons, baptized by saliva, made holy by the fear of getting busted with them, and transformed to the sacred by all the desires floating in the tension surrounding them. Our sweat, our fear, and my love.”, and “I feel myself getting lighter as branches of balloons spring from every limb. I tell them not to cry; I must rise for their sins. I am the Lord's outcast and will face him for all outcasts.” it was much more than just a work of art therapy and the first tangible proof of its author’s genius.  Upon delivering this piece of writing to Dr. Owens office Terminator’s counterpart Speedie was born (complete with a cockney accent). The avatar of Speedie would become a crucial mechanism of something that was quickly snowballing into an endeavor which would blur the lines between the art and its creator. Ultimately calling into question the very archetype of the artist, and the expectations placed upon that role by a media driven consumer culture. At the same time questioning the status quo on a woman’s role in the literary and artistic realms of American culture, as well as those of people on the fringes of society, and in so doing tackled a plethora of modern taboos that few if any other writers were talking about at the time. Her writing was, in hindsight, extremely prophetic and incredibly ahead of its time. Today we take issues of gender identity and sexual assault for granted, we have open discourse on these problems and feel that we have a greater awareness of these things, but in the late 90’s and early 2000’s this was not the case. Baby Doll, another early piece, is the story of a boy dressing in his mother’s clothing in order to seduce her abusive boyfriend. It would be published in the compilation Close to the Bone: Memoirs of Hurt, Rage, and Desire.
 It was on the heels of this story that she, or rather Terminator, was offered a book deal for a memoir. Laura refused the deal not wanting to misrepresent her fiction as memoir. At this point she stopped writing altogether.
A few years later she would write Sarah, which was published not long thereafter under the name JT LeRoy. Soon a cult of personality was springing up around the work of this new force of American literature which demanded that they see their idol in the flesh. It was with the help of Laura’s sister in law Savanna Knoop that JT would indeed become flesh.
Over the course of the next several years many more events would unfold which would blur the lines even further between fact and fiction, drawing Laura and her inner circle further into the realm of celebrity, and later infamy. Two more books would be born from her pen via JT, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things and Harold’s End, a movie was made based on the former title starring Asia Argento.
In 2005 an article was published implying that JT LeRoy was in fact the invention of his manager/handler Speedie AKA Laura Albert. More articles followed on its heels and she was quickly labeled as the architect of literature’s most elaborate hoax. A hail of controversy followed which generated even more press, Antidote International Films, Inc. filed a lawsuit, accusing her of fraud for signing a contract as JT LeRoy. She was viewed as a pariah, her name and work were attacked and defamed by a media machine which had no concept of art, let alone sympathy for an artist that they hardly understood and couldn’t commodify. But this was not the end for Laura.
 She worked as a writer on HBO’s Deadwood, and wrote a slew of articles and screenplays, mostly under her real name. 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 re-released the JT LeRoy books in a boxset under Laura Albert's name, and she and JT were the subjects of the hit Brazilian rock musical JT, Um Conto de Fadas Punk (JT, A Punk Fairy Tale). (1)
When all is said and done, the way that the work of this artist was initially presented was and is an extraordinarily revolutionary piece of art far ahead of its time. Of course, as exciting and beautifully bizarre as the JT mythos is, it is merely the cherry on top when one sits down and actually reads the work. Included at the end of this feature is the first chapter of the New York Times bestseller Sarah, we encourage you to read it. We have also included the trailer for Author: The JT LeRoy Story, it is a must see and a terrific companion to this feature as it explores our subject in much greater detail than we can go into here. We are very honored to present to you our October Spotlight Artist: Laura Albert.
 
(*1-Excerpted from Laura Albert Wikipedia)

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The Laura Albert Interview

​Steven Lee Matz- I would like to begin by thanking you for taking the time to speak with us. One of the aspects of your story that I personally find the most inspirational and thought provoking is the use of not one but two avatars (JT and Speedie), as well as the cast of characters that you would create to populate their lives. Which leads me to my first question, did the personas of JT and Speedie emerge fully formed or did you consciously develop them?
 
Laura Albert- Terminator was Terminator from the moment he first spoke to Dr. Owens – there really was no conscious thought-process to create him. But he emerged after many years of stories of boys like him. When I was a child, in my mind at night, I would hear and see stories of children in crisis, usually boys. Sometimes they would go into my dreams, but most often this would happen before I would fall asleep. Sometimes they’d keep me up, or they’d wake me up, and I’d be crying. Sometimes the kid would survive and sometimes he would die. And in the daytime I would play with my dolls and play out the scenes and situations that I had watched at night.
 
Terminator arrived fully formed, but a lot of stories had preceded his. As for Speedie, she was the advocate I needed to protect Terminator, and then JT LeRoy. At the time I was morbidly obese, my food addiction had taken over. It was a way of numbing myself, a behavior I had learned since childhood – and like any addiction, it is a progressive disease. It was self-destructive but also an effective way to keep people away and to mute my sexuality – which was problematic for me because of the sexual abuse I had experienced as a child. But I felt myself as a morbidly obese monster. And our culture tends to view and treat morbidly obese women this way. We are something to be feared, as if contagious. We wear our “disease.” Only recently has our culture begun to see different-sized people, ethnically- and gender-diverse people being represented in media in any form. Speedie allowed me to step into a persona who could be a fearless and effective advocate for my work.
 
There is a gender bias in how a woman is allowed to express herself. Men are deemed passionate and forceful, but when women express themselves in exactly the same way, they are labeled emotional, hysterical, ranting, or even bitchy. When women go after what they want, they are manipulative, whereas that same behavior in a man is admired, he is a go-getter.
 
Speedie allowed me to not give a fuck. To step out of my toxic shame and be someone who was OK being other people’s bête noire when needed. Because an advocate was also needed to set boundaries where JT LeRoy was being appropriated or taken advantage of. It’s as if I bifurcated myself: There was that aspect of me, “Terminator/JT LeRoy” who would give it all away, and then the Speedie being who was a fearless protective warrior. Making her Cockney was a version of the fearless Brooklyn women I grew up with, who would say it like it was – they were opened-hearted and generous, but knew how to go to war as needed. Speedie’s accent also gave me another layer, her own mask, and an essence of street punk that loaned her power. Speedie didn’t “know her place” as a fat woman who was not cute or pretty, who did not wear fashionable clothes or have a designer handbag. She carried shopping bags, and she was supposed to shut up and be ashamed. But Speedie was punk as fuck, and like me, she did not give a shit about that stuff. Even though it was painful to be mocked.
 
The truth is, people liked Speedie, she was funny, generous, and free. At the time, no one complained about Speedie. And she allowed me to move beyond the shameful identity of a fat woman in a thin-body-biased culture. But there was no publicist, no agent, no manager, so when Speedie needed to set a boundary, she was the one who had to do that. She had to not care if it made people angry. And that fearless boundary-setting helped me learn to say no in my own life. To not be a people-pleaser. When you feel you have no right to live, it is hard to ask for what you need. Or to set boundries. As a child my body was not my own. I did not know what proper boundaries were. I learned over time, I was in foster care, in a group home, and I learned a lot there. But Speedie really helped me. At the time, I also had a baby. I would do whatever I had to do to protect this spirit that had come through my body. Speedie had that momma bear fuel in spades and helped me be an effective advocate for my young son, as well as for JT LeRoy’s books. My novel Sarah was born out of me not long after my son.
 
What is interesting is that, after I was “outed,” people for the most part assumed right away that Speedie was Laura. I think that is a very sexist reaction – a lack of imagination on their part as well. They even pushed aside the fun times they had hanging out with Speedie, and focused on the times when Speedie set limits on their inappropriate behavior that they probably felt ashamed of. Speedie was the one who said, “No, you cannot give drugs to JT” and “No more plying drinks to JT” and “OK, press is over.” They always wanted to push for more. Savannah as JT wanted to go off and party, and Speedie was constantly having to be a sort of den mother. It was awful to be in that position, but was a helpful skill to learn. 

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When an artist is being commodified, there always needs to be someone who makes sure they are treated like humans. That is why people have managers and agents. There needs to be someone willing to be the gatekeeper, to require respect. If there is no one like that, then they will not feed you, they will not give you breaks – but they will often supply drugs to keep the party going, to make the artist more pliant.

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​Speedie was also mocked for asking for what is basic on any promotional tour, the food we needed: apples, almonds, soy milk. Fuel to keep us going through long days promoting their film, which we were not being paid for. It was not even close to being over the top, like some requests that rock stars have been known to demand. But as soon as I was outed, it was framed in a greedy grabbing way, because they saw Speedie as me, and anything she asked for, suddenly loomed larger. It was funny to me that people like Asia Argento – who had long lists of demands for  hotel suites, stocked bars, drugs, and who got paid a fortune for wearing clothing she claimed to detest but had JT LeRoy wear, while of course not sharing any of her endorsement payments – had the hypocrisy and nerve to make fun of Speedie for daring to ask for water, organic apples and almonds.
 
When an artist is being commodified, there always needs to be someone who makes sure they are treated like humans. That is why people have managers and agents. There needs to be someone willing to be the gatekeeper, to require respect. If there is no one like that, then they will not feed you, they will not give you breaks – but they will often supply drugs to keep the party going, to make the artist more pliant. I could not afford to hire an outside person, so Speedie was that gatekeeper. And it was only resented after I was outed in the press. How dare I be both the advocate and the exploited beloved talent?! I had to be one or the other. So it was easier to take the route of unconscious gender bias and procliam, “Laura WAS Speedie and she is a monster!” And it was easy to parlay Speedie to the cliché role of cunt. And because they saw Speedie in my body, while JT was presented in Savannah’s body. The being of Terminator/JT, all the vulnerable mischievous sweetness of that being, as well as all the writing, was from me. But that was quickly dismissed, leaving me, Laura Albert tagged a “manipulative cunt.” Which is another word for publicist/manager/agent – woman.
 
After having been outed, I have traveled by myself to book festivals, I have been a judge at film festivals, I opened the documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story around the world, and I have given lectures, talks, workshops – but it is hard for me to summon my inner Speedie. She is there, but it is only when I feel really taken advantage of that she will come storming out to set a boundary. I am still learning how to be an advocate for myself in a healthy way. I know many women struggle with this balance. I want to be liked. But how do I protect myself as well? Also, I am sensitive to the point of being gun-shy about those accusations – that if I ask for what I need, I am that cunt Speedie. Plus I no longer have that boundary of fat around me. I was 320 lbs. My body is normal-sized now and I feel much more vulnerable.
 
But now I am available. People can come to hear me talk about the work and I can meet with them without the firewalls I had. It was awful for me, when people wanted to talk about what the JT LeRoy books brought up for them, and they were faced with a JT LeRoy who could only sit there and nod. Savannah had not had the experiences I had. She once said to me that she wished she had had real trauma happen to her, like Asia and I had experienced, that she felt embarrassed about her privilege. And she was not able to respond to the fans who wanted to connect around the issues I had so fearlessly explored, because she had no clue.
 
But now I can make myself very available. When I read, I will sit with every fan until they say all they need to, or the venue closes. It is a very moving and healing experience for me. And it sure took a long time for me to be ready to do that in my own skin.
 
I know there is a gift beyond my writing – the added bonus is the complex way I presented it. It has fostered more awareness of sexual and psychical abuse, gender variance, addiction, obesity, etc. In 1995 Dr. Vincent Felitti ran an obesity program at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego. But he had a 50% drop-out rate, just when those quitting were losing up to 100 pounds. “As we interviewed almost 300 of the dropouts, every other person spoke of having childhood sexual abuse; most of them seemed to have been waiting to tell someone after hiding it for years,” Felitti said. “They also often mentioned verbal and physical abuse and other traumatic experiences such as watching their mother being beaten."
 
This reveals how we are only at the tip of an iceberg in our exploration of what is now called developmental trauma and its fallout. That’s why the more stories people are allowed to tell, in whatever manner they can, the better. 

Laura & Savannah Knoop

What was it like for you, both emotionally and artistically, when Savannah Knoop took on the role of J.T. and he became a living person?
 
I saw JT take over Savannah; it didn’t take long before he was really just stepping into her when she had to appear in public as him. For me it was validation of JT’s realness, that he could be channeled in this way. I did not see Savannah, I saw JT when we were out in public. When we got back to our hotel room we would have to decompress. It was a process. Me letting go of Speedie, and she of JT. But they had moved into us, so it was complex. The same when an actor is given over to a role they are playing. Some do not let go of it for all of filming and some even after. The role River Phoenix played in My Own Private Idaho deeply affected him, and there were destructive behaviors he continued after his role ended, which led to his tragic death. Likewise, I think Argento was attracted to the role of Sarah in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things because it tapped into her identity of both victim and victimizer. And she apparently did not stop playing this role with others, particularly the boy Jimmy Bennett who played her abused son, and whom she later slept with while he was still legally a minor. 

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I did not identify as female in a vast majority of the time spent in my body or my thought. There was no language for that. The term gender variance did not exist. And transgender was a scary word, it was still being viewed as a mental illness... Writing as Terminator/JT LeRoy allowed me the freedom to create when gender variance did not yet have a name. 

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You began writing at the suggestion of Dr. Owens, because he said that it would help JT with his continuity issues. My question is when you would write at that time, would you be fully immersed in JT or were you able to keep different methods between Laura and JT?
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Dr. Owens told Terminator he should write, and starting with “Balloons,” Terminator was writing. It was all drawn from my own life experiences and feelings, and from things that had happened to people I’d known. I wasn’t really writing from my imagination, not in the way that a genre writer does, saying, “OK, I am making a character up.” I was writing in a voice that had its own way of using what I had inside me. I was writing when I was a ward of the state in foster care, I had won scholarships to go to college. But a writing teacher – who I very much loved – at that time would not allow me to write in a male voice. She forbade it. I was writing stories of abuse, kids who were going through physical and sexual abuse. My issues. I begged her, I said to her, this is the only way I can explore this stuff in fiction, with a male voice. But she had experienced too many young writers making a mess when they wrote in the voice of the other. She thought, best write what you know first. I had no way to express to her that, even though I presented as female, that was not my inner life. I did not identify as female in a vast majority of the time spent in my body or my thought. There was no language for that. The term gender variance did not exist. And transgender was a scary word, it was still being viewed as a mental illness.
 
To be forced to write in a female voice was too exposing to me. It felt shameful and disgusting. Remember, ever since I was a young child, I had had the release valve of telling stories in a male voice. I very much wanted to be a boy, but my body was in no way masculine. Being chubby, made it worse. I had breasts early, which I detested. After writing about sexual and physical abuse with a girl protagonist in college, I had a break down, I dropped out of school and had to go to a hospital. I would not write about these themes, these issues in a purely female voice for almost thirty years. But now I am able to write my memoir. Writing as Terminator/JT LeRoy allowed me the freedom to create when gender variance did not yet have a name. 

Savannah Knoop & Bono

Were there any other personas that you wanted to experiment with or bring to life during the JT era of your work that you never got a chance to?
 
JT represented a kind of culmination, the most elaborate expression of a defense mechanism. My methods for containing and responding to my own trauma had become so deep and reflexive – and they were so intertwined with my own drive to write and communicate and testify to what was happening – that everything finally coalesced or condensed or distilled into JT. 

Laura & William Patrick Corgan

Who are your main influences artistically?
 
I have been getting to know Sheila Heti, and I very much appreciate how she discusses her process of writing, how honestly she explores what she wishes to write about. It intrigues me how she fearlessly writes very personally, as in her latest book, Motherhood, but she does not call it memoir, she moves it into the realm of fiction, which is hard for many critics to accept. They pass personal harsh judgments about her actual partners even though she states them as fictional. She cuts the lines thin, but that is her right as an artist. Yet it seems to upset many critics, even though it allows her to protect people’s identities and merge her characters to explore a deeper truth. Her writing structure has a collage-like form to it, and that has been wonderful for me, to study her wonderful craft and discuss it with her.
 
I go back a lot to the wisdom of Oscar Wilde, who saw himself go from being the most celebrated writer of his time to being imprisoned, sentenced to two years hard labor, because his behavior was deemed immoral. Oscar Wilde said, "A critic should be taught to criticize a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author. This, in fact, is the beginning of criticism." The author eventually goes away, but if the art is any good, it stays. That's why people still read Homer and stage Aeschylus, while knowing almost nothing about those authors. Focusing on the author rather than the art is like throwing away the banana and eating the peel. But in our society, authors are commodified and merchandized just like their art is, so naturally people get confused... That is why I am concerned when people start focusing too much on the creation of JT LeRoy, and confusing it with an actual hoax, which is something that falls apart very quickly because there is no substance behind it – it dissolves like cotton candy. I wrote real books of fiction, which sustained the fiction of the JT LeRoy persona. To again quote Wilde, "We have no right to quarrel with an artist for the conditions under which he chooses to present his work."
 
What is wild in this day and age, with very little new creativity under the sun, is that most people now celebrate how I was able to do something new within the boundaries of fiction, of art itself. Of course, a few still want to quarrel with me for how I chose to present my fiction. And like was done to Oscar, some need to demonize and even criminalize me. When the lawsuit was brought against me by Antidote Films, they actually presented an inch-thick binder of why CRIMINAL charges should be brought against me. I had not stolen money from anyone, or mispresented any funds, but because I would not let them co-opt my story, they wanted to frame my fiction as criminal. The judge quickly threw that out, recognizing it for the sham it was. But this is dangerous, this need to control the way fiction in ART is presented. My fiction has a felt authenticity with issues that very much need to be explored in the realms of fiction and non-fiction. I hear from people all over the world, who are grateful to find a voice and story they recognize as true. Much the way J.K. Rowling captures so authentically the emotional truth of Harry Potter and his magical world, that people have been known to injure themselves trying to shove their way through a brick wall to catch the Hogwarts train, at the now playfully labeled “Platform 9 3/4” at Kings Cross Station.

One trend we need to be vigilant in guarding against is the assault on artists and the way art is being corralled into “fake news.”

The writer George Saunders has spoken extensively about the peril of confusing the fabrications an artist creates within the realm of their art and the specter of news reporting and politics. There is a very big difference, they are very different domains. Saunders discusses the danger of taking artists who play within storytelling and making us part of the general problem of lying and “fake news” as a threat to our society. Saunders says, “It’ll start to become a general distrust of artists and intellectuals… the Trump movement started saying ​everything​ was fake news. That’s an example of the kind of the line-blurring that happens when an anti-intellectual program is in place… This movement is going to come after the intellectuals, in some form or another. That’s what these movements do.” Saunders reminds us about the importance of the freedom of the imagination, which again is very different from “fake news.”

I think everyone needs to read this quote from him: “(Fiction) trains us, in precision of thought and expression, and more importantly it reminds us there’s a part of the mind that is very expansive and intuitive and empathetic, that is as real as any other part of the mind. And when you’re doing a work of art or when you’re receiving one, I think you’re reminded at every moment, that way of thinking is real.”

That’s right. And there is a contract that we enter into when you pick up a book that says “novel.” You consent to that... process.
​
I am very excited by artists who have different sized bodies, of various races and ethnicities and genders and ways of identifying, and who now have platforms to tell their stories.
 
Lena Duham had a huge impact on me. I stopped wearing shorts at age twelve because I did not see anyone with chubby thighs wearing shorts on TV, in any magazines. The fat girl was the joke, the sidekick. Lena changed that fearlessly. I see so many millennials expressing pride in their curves, while there is still so much messaging that thin is best, there is also a growing counter culture, that is fast becoming mainstream – women can feel pride in whatever way they want to express their bodies. When I was a kid, a girl or woman who was overweight would be mocked for daring to have pride in her body. There are models now that are gender variant. I am also collaborating on projects with photographer Christelle de Castro, a gender-non-conforming lesbian. The writer iO Tillet Wright has the rare and exquisite gift of peeling back layers of identity and showing how we carry not just our stories but our forebears with us in forming our identities – with none of the usual one-dimensional blaming or hostility. There are so many artists who in the past would not have been invited to the table. They no longer have to fight quite so hard to be heard, and it’s about time that a broader spectrum of representations became available. I remember when I was a kid getting Seventeen Magazine, and no one in that mag looked like me or expressed anything I was experiencing. They were selling a narrow ideal of beauty and identity – and if you do not find yourself represented, it only compounds the isolation and loneliness. 
 
While they still have to deal with bias and educate people, it is not the uphill battle that it was. All of this gives me so much hope. On TV, we are not watching stories where we as an audience are trusted to care about characters you never saw on TV before. People of color, trans people of all races, body sizes, older women – I love how some TV shows Trojan-horse it, like Orange Is the New Black. It starts out ostensibly about a blonde-haired blue-eyed wasp, but next thing you know, we are caring about characters very few white male old-school executives would ever risk allowing to be protagonists of TV shows. There will always be a demand for escape shows, like Housewives, Kardashians or Bachelor type shows. But people also want to see people they know, who we are.
This is what excites me.
 
I am also very inspired by music that in the space of a song can take us on an emotional journey. The Smashing Pumpkins are back, and their show blew me away. Shirley Manson is a powerhouse and explores complex issues in her songs, if you pay attention – it’s devastating.
I also am very taken with the band Big Thief. They remind me of Mazy Star meets My Bloody Valentine, but they are very much their own thing.

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Author: The JT LeRoy Story

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Above are the American editions from HarperCollins. Find the books in your favorite format by clicking here.

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​Laura Albert won international acclaim writing fiction as JT LeRoy. She is the author of the novels Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, reissued by HarperCollins, and the novella Harold’s End, with illustrations by Cherry Hood. She is also the subject of Jeff Feuerzeig’s feature documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s film The Ballad of JT LeRoy. Cinema Eye, the organization that recognizes outstanding craft and artistry in nonfiction filmmaking, cited Laura Albert in Author as one of its 2016 list of Unforgettables: the year’s most notable and significant nonfiction-film subjects.
Laura’s books have also been reissued in the UK by Little Brown. Brazil’s Geração Editorial also re-released the JT LeRoy books in a boxset under Laura’s name – and she and JT were the subjects of the hit Brazilian rock musical JT, Um Conto de Fadas Punk (JT, A Punk Fairy Tale).
Laura contributes to print and online publications internationally, in a career that includes the cover feature for Man About Town and articles for The New York Times, The Forward, The London Times, Spin, Film Comment, Filmmaker, Interview, I-D, Vogue, The Face, Dazed and Confused, and VESTOJ, the Platform for Critical Thinking on Fashion. She was a contributing editor to Black Book, I-D, SOMA, and 7×7 magazines and is currently an editor for Diane Pernet’s A Shaded View On Fashion (www.asvof.com), and the Outpost section of psychoPEDIA.com. She has written for dot429, the world’s largest LGBTA professional network, and been an invited speaker at their annual conferences in New York.
Laura’s writing has brought her to speaking engagements from the story-telling series The Moth in New York to Foyles bookstore in London and Brazil’s international Bienal Brasil do Livro e da Leitura, where Laura and Alice Walker were the 2012 U.S. representatives. Her interview given to Nathaniel Rich was the cover feature of the Fall 2006 issue of The Paris Review; she also gave an extensive interview to Adam Langer for the August 2013 issue of Interview Magazine.
She wrote the original script for Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, winner of the 2003 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and was Associate Producer. For Asia Argento’s film adaptation of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Laura served as Associate Producer. She also co-scripted Jean-Claude Schlim’s film House of Boys and was a writer for the HBO series Deadwood. Her writing for short films includes Radiance for Drew Lightfoot and ContentMode, and Dreams of Levitation and We Vault for Sharif Hamza and Nowness. In 2012 Laura served on the juries of the first Brasilia International Film Festival and the Sapporo International Short Film Festival.
The editor of Da Capo Best Music Writing 2005, she has contributed writing to such short-story anthologies as The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003, edited by Dave Eggers and read by Tatum O’Neal on audio edition; MTV’s Lit Riffs; XXX, edited by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; Nadav Kander’s Beauty’s Nothing; and The Fourth Sex, Adolescent Extremes, edited by Francesco Bonami and Raf Simons. She has also been published in Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story, McSweeney’s, and the Oxford American Music issue.
She has written liner notes and biographies for musicians Billy Corgan, Liz Phair, Conor Oberst, Bryan Adams, Nancy Sinatra, and Courtney Love, as well as the liner notes for the Criterion Collection DVD of My Own Private Idaho, which features an audio segment with JT, Gus Van Sant, and Jonathan Caouette. With the band Thistle LLC, she contributed songs to the film Andy Warhol: Morning Star; she was also the voice of Warhol, reading from his Philosophy and Diaries. She also contributed to a podcast project for San Francisco’s MOMA on Warhol.
Laura has collaborated with director and playwright Robert Wilson and with Noah Khoshbin for the international exhibition of Wilson’s VOOM video portraits, as well as for the catalog of Wilson’s “Frontiers: Visions of the Frontier” at IVAM Valencia.
Profiled as an “indie fashion fighter” in the Style section of the San Francisco Chronicle, Laura has served as a member of Diane Pernet’s ASVOFF fashion film competition jury. Steven Klein has photographed Laura for QVEST magazine; so has Kai Regan, for his “Reckless Endangerment” at ALIFE. She has also done fashion shoots for Christian Lacroix and John Galliano, written films for ContentMode and Nowness, and interviewed numerous designers. ContentMode has published her series of fashion-related interviews with film and television actors. She coordinated a fashion show as an HIV/AIDS fundraiser for the Academy of Friends Oscar Party, bringing together Melange Productions and the multi-talented young people of Project Level – an arts academy for at-risk youth in San Francisco, where Laura was Director of Strategic Development – to create looks for the show, which they modeled. Laura also arranged for model and activist Rain Dove Dubilewski to walk the runway as JT LeRoy for the 2014 HIV/AIDS fundraiser held by the Academy of Friends Oscar Party in San Francisco.
Laura profiled award-winner Juergen Teller for the 2003 Citibank Photography Prize catalogue, and was a catalog contributor for both the “Blind Cut” exhibition at New York’s Marlborough Chelsea and “An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area, Parts 1 & 2, Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself” at SF Camerawork. Laura has collaborated with Williamsburg band Japanther, releasing a limited-edition cassette under the name True Love in a Large Room, with original artwork by Winston Smith, and with the San Francisco band The Size Queens on The Size Queens III album.
A spokeswoman for the successful “Heart for Eye” campaign to raise funds for restorative eye surgery for children, Laura hosted a television segment and was both an interview subject and an interviewer of inspirational women such as Anastasia Barbieri and Anh Duong. As part of the campaign, she was photographed by Marc Horn in ads that ran in Korean Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, W, Marie Claire, and other publications.
She has also taught at Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia and California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and lectured with artist Jasmin Lim at Artists’ Television Access with SF Camerawork’s Chuck Mobley.
For several years Laura was the chief entertainment/travel writer/personality for Bayinsider.com, a San Francisco City Guide produced by Cox Interactive Media in conjunction with KTVU/Fox 2, KNBR and The Ticket 1050. She has hosted a series of radio segments at KPOO and KUSF on film, food, and travel. Laura’s other credits include being weekly show host for Rolling Stone, an Internet RealAudio show for Web Entertainment Group; travel writer for a New York-based publication, Singles Almanac; and lifestyle columnist for The Web Magazine and Maxim magazine.

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JT LeRoy CAPS
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Harold’s End
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  Sarah
By J. T. LEROY

CHAPTER ONE

Glad holds the raccoon bone over my head like a halo. `I have a little something for your own protection,' he says, leaning down over me so close that I can't help but stare up at the brown patches of skin that mottle the pure whiteness of his face.
    `Glad, you look like you're sharecroppin' out your own private patch of cancer,' some of the lot lizards would tease him. But I know the truth of it. Glad told me himself. It's the Choctaw in his blood. That's why he's got good medicine. That's why he's a good pimp for a lot lizard to have.
    `These patches of brown be the In'ian in me, making themselves known,' he tells me over a trucker special breakfast at The Doves Diner: a huge mound of hollandaise eggs and thick-as-a-Bible persimmon pancakes. I know he wants me to work for him. His stable is known for being the finest from coast to coast. Glad's little bits don't have to stand outside the truck stop like other goodbuddy lizards usually do. Truckers call in to arrange their appointments months in advance. All Glad's pavement princesses dress so comely in the most delicate silks from China, fine lace from France, and degenerate leather from Germany. If you didn't notice them wearing a raccoon penis bone necklace, and if you didn't know what that meant, you'd never know they were actually male. Most of his boys are either runaways rounding up some cash before heading out with some driver one of these days, or they are like me, have family working the main lot. Nobody bothers with Glad's boys. Some of the lizards say it's because he pays off anyone that would ever have a say. Sarah told me it is because all the ex-con truckers make sure they have Glad's finest boys to look forward to and the local law wouldn't want to start no riot by depriving felons of their sweet reminders of the penitentiary. But I know it is because of the raccoon dick.
    He holds it over my head.
    I lean down and let him slip the rough-cut leather cord around my neck. I always see Glad's boys in the diner, fingering their coon pricks in a real show-off way. They never have to pay their checks. I always hear the waitress saying when she puts in the boy's order, `It's for them two of Glad's with the mountain man toothpick.' And a bill never comes.
    The lizards say Glad just pays their tab like any sugardaddy. Sarah says all the waitresses secretly are in love with Glad and his boys so they don't charge them. But Glad tells me it's neither. `They know most of their business is hungry tricks that work up their appetite after a visit with my boys, and they count on my boys leaving their tricks in a generous and lavish mood.'
    `This better than a policeman's badge,' Glad says as he adjusts the necklace over my black sweater. I knew he was going to give me my bone today, so I borrowed a black sweater from Sarah.
    `Gettin' boned today is what I heard,' she called from inside the bathroom of the little motel room one of her regulars on the green bean run pays for. I knew she was soaking in the shower.
    `I don't care how cheap the room and the hoe, a woman needs a soak same as a coal miner.' She clogged up the drain with wet menstrual pads and towel-lined the shower rim to add an inch or two to her bath. She sat in the corner huddled like an orphan in a flood with the shower pouring down. `You'll be soaking your pump knot in here too once Glad puts you out.'
    I went through the always half-packed plastic attaché case and picked up her black sweater. I pressed it to my face and inhaled her familiar scent of stale cigarettes and alcohol ineffectively masked by powder-scented air freshener.
    `You better not swipe my leather skirt,' she yelled over the shower water streaming down.
    I leaned into the Sheetrock bathroom door. `I'm going as a boy,' I shouted.
    I heard her make a `that's what you think' laugh. I kicked the door and it shook harder than I'd meant. `You ain't the first person to kick in this door.' She laughed and I felt relieved she didn't come after me, but more than a little pissed she didn't even take me half serious enough to try to whip me. It's 'cause she's in her soak, I told myself. I could smell the baby powder scent of her bubble bath and felt excited to come home after a long night of trucker lovin' and deserve my soak just like she did. She never let me use her bubbles. `Buy your own when you work your own!' she'd tell me when she'd see me fingering the bottle covered in pictures of naked baby bottoms.
    `I'm coming home with some of my own bubbles!' I shouted into the door.
    `And leave the keys till you pay me half this rent.' Her voice raised some and that gave me a tinge of pleasure and fear. I grabbed up the black sweater and opened the front door. I walked back over to the Sheetrock bathroom door and said as loud as I could without yelling, `You don't even pay for this room your own self, but since I'll be making more than you As a boy, I'll kick you down some change.'
    Then I ran. Heard her pulling herself up before I finished. I slammed the front door and didn't even look back once.


`This bone stands out nice against your sweater,' Glad says after he is done adjusting it on me.
    I turn and look in the plate glass and there it is, on me, yellowish white like tobacco chewers' teeth. I always wanted to glide my fingers along its curvaceous lines.
    `Shape always 'minded to me like half a waxed moustache ... how they get it in their women's privates is all but beyond me,' he says with a snort, and some unswallowed Kentucky coffeetree drink sprays out at me.
    I carefully wipe the Kentucky coffeetree spray off my face. I've heard truckers talking in low voices how Glad is known to have murdered a few drivers that did his boys a bad turn. He did it with his coffeetree drink, some in the know say.
    `It would only be a Yankee with no manners or sense of self-pride that would hurt a young defenseless boy trying to make a night's wages,' I once heard Big Pullsman Todd say between forkfuls of his Wellington of king salmon with truffle mashed potatoes. `Yankee drivers,' about ten other truckers swore and spit in their spittoons that were fixed directly a foot and a half to the sides of each of their booths. Most would usually miss and make spattered lizard designs on the fake marble with sparkles in its linoleum.
    Every now and then a trucker would sit in the diner and boast of busting up a faggot goodbuddy.
    They didn't notice how the room went quiet. I heard it said that one northerner sat there laughing, wearing one of Glad's boy's raccoon bones around his own neck. He didn't look up from his medallions of chicken fried Ahi when the boy came in—face bruised and misshapen like a sat-on plum, Glad at his side. The boy nodded in the Yankee's direction. Glad sent the boy into the arms of Mother Shapiro, the den mama, to one of his caravans he kept for the boys with no homes of their own.
    I heard that the noise got louder as everyone made a show of acting real regular so they could claim themselves so engrossed in the conversations going on, they never noticed anything foul afoot.
    But everyone heard the song. It has its place in the middle of the jukebox, an inconspicuous number as any: 24B. The A side is worn out skipping 'Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.'
     Everyone made a show of not watching Glad walk real slow, through the swing doors and into the kitchen. Via the open order station window, everyone pretended not to be looking at Glad taking off the leather thong around his neck and removing one of two identical leather pouches he wore next to the hugest raccoon penis bone anyone had ever seen. Bolly Boy stopped checking on his tuna-noodle souffle and took the pouch from Glad. It was well-known Bolly had once been one of Glad's boys, but retired when he fell in love with a john that drove a custom. He swore he'd be true, but he was so used to giving pleasure to all the truckers he was sure his pledge would be in vain. But Glad fixed him with a job as a chef and paid for chef lessons, so Bolly Boy could stay chaste and still deliver pleasure, which made everyone happy. Bolly's sous-chef, Paxton Maculvy, was another one of Glad's who retired when he fell in love with the faces the drivers made when consuming the creations Bolly made. 'No trick ever rolled his eyes to heaven like that when eating me,' Paxton sighed. So Glad sent him to chef school, but on account of Paxton being illiterate, he dropped out and studied with Bolly in the truck-stop kitchen instead.
     The Yankee never noticed the corners of all the truck- ers' eyes following Paxton as he strode over to the jukebox and used a special key to open the box up. If Bolly hadn't been such a great chef, the northerner might've had a chance to take a break from his side dish of liver with crème fraîche strudel. He could've taken note of the subtle hush in the diner as Paxton fingered his coon penis bone with one hand while press- ing the buttons to put song 24B on for ten continuous plays. If Bolly had been less of a chef, the Yank might've done more than just hum along unconsciously to the old TV song theme blasting from the juke. He could've recognized that, like an Indian war whoop warning before the attack, the Davy Crockett song was being played. If the calf liver reduction sauce on the fresh corn ragout had been a little off, he might've got the mental picture every trucker had in the diner. Davy Crockett in his raccoon hat. He might've lit a wet rag out of that diner and escaped with his life.
     The place almost jumped when Bolly himself, with his raccoon prick hanging almost in the Yankee's face, bent over to set down with a thud a pecan flambé and lit it up with a flash at the man's table. Before the Yank could protest that he had ordered no such thing, Bolly whis- pered in his soft voice, 'This, sir, is on the house.'
     The Yank never would've thought that was the last conversation he would ever have in this world. Every- one's eyes were pretending not to be on the flambE, so the steaming brown coffee mug Bolly casually placed next to the pie was paid no mind. And only the folks that knew what was in Glad's leather pouches knew that it was the steaming brown mug that would do the Yank in and not Bolly's work of art pecan soufflE. Though again, if Bolly had been less of a chef and the souffle not as dense, yet airy and so sweet you couldn't help but roll your eyes to heaven and give a praise of thanks, well, the Yank could've had a chance to notice that the coffee had a distinctly strange flavor to it. If he had been a local he might have recognized that he was sipping on a coffee substitute made from the seeds of the Kentucky coffeetree used by poor miners. If he had been a botanist he might have known that unless those seeds and leaves are roasted to a crisp brown, they are as poisonous as a deep mine with a broken vent. The Yank had to sip his coffee against the richness of Bolly's desert. Somewhat immediately he started to get a stomach cramp, but there were still pecans, shiny in their sugar web, to be fished out of the white goblet, so he ate greedily through the discomfort.
    The talk got extra loud as the truck driver from up north wearing a stolen love bone too tight around his neck paid his check and left for his truck. Everyone noted, as they watched him climb into his cab, that the man was bowed over some, rubbing his stomach as if it were a genie lamp.
    The Department of Health and the sheriff made a visit to the diner not long after they found the northerner's stiff body curled up in a fetal position in the back of his vomit-festooned cab. He was pulled off to the side of the Interstate for a day and night before the highway patrol found him. It was the raccoon prick bone around his neck that brought the sheriff in and the crumpled napkins saying The Doves Diner that brought in the Health Department.

The sheriff nodded as he spoke to one of Glad's boys that wore no bone. The boy, through spit-wet eyes, told him a tale of love and a gift he had made to the Yankee. The Health Department collected mouse droppings and Roach Motels so full they could be used as maracas. The sheriff tried to comfort the boy and handed him back his bone. The Department of Health shut the diner for seventy-two hours and gave it a several-hundred-dollar fine. No one ever noticed it was Glad who paid the fine. And no one ever said a word about the known fact that Bolly's kitchen was kept so clean that when he invited many a trucker to eat off of his floor, many took him up on it.
    Nobody ever said a word about it. Except in hushed tones of gossip you could overhear if you had good hearing.
    I subtly finish dabbing up the Kentucky coffeetree droplets off my cheeks. I knew Glad had never hurt one of his boys, even when he had reason to. But I couldn't for the life of me tell the difference between the two pouches around his neck. What if he made a mistake and didn't notice he had Bolly make his mug from the pouch that held the unroasted seeds and leaves?
    `You live with family? In the Hurley motel, don't you?' Glad asks, blowing in his mug and accidentally spraying me again.
    `Yes, sir.' I nod and pat my face with a napkin. I'm not sure what Sarah is supposed to be to me so that's all I say and Glad says nothing more on it either.
    `I've seen her working the lots. Pretty lady. I'm sure she does well.' Glad nods and I nod. `Girls, 'specially pretty blonde young girls, can do themselves quite a turn.'
    I look down at my bone again. I hope everyone saw him putting it on me. I don't think it would be exaggerating to say I heard a dip in the volume when he did—not as much as when Glad murdered the Yankee, but along those lines somewhat.
    `I heard it said you look fetching in a leather miniskirt yourself,' Glad says.
    Sarah used to dress me up herself. She would do my makeup. I loved watching her lick her finger and run it gently under my eyes. It always reminded me of those nature films of a mother bird regurgitating food into its baby's mouth and left me feeling as full as if she had. When we'd go shoplifting, it was better for me to be a girl, even if I couldn't be as pretty as her.
    `Girls have more cubbyholes to hide things in,' she'd say, shoving cigarette packs down my dress and into my empty bra and cold wet chopped meat into my panties. `Men only want to stuff those with themselves—they don't ever see what we hid in `em!' She'd laugh at the guards staring at our legs and I laughed with pleasure at being included in her `we.' But she'd stopped dressing me even though it's easier to make your way in the world as two girls. Easier when you're sitting at a diner, loudly fretting over only having enough for a Jell-O salad when a baconburger would go down real nice, to get a man to lean down over you and say, `Let me take care of this, little darling.' Easier to get invited to stay the night at a man's place instead of sleeping in the car. Most anything you want in this world is easier when you're a pretty girl. She stopped letting me dress when it got too easy for those men to crawl from her bed into mine.
    But I didn't stop. Sometimes I would put bows and sparkle gel in my curly shoulder-length hair until it shimmered, just like Sarah's. Now and then, when I knew she had gone with a trick to gamble out on a delta boat, I would wander the tic-tac-toe-like board lines between the trucks and act like a new girl, a new dress for sale, out on the stroll. I kept to the dark and ran if a john or another lizard called to me. I showed enough to make them interested in who this mysterious girl could be. I thought no one ever saw me enough to know it was me. I convinced myself I was like a comic book hero, hiding in the shadows, my magic stiletto heels clicking away all evil. I watched the lizards climb in the trucks and I giggled to myself as the cab suddenly started a-rockin' and a-rollin' till the lizard would just as abruptly leap from the truck stuffing dollars in her boot. I only got whipped once for using Sarah's things and that was 'cause I was sloppy and she found me out. I had stepped in a deep puddle, and because I had stuffed newsprint in her shoes so I could walk in them, I lost my balance and fell. I broke her heel and put a bad stain and tear in the fine leather of her skirt I had paper-clipped high around me. I tried to get it fixed, but she noticed right off. Before that no one had ever told on me. But folks knew. Glad tells me how much the men are all of fond of seeing me dash under the lamplight like a forest sprite. Even the girls think it's sweet, and that I would make an excellent lizard for real. That was what had brought me to his attention.
    `Those divine golden curls of yours are very much admired,' Glad says, with a raise of his eyebrows and a sweet bowing of his head; asking my permission to touch them.
    I lean forward and tilt my head like a cat under his caress. `Soft as pig belly.' I almost fall flat on the table pressing my head into his hands.
    `You'll be my guest when you dine here, so maybe you can fleshen up some. Our customers tend to like a little meat on their girls.'
    I thought of Sarah saying, `I told you so!' So I say to Glad, `I could be a boy too. I know what to do.'
    `Lots of boys want to work for me.' Glad takes my hand and genteelly holds it. `What a man looks for in a boy is a lot different than what he looks for in my boy-girls.' He flips his long braid past his shoulders. I squint at him to try and see the Indian in him. He always spoke about being Indian, but aside from his long black braid and his facial spots, I can't see it.
    I heard it said that his hair isn't really black anyway. It's just hair-care-product black. His eyes are too blue, even though he tries to downplay it with his heavy lids, keeping them half closed. His nose is flat, more like an Irishman's then like an Indian. But the story is, his great-grandmother or maybe it was his great-great- or great-great-great-grandmother was a Mississippi Choctaw. No one knew which, not even Glad himself. Mother Shapiro was the only one that had seen the truth of it. She is the oldest and wisest lot lizard at any truck stop in any state, and it is widely known that the sheriff visited her trailer every now and then. She was a long time ago from the North, but no one holds it against her. She likes Sarah. I'd often see Sarah and her cuddled up in one of The Doves' booths. Sarah would lean in against Mother Shapiro's Hawaiian Muumuu-covered mounds of flesh and eat banana crème brulée while Mother Shapiro stroked her hair curls.
    `His name is Glading Grateful ETC ... The ETC is in capitals with three dots after the ETC sitting there like a trail into the sunset,' Mother Shapiro had told Sarah as they sat in Mother's round bed snuggled under goose-down blankets from Hungary. Sarah told me all about it. And I knew she was trying to make me jealous, so I pretended not to listen and kept saying, `What? What?' until Sarah did stop and I had to beg her to tell me what Mother told her.
    `Mother Shapiro saw an authentic copy of Glad's driver's license,' Sarah finally continued. `The Sheriff showed it to her because he couldn't believe anyone would put ETC and three dots in a name just because he don't know how far back the first Glad was.' Sarah loves to tell gossip when she is drunk. Even if she had sworn to hate me forever, if she found out any information about anyone at one of the bars she always stopped at after she was through for the night, she would talk to me. I watch all the gossip shows to arm myself with material.
    Sarah was on the bed, her head between her spread-out legs to keep from puking. But it didn't keep her from telling me what she'd learned from a night with Mother about Glad's Great-Grandmother ETC ...
    `A missionary devoted his life to taking her from a Choctaw to a Christian. He gave her lessons on how she could put Christ's joy and love into her heart.' Sarah rolled her head up and down in a little vibrating laugh and I knew it was a move she copied from Mother Shapiro. `So he went about gladening her and making her grateful and ...' She laughed and let her whole body shake as if she were round and undulating like Mother. `Glading Grateful the First was born some nine months later.'
    I moved myself slowly till my side was next to Sarah's arm and I cautiously let my head rest on her shoulder. We sat there in the dark of the room, occasionally lit up too bright by the glare of a truck heading out. I slid my feet under the nubbly bedcover, slowly like a crab under sand, to be next to hers. And we stayed like that until we both were asleep.
    `Well, I would like very much to have my own skirt of leather and my own makeup bag that closes with Velcro,' I say to Glad.
    `I can get you a big sight more than that,' he says and thumps the table.
    We start my training right away in the caravans back behind The Doves. I try to tell Glad I know what to do, that I've been with enough of Sarah's boyfriends and husbands, that if they had paid me I could buy a gator farm. Glad tells me I have to unlearn bad habits learned by watching drunken whores, no disrespect intended.
    `You have to learn to read a man and know when he's just lookin' for fun and when what he really needs is for you to hold him so he can cry his eyes out like a babe,' he told me as we drank strawberry Yoo-Hoos and sat on custom satin-covered beanbag chairs. `You have to learn how to listen. There is medicine in that penis bone to help you learn how to love like a real professional.'
    I take daily lessons from various boys of Glad's, who affectionately refer to each other as baculum, which Glad tells me means `little rod' in Latin.
    I practice rolling a condom on a man with my teeth without him knowing. I practice how to take every bit and grain of a man in my mouth. I already knew that one. I'd have contests with Sarah. We'd lie on our backs side by side on some motel bed, with our heads hanging, tilted back over the edge of the bed, till our mouths, esophagus, and throats would all line up. Then we'd put in a carrot as deep as we could without gagging. We'd mark the carrot with our top teeth and after we'd see who was the better head giver. Sarah always won.
    `You win 'cause you're older and bigger,' I told her once and she slapped my face so hard I saw stars.
    `Don't you ever call me old and big,' she said and ran out crying.


I acquire tricks, like spraying Binaca on your right hand, so if a date is not on top of his hygiene, you can breathe in the scent of fresh mint from your hand and think of the snowy Alps instead of inhaling his ammonia scent and being reminded of a dirty Porta-potty.
    I learn how to trick with men who want to dress in lacy frilly things.
    `That's the most difficult one,' Pie tells me. Pie was born a woodscolt—a bastard, and half white on top of that. To his Chinese mother from a traditional Chinese family that ran the only traditional Chinese restaurant in the upper reaches of the Appalachian Mountains, it was a disaster. They tried to keep him hidden by making him tip long beans and slice bitter melon all day and night. All Pie wanted to do was be a Japanese geisha, and as soon as he was old enough he hitchhiked all over, ending up in San Francisco. He came back home when his Great-Aunt Wet Yah was dying. His Great-Aunt Wet Yah was the only one who let him wear her silky undergarments and read to him from a forbidden book on the great geishas she had happened to possess. Wet Yah died and now Pie was working for Glad, saving up to move back to San Francisco and open his own geisha training school for men.
    `You have to listen very carefully when you are with a man that wants to dress.' Pie uses his hands while he talks, gracefully waving them back and forth as if he were icing a cake in the air. `He might only want to show you how nice he looks in his pink panties and discuss how much he enjoys the feel of the smooth material against his privates. Or he might want to be a lesbian and make love to you as a woman making love to another woman.' Pie moves his body in a flowing S, making the silk of his kimono ripple so sinuously as to suggest two women making love. `Or the gentleman might wish to be called a little sissy pantywaist, teased and otherwise humiliated.' Pie shakes his hips and mimics a femmie boy. `You can often make extra by making the gentleman pay to bring in other bacula to laugh at him.' I nod and scribble notes in a notebook Glad has given me.
    `The gentlemen often do not tell you what kind of cross-dressers they are. You have to listen and take their clues.' Pie sits down on a beanbag and looks at me studiously, the slight slant of his eyes accentuated by broad strokes of black liquid liner. `It is your job to figure out: do they want to pretend you are a woman completely, do they want you to be sweet and gentle, do they want you to be forceful and fill their hungry mouth, do they want abuse or gentle guidance? The faster you can figure this out, the more famous you will become.'
    And Pie is famous. Cross-dressers come from as far away as Antigua to see him. But I don't need to be told which boys are the best. All I have to do is look at the raccoon bones around their necks. The better the whore, the bigger his bone. I heard it said that the bigger bones aren't real, that Glad just melts waxed dental tape onto a small bone until it is bigger. I look at Pie's and it looks authentic. Big and genuine.


`You're ready for your first date,' Glad says to me two months after I've started my training. I haven't lived at the motel room in a month. I stay at the caravans. Sarah took off with a rich crooked cargo inspector, and I check the room every day to see if she is back. The plastic attaché case is gone, but her bubbles are still there in the bathroom so I know she'll come back eventually. I plan to have my own bubbles on the shelf next to hers by the time she gets back.
    `You think you're ready? You feel okay?' Glad asks as he helps me get dressed in a muted pink leather miniskirt I couldn't wait to show Sarah when she came home.
    `Ready as snipers at bull-ball cuttin' time,' I say, borrowing Sarah's line. I put finishing touches on my makeup the way Sarah taught me. Glad makes me go light on the makeup, though. I want to take an iron and straighten out my hair so it flows like floss, but Glad won't hear of it.
    `You really oughten not to be wearing any makeup. The natural look will make ya more lettuce than a face palette. Men pay for freckles and curls,' Glad says and wipes up my face with his hankie.
    `Glad, you are a sight worse than a mother dressing her daughter for prom night,' Sundae laughs.
    Sundae is a Texas honey-blonde with a bone bigger than Pie's. Sundae's specialty is cheerleaders. `You'd be surprised by how many football players want a cheerleader with cock,' she says adjusting the miniature pom-poms in her hair.


Glad picked out a truck driver everyone knew.
    `He's a nice man that only wants to diddle you,' Sundae says.
    `Remember to watch the clock on the dash,' Pie says and gracefully kisses the air next to either side of my cheeks. `Good luck.'
    Glad just wrings his hands and makes me feel nervous.


I walk, in the flat white Mary Janes Glad made me wear instead of the spike heels I wanted, out of the caravans with everyone seeing me off, past The Doves, and into the lower-lit fluorescent night-time of the overnight truck lot. The Nice Man's truck is right where Glad said it would be, five rows in and seven across. It is a plain truck, nothing special. No custom anything. The door is a dark blue and I can see my face mirrored on it. I squint my eyes so I can pretend I am seeing Sarah's reflection. I am supposed to tell the Nice Man my name is Cherry Vanilla, but after I knock and he says, `Who is there?' the name `Sarah' just comes out of my mouth.
    At first I'm scared of the Nice Man. He reminds me of a New Orleans voodoo priest, his eyes rimmed with a thick black tattoo. Then I realize, after I sit on his lap a little and he talks to me in his near indecipherable Appalachian twang, that he is just a laid-off coal miner. And it's true what they say; the dust settles in every crease of skin like a new layer of pigment.
    `Started in the mines when I was ten,' he says and places his charcoal-lined hands gently on my waist.
    He is from Mingo County, West Virginia. Everyone in West Virginia, no matter how bad off they are, gives thanks at least they don't live in Mingo County.
    `I used to lie in the bed with my brother at night while my mama listened to The Christ Cure Radio Show and my daddy sucked on a piece of coal to help his graveyard cough,' he tells me while bouncing me tenderly on his knee. I thought about asking him if he heard my grandfather's sermons too, as his show came on not too long after The Christ Cure Radio Show and was very popular in Mingo County, but I remember what Glad told me about not getting personal about my life.
    `It ruins the fantasy of who they want you to be,' Glad had said.
    `I do love Jesus,' the Nice Man says and begins to run his hands up under my pink skirt and to my peach panties. `And you are such a sweet thing.' I hope he will say the name I told him. I want to hear her name while his


hands begin to diddle me. I close my eyes and let him rock me and caress me. 'Sarah,' he finally whispers into my ear. 'I'm here,' I whisper back, 'not going nowhere.' I let my eyes roll back into my head in pleasure.Sarah comes back a month after I've started working. The green-bean truck-driver man had stopped by to see her while she was gone. Other lizards were more than happy to be helpful and let him know Sarah's where- abouts. He was so mad that she was carrying on in some other state, with a cargo inspector at that, that he got rid of our room and put everything she'd left out on the brown lawn. Someone rang up Glad and I came and gathered up all the things and took them back to the caravan. Except her bubble bath. I left that sitting there on the rotting grass.


Mother Shapiro paid for Sarah to get our room back at the Hurley motel, but mostly Sarah stays with Mother in her caravan. They're always together. Sarah even starts acting like she cares about the lizards' moons too. Mother Shapiro knows all the girls' monthly cycles by heart. At any given time, if Mother is sitting in The Doves, some lizard will holler out to her across the floor asking if they were ripe. Some want to know so they can force a driver they are fond of to settle down with them and a baby on the way. Some want to make sure they weren't gonna catch, so they can earn extra money risking sex without a rubber. Some just want to know so they can set aside enough money to get their feminine hygiene products ready. Mother Shapiro is pretty good at figuring out why a lizard wants to know. Folks say she has a second sight that way. Being a big believer in condoms she usually yells back across The Doves to the girl, 'Honey, you're as ripe to seed and as ready to take as a breeding sow!'     The only problem is most girls know that when Mother Shapiro overreacts like that she's just being protective and the coast is probably all in the clear.
     Now Sarah acts like she knows the dates too, and discusses bleeding with Mother. I think about going up to Mother and telling her how many millions of times I've heard Sarah scream how she hates the 'plague.'
     Mother Shapiro would invite me over to their booth to share a caramelized kiwi and walnut tart tatin when she sees me hovering nearby. Mother Shapiro asks me about how my dates are going and Sarah rolls her eyes away from me when I answer. Despite myself I try to interest Sarah in some good gossip from the World News news- paper.
     'Said in the paper today that Elvis was really a her- maphrodite.'
'Read it already,' Sarah says and rolls her eyes again. 'Now, now...' Mother says. 'You two should really try to get along. You're family, aren't you?'
     I realize by the way Sarah's eyes dilate that even Mother doesn't know exactly how we're related. I slide out from the booth and before I walk away, I say with a small smile in a voice loud enough so those with good ears could hear, `She's my mother.'


I hope Mother Shapiro will send for me, invite me to her trailer to snuggle under the goose-down blankets from Hungary with the two of them. Instead no one sees either one of them for weeks.
    The candles in Mother's trailer blaze at night and Mother's broad outline can be seen lumbering past the drawn shades. It is said Sarah was taken with severe shock upon discovering she was my mother, and in public at that. All she could do was lie in bed and moan, while Mother Shapiro tended to her and tried to ply her with food.
    Bolly tells me, `She's got a freezer in there the size of a mare farm trough. I've been filling it for her with specials, in case a famine should hit.'
    From outside their trailer I can smell reheated Appalachian foie gras with apple crisp in vet jus with grilled tender mango, and microwaved cider-cured spit-roasted pork loin with grilled figs and sweet Vidalia onion purée. Paxton is the only one who's set foot in there in two weeks, and that was very briefly. He brought them over a Tupperware of osetra caviar dressing, which Mother had used her second sight to know Bolly had prepared.
    `That place is lit in hundreds of beeswax candles,' Paxton said gravely. `Your mother,' and I distinctly heard a tone of hostility directed at me as he said those words, `Is at death's doorknob.'
    When I enter The Doves I notice an audible dip in the volume, which especially alarms me after reading that stuffed quail eggs braised in fresh huckleberries with English pea ravioli and miso-butter-poached chard is the day's special. Even a loud smash-up in the lot right outside The Doves wouldn't cause any notice to be taken when the menu was what it is today.
    `Accusing someone of being your mother is a very serious thing,' Glad says to me sternly when I run back to the caravans in tears.
    `Are they gonna play Davy Crockett for me?' I ask and put my head on Glad's lap.
    `Oh no.' His hands slide through my curls. `It just gonna take everyone a little time to get over it, that's all.'
    I devote myself to proving I am not the inconsiderate scoundrel everyone thinks I am. I dedicate myself to being the best lot lizard ever, so one day I can walk in to The Doves with the grandest-ever raccoon penis bone and make the place hush in awe and respect.
(Continues...)
(C) 2000 J.T. LeRoy All rights reserved. ISBN: 1-58234-076-5

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Sarah never admits that she’s his mother, but the beautiful boy has watched her survive as a “lot lizard”: a prostitute working the West Virginia truck stops. Desperate to win her love, he decides to surpass her as the best and most famous lot lizard ever. With his own leather mini-skirt and a makeup bag that closes with Velcro, the young “Cherry Vanilla” embarks on a journey through the Appalachian wilds, dining on transcendental cuisine, supplicating to the mystical Jackalope, encountering the most terrifying of pimps, walking on water, being venerated as an innocent girl saint—and then being denounced as the devil.
By turns exhilarating and shocking, magical and realistic, Sarah brings urgency, wit, and imagination to an unknown and unforgettable world.

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