Press Play with Madeleine Brand
The rise and fall of JT LeRoy
Jeremiah "Terminator" LeRoy had a tragic young life. He was a truck-stop prostitute in West Virginia and a homeless drug-addict in San Francisco. He turned that heartbreak into a memoir in 1989 and became the “it-boy” of the literary world - embraced by writers like Dennis Cooper and Mary Carr and celebrities like Billy Corgan and Courtney Love.
By Madeleine Brand • • 1 min readJeremiah "Terminator" LeRoy had a tragic young life. He was a truck-stop prostitute in West Virginia and a homeless drug-addict in San Francisco. He turned that heartbreak into a memoir in 1989 and became the “it-boy” of the literary world - embraced by writers like Dennis Cooper and Mary Carr and celebrities like Billy Corgan and Courtney Love. And then, it all blew up. The New York Times revealed that he was actually a she. And JT Leroy’s hard-scrabble story was a fiction written by a woman named Laura Albert. Now, there’s a new documentary about what happened. And this time, Laura Albert - aka JT Leroy - is telling her own story.
