Bookplanet: Is writer JT LeRoy for real -- or a hoax?

1. Who's that boy/girl?
JT LeRoy used to be a child prostitute. Now he is one of America's coolest young writers, the author of several rapturously received books and the darling of hip LA. There's just one problem: no one is quite sure if he is a man - or whether he even exists. Laura Barton meets him ... or does she?

"She slowly rolled her head to me, flopped an arm over the back of my neck, and pulled me closer as if she were pulling in won poker chips. 'Everybody needs someone to know who they really are,' she laughed, and guided my head down to lie next to hers." --- from Sarah, by JT LeRoy

1.30am, Los Angeles. The telephone rings. I flail through the darkness of my hotel room and lift the receiver. "Laura?" It is a woman's voice, South African, a little tipsy. "It's Emily," she says. I frown. I do not know Emily. "Ah," I say finally, the fuzz of sleep subsiding. "You must be calling about JT."

JT LeRoy is one of literature's most elusive and most compelling figures. Depending on who you talk to, he is either an endangered species, the last of the innocents, or a spectacular example of media manipulation, the greatest literary hoax since the Australian "modernist" poet Ern Malley was exposed as a caustic invention in the 1940s - and thus a dazzling satire on modern media gullibility. He is feted as an authentic underground voice by the hippest of the US hip, but very few substantiated truths about him exist. If he is a him. Indeed, all that we have of any real certainty is his books.

LeRoy first surfaced in 1997 in an anthology of memoirs, Close to the Bone. His contribution, Baby Doll, a tale of a boy who dresses in his mother's clothes to seduce her boyfriend, was the thorniest story of the bunch. Written under the name Terminator (the T in JT stands for Terminator; the J is for Jeremy), Baby Doll set out LeRoy's principal preoccupations: the southern states of America, the lot lizards (prostitutes) who prowl its truck stops, abuse, drugs. His stories are populated by lithe and slippery characters who slide effortlessly in and out of truck cabs, genders, names, women's clothes.

Having whetted appetites, LeRoy promptly evaporated until, after a silence of three years, came Sarah, a brief novel of bewitching intensity that told of a 12-year-old lot lizard named Cherry Vanilla, hell-bent on making it to the top of his profession. "An Alice in Wonderland on acid," said the New York Times. "Nothing short of a miracle," declared the New Statesman. The following year LeRoy published The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, a collection of stories (including Baby Doll) written prior to Sarah, and, it was claimed, under the shepherdship of psychologist Dr Terrence Owens of the McAuley Adolescent Unit at St Mary's Medical Center in San Francisco.

The biography that emerged of the author through magazine articles, other authors and on the grapevine was no less seedy and harrowing a tale than those in LeRoy's books. He claimed it was Owens who encouraged him to write, apparently in an attempt to help wean him off heroin, and who introduced him to various literary figures including Tobias Wolff and Sharon Olds. LeRoy was already familiar with Olds's work, on account, he said, of the fact that one of his tricks had liked to read it while they had sex. And this was always one of the selling-points of JT LeRoy; that his stories themselves bear the hallmark of authenticity because the author himself was a genuine lizard, plucked from the streets of San Francisco by an outreach worker named Emily Frasier, cultivated by Owens, and redeemed by literature.

Since his debut, LeRoy has acquired an impeccably hip CV, part self-crafted, part the product of the feeding frenzy that descended almost immediately upon the young author. He is a contributor to magazines such as i-D, Nerve and Rolling Stone, along with the New York Times and McSweeney's. He has guest-edited Da Capo's Best Music Writing 2005 and been photographed in Vanity Fair. His most recent publication, Harold's End - the story of a street hustler, an unconventional client, and a snail - was published by Last Gasp, the cult San Francisco publishing house, with illustrations by Cherry Hood, an introduction by Dave Eggers and book jacket bursts of praise from Zadie Smith, John Waters, Nan Goldin and Lou Reed. The Heart Is Deceitful has already been made into a successful film starring Asia Argento, and Sarah is next in line for adaptation. Meanwhile, LeRoy wrote the original screenplay for Gus van Sant's Elephant and is listed as the film's associate producer. In addition to inspiring a song by Garbage and accruing numerous rockstar admirers, LeRoy now has his own rock band, Thistle. His latest project is writing for the savvy western TV series, Deadwood.

The mystifying element has been that although we know much about the worlds LeRoy has purportedly inhabited and the dark things he has done through his work, we know little about him personally. The authorial blurb in his books contains little information other than the repeated information that "JT LeRoy lives in California and enjoys playing whiffleball". He attends his own readings - and indeed most public occasions - in disguise (a trilby, blonde wig and shades). He rarely performs them, however, instead relying upon a succession of celebrity understudies that have included Tatum O'Neal and Winona Ryder. Bono, Billy Corgan, Conor Oberst, Bryan Adams, Nancy Sinatra and Courtney Love are all reportedly admirers. It is a reasonable assumption that there are now more celebrities devoted to JT LeRoy than there are to Scientology.

In the past few months, however, LeRoy has begun to fall from favour. There began murmurings that he was the Rasputin of Hollywood, an imposter who had charmed high society, that he was a secret celebrity club, that in truth LeRoy was a literary hoax to rival Thomas Chatterton. And for a while the rumours swirled like dust storms: was LeRoy really Dennis Cooper, an author with whom he had allegedly formed a close bond? Or perhaps he was Gus van Sant? Or maybe he was actually a woman? Sharon Olds, or Mary Gaitskill? Or possibly he was many people, "JT LeRoy" serving as an umbrella name for an artistic collective?

Funnily enough, amid all the kerfuffle and the paraphernalia - the disguises, the A-list stars, the is-he-isn't-he debate, the books themselves seemed to sit forgotten. Had people looked a little more intently, they might have noticed an episode in Sarah, where Cherry Vanilla is mistaken for a saint and briefly worshipped before the cold finger of doubt creeps in and the young hustler is excluded from truck-stop society. Indeed, in a key episode, triggered by some excessively invasive probing, the community discover that Cherry Vanilla is neither a saint nor the little girl they imagined him to be.

LeRoy's own probing came this October when an article appeared in New York magazine entitled "Who is the Real JT LeRoy? A search for the true identity of a great literary hustler." The journalist, Stephen Beachy, had followed LeRoy since his first reading in San Francisco in 2000, becoming increasingly intrigued by the author's true identity. It was a fastidious investigation that trawled the hustlers of Polk Street, the public records of West Virginia and the histories of Emily Frasier and her husband, with whom LeRoy now lives - and came up with nothing. Beachy questioned the author's decision to hide behind email and fax, charted his various media outings, celebrity fanbase and fall-out with Dennis Cooper. Ultimately, he posited the theory that LeRoy was the heir apparent of the literary hoax. But if so, who was behind it? The dust seemed to settle on Laura Albert, a Brooklyn-raised, 39-year-old mother and rock singer. Beachy suggested that Albert was not only Emily Frasier, but also LeRoy's close friend from the street, Speedie, and furthermore LeRoy himself.

The media reaction was immediate, gloating in particular at an apparently credulous profile of the writer in the New York Times. The paper responded by asking LeRoy to show editors his passport and social security card before it would run a piece he had written for the paper. LeRoy declined, and the story did not run.

In this silty light, an interview seemed unlikely. However, following extensive email discussion that centred on a shared love of Johnny Cash, the Mississippi recording studios Sweet Tea and, improbably, the promise of Green & Black's chocolate, LeRoy agrees to a meeting in Los Angeles. "Y'all wanna talk bout my work, the film [The Heart is Deceitful] ... kwool," he mailed. "And I will chat bout being a ghost as well. But there will be parameters and that needs to be respected. Like I answer a question once and we move on from there ... the anal probe ain't my thing right now." There is no interview time allotted, no meeting-point decided; just a city, and a name. Nevertheless I head to LA, passing the flight compiling a list of rumoured contenders for the title of The Real JT LeRoy: Laura Albert, Dennis Cooper, Bruce Benderson, Sharon Olds, Mary Karr, Mary Gaitskill, Vicki Fraginals, Dave Eggers, Winona Ryder, Tatum O'Neal, Asia Argento, Mick Rock, Shirley Manson, Madonna, Liv Tyler ...

When Emily calls, in the early hours of the morning, she tells me that she and JT have been eating sushi with Sean Lennon and Harper Simon (son of Paul Simon and Carrie Fisher), and that LeRoy is still with them, partying at Fisher's house. "Carrie's is like an amazing oasis," she says. "It's a sanctuary, with the most amazing creative people in the world. He met these people through Courtney Love ..." She apologises for being tired and frustrated and drunk ("we've been drinking sake") and begins a conversation that will sprawl across two hours and regurgitate identical phrases and arguments I've read in dozens of interviews with LeRoy. I am unsure whether the accent and the drunkenness are real. Why is she calling in the middle of the night? Why, having introduced herself as Emily, does she note at one point that she and I "have the same name"?

She slates one British journalist who interviewed LeRoy earlier this year. "I went up and I touched his crotch," she laughs, her voice coated in a thick layer of disgust, "cos that's what I do with people I'm not sure about." She says they knew the backlash was coming, felt the tremors when they read a sneery account of 826 Valencia, Dave Eggers' writing centre in San Francisco. "I remember seeing JT just weeping like a puppy," she recalls, "and saying, 'Here's people teaching kids to read, and they go at him with a sickle. They're coming for me.' Being honest and having a voice is scary. People want to make you a god and then tear you down."

Throughout the conversation, Frasier toys readily with the idea that the whole thing is one big sham, even joking that they have in fact hired cheap labour in a factory overseas to churn out the fiction: "It's in Malaysia. We had to pay an extra nickel to get them to write about penis bones and transvestites in West Virginia, but I think they did a good job." Meanwhile, her heavy reliance upon the plural reinforces the idea of JT being a collective enterprise. "The whole thing for all of us is hard, cos they want everyone to say 'Yes, it's all a hoax, I'm terribly sorry,'" she drawls. "Our point is it's all useful conversation that's about gender, identity. It's about giving people a voice. It's about the JT community. I've answered emails as JT - we've all answered emails as JT - if it needs to be answered ... Sometimes I'll take a photo and we'll credit someone who's trying to get into the industry. It's like a big family - if you recognise an artist with a purity of intent it's a sin if you don't try to help them." The problem is that although I agree with her, I can't help but feel as if I am staring at some elaborate trompe l'oeil.

"A hoax?" she ploughs forth, incredulous. "A hoax is something you do when you create a Happy Meal in McDonald's, or when you convince someone to send a mail to Microsoft to get free money. You don't write books!" And then she embarks upon an extensive explanation of the plot of the Dr Seuss book Horton Is a Who: "It's an elephant, he realises the world is in the dust and he talks to it. And the animals think he's mad. They tie him up and they get this vat of water. Meanwhile he's saying to this dust, 'You've got to get your voices out!' And their voice breaks through: 'We are here we are here we are here.' And the animals hear it and realise that they almost destroyed the world. It's about 'we are here'. It's about getting your voice out so they can hear it. JT is Horton," she says by way of illumination. "Horton Is a Who. I think we all are." There is a long pause, and for a time I wonder if the line is dead. "There are people," she says eventually, "with extra tastebuds on their tongues, and JT's like that - he hears notes at a pitch that no one else hears. But people who aren't supertasters, they know something's not right, but they can't say what. They don't hear Horton."

Along with furious references to Shakespeare, Harper Lee and Oscar Wilde, celebrity names are dropped with dizzying frequency. "Harper [Simon] wants to write some songs with JT," she says, adding: "They're all in on the hoax," and later wearily mourning the fact that LeRoy gets to eat the sushi and the do the partying while "I just write the books." Is the whole JT phenomenon some sort of celebrity cult? "They never got into JT cos he's a celebrity cult!" she says with screeching disdain. "He isn't a celebrity cult! What is he - a shade of fucking lipstick? He's a writer! And the books are fucking fiction! That's the funniest thing of all. JT says, 'I don't know what's fiction or not.'" Right now, at 3.30am in an unfamiliar city, on the phone to a woman who has two names and a dubious accent, nor do I.

For a couple of hours afterwards I lie in the dark and consider our conversation. I am worried that when we meet Emily will grope my crotch. I fear I am part of the media scum that makes gentle writers cry. But it also puts me in mind of the tailors who made the emperor a special coat out of magic cloth that was invisible to anyone who was unforgivably stupid. What if I meet LeRoy and, instead of Horton, he is naked?

The next morning I sit in my hotel room and await Emily's call. She rings in the early afternoon, and arranges to collect me later, says we'll head up to Carrie Fisher's house and then out for dinner. Shortly before four o'clock, she calls again. They are delayed, she says. "We set out and turned back, the traffic was so bad," she tells me. "There's been some kind of fucking accident in this place where there's killer spiders and . . . Did you find a restaurant? High end, right? Gourmet?" An hour later, Emily is standing in the hotel lobby, elaborately attired in what looks to be Victorian costume: corseted, mop-capped, highly rouged. In both her appearance and demeanour she resembles a character from a children's television drama: theatrical, knowing and highly excitable.

We are heading to the Hollywood hills. In the front, Emily banters with Steve, the driver (also the drummer in Thistle), while in the back I flick through photos of the JT community's trips to Europe and snaps from the set of Deadwood. In all of them, LeRoy is incongruous in his platinum wig, hat and shades. I notice that Emily's South African accent appears to have slipped, though I am not surprised. But it does make me wonder: can you believe any of the things someone tells you in a fake accent? And maybe this in itself is an important point;even if JT's voice is not authentic, could what he says be genuine?

Carrie Fisher's house is a series of low buildings, homely yet eccentrically decorated: in the grounds there are fairground games, gnomes, and signs reading "dildo", while indoors the walls are lined with paintings of dogs, pictures of family members, stuffed deer heads. A plastic model of Princess Leia sits on a shelf. In a side room, at the top of a sheet of paper I spy the words "Episode 3". It occurs to me that perhaps it is Fisher who has been writing the episodes of Deadwood, and maybe she is the real JT. Fisher herself bobs in and out intermittently before leaving to buy a Christmas tree. She is wearing a pink woolly hat in the shape of a pig.

And over there is JT LeRoy, uncurling himself from an armchair by the fire where he has been composing songs with Harper Simon. LeRoy is 5ft 5in and vaguely stocky; barefoot in baggy shorts with orange leggings beneath, and a tattered, shapeless top. This is the first time I have seen him without his wig and shades. His hair is mousy, worn short and wispy in places. Today he is makeup-less, and a faint down lies on his top lip. Nevertheless, the first impression is one of femininity. In our early-morning conversation, Emily had told me "JT is trans-gender - it changes with the fluidity of wet ice-cream," and indeed, in his presence his gender seems so changeable as to be iridescent. "Pleased to meet you," he says, and his voice is light and airy, like egg-white.

Simon and LeRoy play guitar a while, and there is a brief dissection of the night before, of sushi and sake and Sean Lennon's pursuit of a young lady, and of how LeRoy fell asleep on Fisher's bed - "curled up like a little kitty cat", as Fisher puts it - and then we head back to town to a macrobiotic restaurant. Simon and a female friend hold court over dinner, gigglingly offering theories as to who the Real JT could be. The table has the awkward air of some Agatha Christie whodunnit. Right now I'm wagering on Carrie Fisher, in the conservatory, with the candelabra. LeRoy eats orange roughy and largely remains silent. Emily bats back any questions with a resolute, "I can't talk while I'm eating. We'll talk later." As we leave, LeRoy stays back to hand me a small rubber duck, emblazoned with the words "Cutie Pie".

The parking lot is dark, save for the light from the grocery store window. Emily and Steve are inside, buying soya milk and oranges. We sit in the back of the car together, LeRoy and I, like awkward teenagers about to make out. He places a blanket over my knees in case I am cold. I turn on my tape recorder, and we listen to it whirr.

The fallout from the New York magazine article has been "a pain in the ass", he says, sounding more southern than he has all evening, but still sweet and light and dusty, like talcum powder. "In a way I think this is what I kept trying to plant for a long time. That I really didn't want the attention to be on me. And I was always trying to say that it was Dennis [Cooper] and Gus [van Sant] and Speedie ..." and he nods towards the front seat as he says it.

"I think," he continues slowly, as if cautiously placing one foot at a time, "identity is one of the last frontiers to be played with. It should be played with. I mean, in our society it's very kind of ... especially nowadays with reality TV, where everybody will go to great pains to show all their darkest secrets and to have that attention, and so it doesn't make sense right now to keep something to yourself, or to have something be discreet - specially about identity. And like your looks ... we had other people saying: 'Laura! Why are you hiding? You're not ugly!' like it really does come down to your looks. And I think that's what it's playing with, and so that's why it's all so disconcerting and unnerving to people because it's not exactly like an accepted thing."

What strikes me most is the inarticulacy of LeRoy's speech. The delivery is stilted, the distinctive LeRoy vocabulary neutered. And while there is no reason for authors to be verbally articulate, I cannot find the pulse here, nor an intensity that in any way relates to the work of JT LeRoy. He seems distant, not only from our conversation, but from the work and his own argument. Much of what he says is identical to the phrases used by Albert in our telephone conversation, and it is hard to decipher whether this is LeRoy speaking Albert's words, or whether Albert was simply recycling LeRoy's.

Whoever this is, sitting so sweetly beside me in the back of the car, I'm not wholly convinced it is the person who wrote the books. I would say two things with some certainty: I think it's a woman, and I think she's a real cutie pie. But whoever she is, our conversation seems cursory, a mahogany finish sprayed onto the solid wood beneath. It dawns on me that the real interview was my early-morning exchange with Emily.

But still we continue. I ask how old he is now. "Twenty-three, er ... 24," he stumbles. In fact, LeRoy, by his own biography, is 25 - he was born on Halloween 1980, which pretty much makes him a ghost. Or at least a very elaborate trick or treat. He tells me about the new book, which has a working title of Labor. "It's set in the desert and it is still the Jeremy character and he's with his mom still ... Still playing a lot with um ... myth and superstition and that kind of ... the magic that's in rural places, that there's more space for magic."

We alight on the subject of the celebrity cult. Strangely, this is where LeRoy becomes quietly convincing. "I think people think I'm trying to whore around," he says gently. "It's not really about that at all. I mean I'm always interested in meeting anybody, because I'm so stuck on my hamster wheel a lot of the time." He likes to meet anyone, he says, celebrities or not. "I mean, I put my email in the back of the books because I ask for people to contact me, because it means so much when I can contact them. And it's really like I talk to all kinds of people ... But people like to talk about the famous ones, because they're famous."

Last question, I say, as Emily and Steve climb back into the car. What exactly is whiffleball? "Whiffleball?" says LeRoy slowly. "It's a great game! You know what they look like?" I shake my head. "They're white plastic balls and they're perforated. But to be honest ... I'm not ... I think it's played with like ... with a tennis racquet ... How do you play whiffleball?" he throws the question over the front seat. "Whiffleball's with a plastic thin baseball bat that's empty, with a white plastic ball with holes in it," Steve chips in jovially. "It's like baseball but slow, and painless. You're thinking badminton, with the racquet." LeRoy smiles. "Oh yeah, badminton, that's with the little birdie." He smiles across the back seat at me. "I just like 'em, I like the way it feels," he says, and mimes throwing a small white perforated ball up into the air.

4.30am. The telephone rings. I flail through the darkness and lift the receiver. "Hey," whispers a southern-licked voice, "it's JT." There is not a single bone in my body that does not think this is Laura Albert. "I'm sorry to call," he says. "I know you're on fucked-up time." I'm half asleep, jetlagged. Outside my room, the corridor creaks. That's OK, I say. Are you OK? "She got me paranoid," the voice comes frailly across the line. "Not paranoid, but ... you ran off so fast." There is no need to be paranoid, I say, and ask if they had a good evening. "We ate left-overs, watched Eddie Izzard ... That's what we do." He sounds suddenly rum. "Good dinner, though!" Yes, I reply. There is a long silence before the voice returns, breathy and faint: "I'm sorry I didn't bring you a whiffle ball."

When I get back to London there is an email waiting: "You are very cute. You made us all worried we was too over the top when you hopped out the car like we all released our gas from that dinner. I am sorry we joked so much, and I shouldn't've played round with the whiffleball thing. Fuck, am I spelling it right? It just is in every book I wrote, and Nancy sells ones I signed and it is a playful thing and its kinda great if I respond that I don't know what the fuck it is, we just went through this funny thing where a guy asked for a Laura Albert signed ball from Nancy and uh, he got one and he insists it is Nancy signed it ... I can send you the whole exchange, it is very funny, well if you have that sense of humor, that uh ya kinda saw ... when I spent so much time sitting in London with reporters talking about the whiffleballs and, it is interesting what a country might seize on. It's like when I started telling folks I was from North Virginia and only one mag got it. I don't think it was silly of you to ask, it was me battin' a ball - a whiffle one - back ... like a kitten."

I do not know whether LeRoy really was batting a whiffleball back, or whether the JT community was attempting to cover over a slip-up. I am confused by their sudden desire to be candid, and baffled by the late-night telephone calls and the accents and the giggling celebrity entourage. I am perplexed by the fact that when I left them, Emily handed me a packet of organic chocolate chip cookie mix. I could not tell you if I liked them or they liked me. The facts remain as clouded and uncertain as when I left London. But in some curious way, I am rather pleased to be left clinging to a solitary yet buoyant fact: somebody has written those books, and really, I don't much think it matters who. As Emily, or Laura, or JT, or whoever it was, argued in our telephone conversation, "People didn't freak out cos Mark Twain's real name wasn't Mark Twain! Celebrity magazines didn't want to know about Charles Dickens!" Warhol, she added, also sent people out dressed as him. "At the time people thought he was a monster. Now everyone's, 'Fucking Warhol! He's fucking great!' "

It is all a matter of authenticity. Is it because if JT LeRoy is not a drug-addled hobo hooker made good, we feel embarrassed because we've been conned, as if we paid full price for a Louis Vuitton purse only to find it was a fake? But nothing has been taken from us. The books remain: as startling and disturbingly beautiful as they ever were. There is nothing that has sullied the New York Times's assertion that "his language is always fresh, his soul never corrupt". And what strikes me more than anything is that in this age of overblown celebrity, where people such as Paris Hilton can be famous purely for being Paris Hilton, mightn't JT LeRoy represent the precise inversion of this? The work is all. The identity is irrelevant.

The words that surface most frequently in my head are those of the writer Peter Murphy, who contacted LeRoy after the New York Magazine piece to show his support: "It all boils down to this," he wrote: "I can't prove the existence of god, but I sure do love the Bible".


2. The Unmasking of JT Leroy: In Public, He's a She -- by WARREN ST. JOHN

It has been one of the most bizarre literary mysteries in recent memory: Who, exactly, is the novelist JT Leroy? An answer, at long last, is taking shape.

Mr. Leroy's tale was harrowing in its details and uplifting in its arc. He was a young truck-stop prostitute who had escaped rural West Virginia for the dismal life of a homeless San Francisco drug addict. Rescued as a young teenager by a couple named Laura Albert and Geoffrey Knoop and treated by a psychologist, he was able to turn his terrible youth into a thriving career as a writer. JT Leroy has published three critically acclaimed works of fiction noted for their stark portrayal of child prostitution and drug use.

Along the way Mr. Leroy gained the friendship and trust of celebrities and noted writers, who supported his career financially and offered him emotional support when he declared that he was infected with H.I.V. Sales were good, and his books were published around the world. Shy and reclusive, Mr. Leroy, now 25, appeared in public often disguised beneath a wig and sunglasses.

But the young man in the wig and sunglasses, it turns out, is not a man at all. The public role of JT Leroy is played by Savannah Knoop, Geoffrey Knoop's half sister, who is in her mid-20's.

A photograph of Ms. Knoop at a 2003 opening for a clothing store in San Francisco was discovered online. Five intimates of Mr. Leroy's, including his literary agent, his business manager and the producer of a forthcoming movie based on one of his books, were shown the photograph and identified Ms. Knoop as the person they have known as JT Leroy.

"That's JT Leroy," said Ira Silverberg, Mr. Leroy's literary agent, upon seeing the photograph. Mr. Silverberg said he had met Mr. Leroy a number of times in person. Lilly Bright, a producer of "The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things," a 2004 film based on Mr. Leroy's 2001 collection of stories, was no less certain. "It's JT Leroy," she said, adding that she had worked with Mr. Leroy extensively on the production.

Nyoka Lowery, a Bay Area hat designer who appears in the photograph alongside the person in question, also said she knew that person well.

"That's Savannah," Ms. Lowery said. She said she had known Ms. Knoop for years. Ms. Lowery identified Ms. Knoop in another photograph online, on the events page of a site for a San Francisco clothing company called Nisa (www.nisasf.com). Umay Mohammed, an owner of Nisa, said in a telephone interview that Savannah Knoop was a friend, and a model on her company's Web site.

Reached by telephone, Ms. Knoop said, "I don't need this in my life right now," before hanging up. She did not respond to several voice mail messages seeking further comment.

But the discovery of the public face of JT Leroy is only part of the mystery. Still unsettled is the question of who writes under that name.

Writers like Dennis Cooper, Mary Gaitskill and Mary Karr were among those who offered support to Mr. Leroy's literary career, as did several prominent editors at Manhattan publishing houses, and numerous film and pop music celebrities offered him emotional support, including Courtney Love, Tatum O'Neal, Billy Corgan, Shirley Manson and Carrie Fisher.

And of course there were journalists (including, in November 2004, this reporter), who wrote credulous profiles of the successful young writer after interviewing him, often in person. The New York Times even published an article last September under the byline JT Leroy in a Sunday magazine supplement, T: Travel. (A subsequent T: Travel article by Mr. Leroy, about the HBO series "Deadwood," was reassigned by editors when questions about his identity began to surface.)

The unmasking of Ms. Knoop adds to a mounting circumstantial case that Laura Albert is the person who writes as JT Leroy. Pressure to admit the ruse has been building on Ms. Albert since October, when New York magazine published an article that advanced a theory that she was the author of JT Leroy's books.

The New York article, written by Stephen Beachy, portrayed Ms. Albert, 40, and Mr. Knoop, 39, as unfulfilled rock musicians who concocted the character of JT Leroy to gain access first to literary circles and, later, to celebrities. The scheme began, Mr. Beachy wrote, with faxes, e-mail messages and phone calls by Ms. Albert, speaking in a West Virginia accent as JT Leroy. The article also described an acquaintance of Ms. Albert's who said she had asked him to type and fax manuscripts that bore striking thematic similarities to work later published by JT Leroy. When that name became famous, Mr. Beachy theorized, an actor was needed to play JT Leroy in person; he did not know, he wrote, who that actor was.

Mr. Beachy discovered that the advance for Mr. Leroy's first novel, "Sarah," published in 2000, was paid to Laura Albert's sister, JoAnna Albert, and that further payments to JT Leroy were made to a Nevada corporation, Underdogs Inc.

The president of that company, according to public records, is Carolyn F. Albert, Ms. Albert's mother, who lives in Brooklyn Heights. Reached by telephone, she declined to comment. The payment for Mr. Leroy's article in The Times was also made to Underdogs.

After the publication of Mr. Beachy's article, The Times began to examine the circumstances of the T: Travel article written by Mr. Leroy, about a trip to Disneyland Paris. A review of the paperwork accompanying the assignment revealed a discrepancy: the article described four people on the journey. Expense receipts submitted to T: Travel by Mr. Leroy, however, included only an Air France itinerary for three people.

Employees at Disneyland Paris and at two Paris hotels identified Ms. Albert from photographs as the person who presented herself as JT Leroy. Those employees said no one remotely resembling photographs of JT Leroy was traveling with Ms. Albert, who told them her companions were her husband and son. Ms. Albert and Mr. Knoop are the parents of a young son.

When hotel employees told Ms. Albert they were under the impression that JT Leroy was a man, they said, she told them that she had had a sex-change operation three years before and was now a woman.

Ms. Albert did not respond to numerous voice mail messages requesting comment. Reached by telephone, Mr. Knoop declined to comment.

Peter Cane, a Manhattan lawyer, responded to phone and e-mail messages left at the number and e-mail address JT Leroy provided his editors at The Times.

When The Times asked Mr. Cane to provide his client's passport to confirm his identity and that he had traveled to Europe, Mr. Cane declined. Later, however, he gave this reporter an e-mail statement from JT Leroy in response to questions about Savannah Knoop: "As a transgendered human, subject to attacks," the statement read, "I use stand-ins to protect my identity." In the past, JT Leroy has invoked transgenderism to explain confusion over his identity.

It is unclear what effect the unmasking of Ms. Knoop will have on JT Leroy's readers, who are now faced with the question of whether they have been responding to the books published under that name, or to the story behind them. The identification of Ms. Knoop may also have repercussions for the publishing world; JT Leroy is under contract with Viking for a new novel, and Mr. Silverberg, his agent, said his books were on sale in as many as 20 different countries. Carolyn Coleburn, the director of publicity at Viking, said simply, "We stand by our authors."

But perhaps those most affected by the revelation that Ms. Knoop has been playing the public role of JT Leroy are those who went out of their way to help someone they thought was a troubled young man.

"To present yourself as a person who is dying of AIDS in a culture which has lost so many writers and voices of great meaning, to take advantage of that sympathy and empathy, is the most unfortunate part of all of this," Mr. Silverberg said. "A lot of people believed they were supporting not only a good and innovative and adventurous voice, but that we were supporting a person."