Evidently JT Leroy, child prostitute and AIDS victim, never really existed. John Scalzi thinks this is no more than convoluted ghost-writing. Susie Bright feels much, much differently about the situation:

For readers, famous author JT Leroy’s hoax — that “he” is really a “she,” that a middle-class 40-year-old woman has been impersonating the life of a lumpen gutter-whore child — must make for great reading. Memoir, shmemoir, right?

But if you’re an author, an editor, a publisher — or worse, a friend — to someone who bullshit you up one side and down the other, it’s not cute. It’s not irrelevant. It’s a cruel con, straight up, and the whole writers’ community suffered for it.

She goes on to describe her relationship with JT — apparently Bright got (and published) JT’s first work — and clearly she and a lot of other people were taken in. I feel really bad for her: I know how hard some online journalers on the ‘net took it to find out other journalers were frauds, and there was no money, time, personal contacts, and business to fuck up there.

Of course, there were the online journals set up to detail leukemia victims, or what have to you, in order to get money. And a lot of people were hurt by that too.

The most hysterical detail Bright relates is the last plea she got from JT:

Then, in October, JT wrote and asked me to help fundraise for his son’s private French immersion school, Lycee Francais La Perouse, the most prestigious and expensive grade school in San Francisco.

THUD.

I had just come from a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser before I opened my mail. JT’s plea to support his dream of higher education seemed… just plain high.

In the years since I first knew him, JT had made film and book deals galore, with celebrities fawning at every gesture. I felt like writing him and asking if he’d like to donate to my gas bill, which is suffering more of a hit than Lycee Francais’s current endowment fund.

But I didn’t write back. I didn’t want to say I felt ignored and used, because I felt silly that I had ever thought it was anything more than that.

Lycee Francais La Perouse? Hahahahaha. The lil’ street hustler sure had moved up in the world.

§

I seem to remember reading a long time ago that James Frey was a big fraud — in fact, I was surprised to see on Amazon he’d been chosen by Oprah. Perhaps the difference now is that The Smoking Gun has the proof?