Hoaxes

Back in 1993, I read a Newsweek article about Anthony Godby Johnson, a 14-year-old teenager with AIDS who had somehow survived a torrent of childhood physical and sexual abuse as well as a litany of physical illnesses (lung infections, leg amputation, the removal of a testicle), but still managed to write a heart-wrenching memoir, published in 1993 as A Rock and a Hard Place. The Newsweek article pointed out that none of Johnson's editors or many friends, including author Paul Monette, had ever met the boy in person. All communications took place via letter, fax or phone, because the boy's adoptive "mother" was incredibly protective of his safety. The conclusion left by the article was that the "mother" was actually the boy, disguising her voice on the phone.

At the time, I was taking a linguistic anthropology summer class at the University of Florida. The professor was an old school feminist. For our first project, I decided that I'd tackle the story of Johnson, because I was intrigued, and we were supposed to look at an issue involving gender. I thought this story had intriguing angles involving gender, age, sexual orientation, and disability. I turned in my proposal on a Friday. On Monday, the professor announced to the class that "some people" were proposing projects that were inherently sexist, because they involved children or the handicapped. Doing a project like that, she said, was tantamount to saying that all women are children, or all women are handicapped. It was demeaning, and not an appropriate topic for class.

The professor never said a word to me, and for all I know she didn't know who I was. But I burned with an anger that I'd never felt before. Maybe I didn't express myself very clearly in my proposal -- I was a junior in college, it's not like I was the brightest thing ever. But at the very least she could have talked to me about it before making a blanket example out of me for the rest of the class. I dropped the class that week, which meant I had to make it up with a different professor a year later. But it was all for the best, in the end.

At any rate, I was very much reminded of the Anthony Godby Johnson a few year's back, when the Kaycee Nicole blog scandal was exposed. (Short version -- a teen blogger dying of leukemia was exposed as actually being a fake person created by the blogger's "mom".)

Then, in 2000, Armistead Maupin published The Night Listener, his fictional retelling of the Johnson story. Maupin was a friend of Johnson's who slowly began to distrust as he realized that Johnson's "mother" Vicki had a voice that was nearly identical to Johnson's.

I was reminded of all this by two long interesting articles that I read today. The first is Who Is The Real JT LeRoy?, a deep look inside another potential literary hoax, this one longer lasting (LeRoy has published several books to much critical acclaim). Author Stephen Beachy makes a compelling argument for the identity of the "real" LeRoy. Read it for yourself.

Beachy brings up the many similarities to the Johnson case, including a mention of Tad Friend's lengthy New Yorker profile on the topic. This is a job for Blogging The Complete New Yorker! I fired up the search engine, which lead me right to "Virtual Love", from the November 26, 2001, issue.

Both "Who Is The Real JT LeRoy" and "Virtual Love" are strong literary detective stories, but neither answer the fundamental question: why do these women create suffering children? Is it an oddly safe form of Munchausen's by Proxy? Unless one of the perpetrators fesses up, we may never know.