For years she posed as an acclaimed author and rubbed shoulders with a host of A-list celebrities. Now, three years on from being outed as a fake, Savannah Knoop is finally ready to tell her side of one seriously twisted story.

Her claim to fame is wilder, more shocking and infinitely more brazen than even the brashest of Hollywood types could conjure up. For six long years the world knew Savannah Knoop not by her real name - or even her real gender - but as the face of an elaborate and bizarre literary charade that fooled psychologists, agents, journalists and a host of big-name stars. The hoax was cooked up by her sister-in-law Laura Albert, when Knoop was just 18 as a means of getting Albert's fictional writing published.
Winona Ryder, Madonna, Carrie Fisher, Courtney Love, Marianne Faithfull and Shirley Manson from the band Garbage were among the celebrity fans and sympathisers of author JT LeRoy whose novels Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things turned heads with their shocking tales of rape, child prostitution, drug addiction, mutilation and gender-bending surgery. Manson even penned a song for they fey, feminine JT 'Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!)' while actress turned filmmaker Asia Argento made The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things into a movie - and had a sizzling sexual relationship with Knoop, believing LeRoy to be a male-to-female transsexual.
JT LeRoy first rose to fame in the late 1990s when 'he' claimed his publisheed stories of a young boy, 'Jeremiah Terminator', were based on his own childhood experiences in the American south. These included rape, beatings and being dressed as a girl by his truck-stop prostitute mother who offered him up to her clients. His teenage years were spent hustling, taking drugs and living on the streets.

LeRoy wrote articles (penned by Albert) in i.D, The New York Times, Spin, Vogue and Interview. He made personal appearances to read from his books, accompanied all the time by his English 'handler', Speedie, who was in fact Albert putting on a cockney accent. Albert would also do telephone interviews as LeRoy.
Despite the obvious discrepancies between Albert's and Knoop's voices, occasional slip-ups by the pair about events in LeRoy's life and the fact that Knoop was a girl in a wig pretending to be a boy who wanted to be a girl, everyone was taken in.

When the truth finally came out in 2006, with the works exposed as pur fiction by a 41-year-old woman from a privileged background (Albert), who worked as a phone sex operator, the literary world was stunned. Many were dumbstruck, some angry, while others admitted to being begrudgingly impressed by the mammoth deceit. In the aftermath the by-now 25-year-old Knoop - who had bound her breasts, donned a wig and sunglasses and appeared in public as JT Leroy for seven years - went underground.
Two years have passed since the revelation and now, with some genuine material to plug - a book and a fashion label - Knoop is once again ready to talk. As Knoop, that is.
"I'm always noticing that when people tell me they are something or are doing something, I rarely question that and I think that has a lot to do with it," she says. It's like the Emperor's new clothes, it's a lot harder to stop everything and go, 'This is not right', rather than just go along with it and see what happens."
Knoop has written a memoir, Girl Boy Girl, about her experiences as LeRoy, a story she now seems happy to share.
So what made her become JT LeRoy and continue the con for so long? "One huge part was I was addicted to having a secret," Knoop, now 27, confesses. "I was addicted to having this double life. I had things compartmentalised. JT's life was a little more glamorous than my life but there were specific places I could pour certain energy and interest into. I had a role. It was really satisfying and clean but one would sometimes bleed into the other and get so complicated. Also just travelling and meeting people and having the opportunity to interact with the world was great."

The gender-bending aspect also appealed, she admits. "Playing JT had a huge impact on my gender identity and it think in the beginning that was one of the most intriguing aspects of it," she says. "I was just beginning my own journey of [gender identity] and playing him allowed me to explore my desire to embrace a more masculine side of myself and to bounce it back to how he desired to explore his more feminine side. I'm interested in contradictions, always, so that was something really fascinating about playing him."
Nowadays Knoop identifies as 'genderqueer', something she describes as "weird and complicated and kind of fluid" although she's given up caring which pronouns people use when referring to her. "That was the interesting part of JT - that he was so fluid with his pronouns, like I can be a boy some days and a girl other days."
Critics have lambasted Albert, claiming she manipulated Knoop who was much younger than her into keeping up the LeRoy charade. While Knoop admits that she felt some pressure from Albert, she also acknowledges that the two were bound together by each having an eating disorder. "It was so huge to have someone to talk to about it," she says. "I didn't even know that Overeaters Anonymous existed. I felt really grateful to have someone to talk to through the years Laura and I hung out. It's an interesting aspect of the story in terms of gender too because on one level I don't have a conventionally attractive body as woman and I couldn't come to terms with that at the beginning, so part of it was, if I was a boy I could be feeling ok about my body - that I wasn't a woman per se, I was a being."

When it was finally revealed in the The New York Times between October 2005 and January 2006 that JT LeRoy was a literary hoax, there were, understandably, some hostile reactions from his fans, ranging from embarrassment to outright anger. Albert - who has been branded mentally ill in some quarters - copped most of the flack, as Knoop went into hiding. "It was very different for me as I didn't have contact with any of the people I had met as JT," she explains. "But Laura, she heard back from everyone she'd been in contact with all those years. I would have avoided all the contact anyway. I felt kind of lost because it had become such a big part of my life and in a way it was like having a new identity crisis. It was also a relief - that was the most overwhelming emotion - but it was conflicting because what was I without it?" Argento surely must have felt a fool since the unmasking of LeRoy came just a few weeks before the US opening of her film based on his novel but if she did, she kept it to herself, inviting Albert to accompany her to the premiere instead of her lover, Knoop. "I didn't even talk to her when the film came out," Knoop says. "I have a feeling she's not happy about [the whole thing], otherwise I feel she would have contacted me."

Today, Knoop is still doing public readings, only this time from her memoir and as herself. She also heads up her own fashion company in San Francisco, Tinc, using cruelty-free eco-fabrics such as peace silk (the silkworms aren't boiled alive like they are in conventional silk) and organic cotton jersey.
She acknowledges that playing LeRoy has had a "profound effect" on her designs and passion for fashion. "It was a whole language of identity for JT, so I got really into the dressing up and what it signified for his character," she explains. "It was the beginning of me embracing fashion. It's like a second skin and you can convey whatever you want to at the moment. It's completely implicit too - you can read between the lines of fashion and come to all these conclusions about the way someone is dressed. JT became really involved in fashion. Designers would send him clothes towards the end … It would be like I put something on and felt completely different. I began to realise how powerful [fashion] could be."

Girl Boy Girl is published by Seven Stories Press. For more information on Tinc, visit www.tincwear.com

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