This modern worship of the writer as a person is an illusion and has killed many major talents.
Because in the end whoever the hell you are
does not matter.
What you wrote and left behind does.
If you are a writer, you are actually nobody.
All the blather about WHOM here is just noise and filler and irrelevant in the hushed halls of the great literary ghosts.
Will JT Leroy live as more than an amusing footnote in the fin-de-siecle "transgressive tradition"? If JT is in truth an unglamourous 40-something dame with a larcenous streak, most likely only posterity will lay the laurels.
Unless some brave editor with a larcenous streak reprints ha'.
And to those literary bigwigs so famous at present, and their little-wigged entourages, who touted JT so avidly ... Yes you kissed a fantasy. You were just like those truckers in "SARAH" who stood in line to gaze with awe at the perfect little chicken laid out on the pimp's bed. You paid your money and gawked, so stop your whining and swallow your chagrin without coughing further.
Back to your respective drawing boards! Enough dirtying up time's smudgy blackboard... look out you're about to yourself go poof as so much chalk dust.