Letters to the Editor
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Sleeping in the nothing
Before the JT Leroy hoax was first exposed a few months ago, I had never heard of "him." I didn't understand what the fuss was about then and I don't understand it now.
This is not a front-page, above-the-headline story. This isn't even a page six, throw-that-item-in-the-processor story. To be quite honest, Salon isn't even printing a story at all. I feel like I've just been digging through Ayelet Waldman's garbage and found her diary from high school.
How did this person fool anybody? The person in this picture is so obviously a woman approaching middle-age that it would take a clinical disconnect from reality coupled with a desperate willingness to believe in the "oooh, neat" exoticness of the Leroy persona to buy the goods that were being sold. Perhaps that is the true story behind the Leroy hoax, how these people were able to reveal the gullible, facade-hungry nature of a number of social circles, from celebrities to those who deem themselves literary elite by playing into their handy little prejudices of gays, the transgendered, and the "others" in the "South."
But then we have Ayelet Waldman, moaning about how she was sucked in to the Leroy hoax so easily. I can only imagine that she saw in Leroy her own narcissistic, self-indulgent persona reflected back at her like a kindred spirit. This is perhaps the genius of the Leroy hoax, attaching "him"self like a lamprey to similarly self-absorbed celebrities into a mutual admiration society of false constructs and shiny, happy people.
This is not the first time I have complained about Waldman's shamlessly egotistic coulmns. My Salon membership is coming up for renewal in about a month, and Waldman's continued sullying of what was once a fine alternative news source is seriously making me reconsider. I don't charge people to read my own weblog, and I refuse to pay money to read someone else's. And no, I'm not railing against Waldman because I want to sleep with Michael Chabon, since I've never read his writing, I have no idea what he looks like, and if I had to pick an author to sleep with, it would be Clive Barker, anyway. No, Waldman's shameless self-indulgence, and that fact that Salon feels her clueless, patronizing columns are more important than things like the Alito hearings and the war in Iraq, are causing me to double check my credit card statement to make sure it doesn't say "Yearly subscription, Us Weekly."