“’Most anything you want in this world is easier when you’re a pretty girl.”: J.T. Leroy and exploitative transformations Marija Peričić Back in 2000, a hot, new, edgy writer burst onto the scene with a debut novel, Sarah: a camp, magic-realist story of a trans Appalachian teenage sex worker, Cherry-Vanilla, and her life working at truck-stops in the American South. The novel was met with huge acclaim. The 2000 Bloomsbury edition comes with endorsements from a roll-call of celebrity authors: Chuck Palahnuik, Mary Gaitskill, Dennis Cooper, Tom Spanbauer, as well as, oddly, the singer Suzanne Vega – an impressive list for a first-time novelist. The novel was by J.T. LeRoy, and J.T.’s life story – the J.T. stands for Jeremiah Terminator (Beachey 2005) – was almost as melodramatic and tragic as the plot of Sarah. J.T. was born in 1980 in West Virginia. He 1 survived a horrifically traumatic childhood of abuse, which included being sexually trafficked at truck-stops by his mother, a sex worker. At some point J.T. managed to escape to San Francisco, where he lived on the streets, making money from sex-work. He developed a heroin addiction and contracted HIV. When he was thirteen, he met a social worker, and went into therapy under a Dr Terence Owens. Owens encouraged him to write for therapeutic purposes, and by the time J.T. was sixteen, his short stories were appearing in popular magazines and journals (Beachey 2005; St John 2006). After the publication of Sarah, J.T. shot to fame, but he was uncomfortable in the spotlight. He was shy – pathologically so, according to his manager. His trans identity, as well as his HIV-related facial lesions, made him feel vulnerable. Because of this, he was reluctant to make public appearances, and instead preferred to conduct lengthy phone and email exchanges. When he absolutely had to make a public appearance, it was always in a wig, a large hat, and sunglasses, and always accompanied by his manager, a British woman named 1 J.T., although in the process of transitioning from a male to a female gender identity, referred to themselves using the pronoun “he”, for which reason I will also use “he” to refer to J.T. in this paper.