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The JT LeRoy scandal is a story of our times. In January 2006, the New York Times unmasked Savannah Knoop as the face of the mysterious author JT LeRoy. A media frenzy ensued as JT’s fans, mentors, and readers came to terms with the fact that the gay-male-ex-truck-stop-prostitute-turned literary-wunderkind was really an invention of Knoop, who played the character of LeRoy, and Knoop's sister-in-law Laura Albert, who wrote the books.

Now Knoop's memoir of the experience, Girl Boy Girl, has been turned into a movie, JT LeRoy, starring Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern. To link up with the film, we're publishing a new edition of the book, with a brand new preface by Knoop, exclusively online here at the Seven Stories Blog. Click through to see!

If the Cultural Purity Police (CPP) had their way, they would brand British curry as theft, but every cuisine consists of an infinite number of borrowings and travels, sometimes stretching back millennia. . . . The idea of cultural purity now determines what representations we might safely consume without guilt. . . . [T]he loss is ours, doomed as we are to sterile images that question and probe nothing, offering only vast oceans of purity . . . .