American performance artist and impersonator Savannah Knoop was (possibly) BOTD in 1981. Born in San Francisco to artist parents, they were educated at a boarding school in Connecticut, and attended the City College of San Francisco. In 2000, Knoop was approached by their brother Geoffrey’s partner Laura Albert to portray JT Leroy, a fictional alter-ego created by Albert and the purported author of her novels Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things. Knoop bound her breasts and donned a blonde wig and sunglasses to play LeRoy, a former pre-teen hustler and post-operative trans woman whose childhood trauma supposedly inspired the plot of Sarah. Knoop-as-LeRoy quickly became the darling of the indie film scene, attracting celebrity friends including Asia Argento, Courtney Love, Liv Tyler, Billy Corgan, Marilyn Manson, Dennis Cooper, Winona Ryder and Gus Van Sant. In 2004, Argento directed and starred in a film of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, during which she had an affair with Knoop-as-LeRoy. The hoax was uncovered in a 2005 New York magazine article and later in a New York Times report, corroborated by Albert’s boyfriend. The resulting scandal triggered debates about authenticity versus performance and the voyeuristic appeal of abuse narratives, with some enjoyable mocking of the celebrities fooled by the charade. Knoop largely withdrew from public life, while Albert was successfully sued for fraud by film producers who had purchased an option to make a film of Sarah. In 2008, Knoop published a memoir Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy, noting that Albert was the sole financial beneficiary of the hoax, and attempted to rationalise her JT LRoy persona as performance art. The memoir formed the basis of the 2018 biopic LeRoy, starring Kristen Stewart as Knoop and Laura Dern as Albert. Knoop now identifies as gender-non binary, and lives in New York, where they work as a visual and performance artist.