As a friend, tell me: what's in a name?

[NOTE: As with my previous post, the song accompanying this has nothing to do with it beyond a thematically suitable lyrical snippet. But it ??is??, luckily, overwrought, silly and fun.]A year or two ago, there was a sort of mid-level scandal in the publishing world when, at around the same time, it was revealed that James Frey, the author of ??A Million Little Pieces??, had palmed off as a factual memoir what was, in reality, an almost total fabrication, and that J.T. LeRoy, the author of ??Sarah?? and ??The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things??, was not, in fact, the bizarre, very young, camera-shy homosexual man that was presented to the public, but instead a woman in her thirties named Laura Albert.I'd read ??A Million Little Pieces?? a year or so before it was exposed as fiction - no; "fiction" does it an undeserved credit - before it was exposed as a load of horsefeathers, and for my own part, recognized it before I was halfway through as the tissue of feeble, self-glorifying lies it could not have been other than. I'd also read ??Sarah?? several years earlier, and although I certainly considered Mr. LeRoy a very odd character, I never saw any meaningful reason to doubt his existence, or even give it any thought. It wasn't an issue. ??Sarah?? remains one of the four or five greatest American novels of the past ten years, and whether it was written by J.T. LeRoy, Laura Albert, or a monkey hitting random keys on a typewriter, it's a flat-out masterpiece.George Eliot wasn't really a man. The Ramones weren't really brothers. Dr. Seuss did not, in reality, hold a valid medical license. You may even be shocked to learn that my name isn't actually zarpex. But for some reason, J.T. LeRoy is called a hoax. Authorial identity is one of the crutches available to the aesthetically crippled. Few people, it pains me to say, possess the faculties even to understand what they like or dislike. The majority would wince at a glass of wine poured from a bottle labeled "Gallo" and rhapsodize over the same wine poured from a bottle labeled "Chateau Lafite." If Toni Morrison were to be revealed in tomorrow's newspapers as a wealthy Caucasian, her writing would suddenly be recognized as the facile twaddle it has always been, and its newly identified creator would be hanged from the nearest tree by the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature.If anything, the invention of J.T. LeRoy should be regarded as a creative accomplishment unto itself, stranger and more complex than Ziggy Stardust (which, for all its endurance, was really little more than a pseudonym), possessing both an absurdity and a plausibility that stands toe-to-toe with Borat. And is it not possible that Laura Albert could not have written her books without creating an alternate character to speak through? Wagner had to dress in period costume to compose; Brian Wilson, whose feet, as far as I know, have yet to touch a surfboard, compensated by resting them in a box of sand when he sat at the piano to write.A misfortune of timing lumped an important work of art together with a piece of crude literary onanism, and our culture is the weaker for it. Do yourself a favor if you haven't already, and read ??Sarah??. The IAU stripped Pluto of its status as a planet, but you know what? It's still out there.