She left her mother’s care as a teenager, spent time in a group home for troubled kids, and took fiction classes at the New School in Manhattan while taking part in the early-80s punk scene in the nearby East Village.

"[3] She achieved some degree of fame as a freelance sexpert, under the alias "Laura Victoria", using that name to write columns for Future Sex and later the Rolling Stone website.

[citation needed] Albert continued making these calls into adulthood, sometimes posing as a young male from an unstable background nicknamed "Terminator."

As Terminator, she began receiving treatment from Terrence Owens, a psychologist with the McAuley Adolescent Psychiatric Program at St. Mary's Medical Center in San Francisco.

[5] Owens eventually gave some of this material to a neighbor of his who worked as an editor, who put LeRoy in contact with other figures in the San Francisco literary scene.

[6] The character of Jeremiah "Terminator" (JT) LeRoy, as presented by Albert, was an underage, gay, male prostitute who started working in Appalachian truck stops while still a boy.

In the opening story, "Disappearances," a young boy named Jeremiah leaves a stable foster home to reunite with his biological mother, Sarah, an 18-year-old drug addict.

When meeting face-to-face, Albert would adopt the additional persona of Emily "Speedie" Frasier, a well-travelled woman with a Cockney accent who purported to be JT's friend and roommate.

[11] According to author Mary Gaitskill, at a dinner date in which she and LeRoy were to meet, Albert, in the guise of Speedie, arrived instead, and the two engaged in a long conversation.

"[12] A 2005 New York Magazine article by Stephen Beachy called JT LeRoy's existence into question and implied that Laura Albert was the true author of the stories.

[29][30][31][32][33][34] Albert wrote "Dreams of Levitation," Sharif Hamza's short film for NOWNESS, and worked as a writer for the television series Deadwood.

She was photographed by Steven Klein for QVEST magazine and by Kai Regan for his "Reckless Endangerment" at ALIFE; she has also done fashion shoots for Christian Lacroix and John Galliano.

She was a catalog contributor for the "Blind Cut" exhibition at New York's Marlborough Chelsea and collaborated with Williamsburg band Japanther, releasing a limited-edition cassette under the name True Love in a Large Room, with original artwork by Winston Smith.

She has also written for dot429, the world's largest LGBTA professional network, and been an invited speaker at their annual conferences in New York; her talks and lectures about gender variance and transgender issues include dot429, Bomb Magazine, Ireland's Mindfield Literary Stage, and the Transgression Symposium at Utah Valley University.

[19][39] In January of 2023, Albert spoke at the San Francisco Public Library with actor/photographer Brooke Smith, author of the book Sunday Matinee, about their involvement in the 1980s New York hardcore punk scene.