The “Leave Britney Alone” video, as should have been painfully obvious, is fake. Chris Crocker, the guy who made it, is for all intents and purposes the second coming of Jonathan Caouette; a flamboyently gay teenager with a talent for acting who is hoping his internet stardom will yield him a ticket out of his intolerant hicksville hometown.
For a 19-year-old who lives with his grandparents and who originally started posting MySpace rants as a way of getting in the face of his small Bible Belt community, the interest from Hollywood and New York is potentially life altering. It offers something Chris has only recently begun to believe is within reach: an escape from the South, an escape made possible by the entertaining distress signals that he’s been sending out over the internet for almost a year.
“I don’t want it to pass me by,” Chris told me a few weeks ago when I visited him on Real Bitch Island. Intrigue had drawn me across the country to see him: I wanted to hang out with the guy behind the viral videos, but more than that, I wanted to find out what life is like for this new type of teenager—a young man connected in ways that let him transform his rural frustrations into national online fame, but who is still painfully disconnected.
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