JOSHUA THORSON — PORTFOLIO (5 of 10)

Rock and a Hard Place (excerpt)

Rock and a Hard Place (2006, 23 minutes, DV and VHS video, stereo)

Assembled, directed, and edited by Joshua Thorson

Music by Nick Hallett, Sara Marcus, and Joshua Thorson 

With Kevin McGarry, Dale Hoyt, Jill Zimmerman, and Pat Palermo

"JT Leroy was not the first of his kind. Anthony Godby Johnson was a thirteen-year-old boy who was 

reportedly severely abused and used as a sex slave by his parents and their friends, becoming infected 

with HIV in the process. He wrote a memoir, A Rock and a Hard Place , which detailed his miserable family 

life, his escape and learning to love again, and his battle with AIDS. Like JT, Tony also sought free therapy 

and editorial advice from established gay writers - in Tony's case, Armistead Maupin, who fictionalized his 

own experience into The Night Listener. In fact, the woman claiming to be his adopted mother had invented 

Tony, and the ruse was kept going by a coterie of conspirators who felt that America needed a Tony to 

believe in: he was the product of pure faith. Through its collage of voices and images that never fully 

add up to a complete picture, Joshua Thorson's portrayal of the case (also called A Rock and a Hard 

Place) perfectly captures how any potential real boy that may have existed becomes clouded in an 

impenetrable miasma of desires and projections."  

— Jon Davies, "Bad Boys: What JT Leroy Knew About Being Fucked Up," March 2007.

Premiered at Rotterdam International Film Festival, 2006.

Additional related material below.

JOSHUA THORSON — PORTFOLIO
JOSHUA THORSON — PORTFOLIO (2)

"Joshua Thorson" page from:

Cornell, Lauren. Younger than Jesus: Artist Directory: The Essential Handbook to a New Generation of Artists; 

[Publ. on the Occasion of the New Museum Exhibition "The Generational: Younger than Jesus," April 8 - June 14, 2009]. London: Phaidon, 2009.