Night moves: Armistead Maupin wrote The Night Listener after he was duped into a phone friendship with someone posing as an abused teenage boy. Now the book is a film. Maupin talks with Regina Marler about this "gritty little thriller".

Armistead Maupin's 2001 novel The Night Listener is based on his breakup with partner Terry Anderson and his six-year phone friendship with Anthony Godby Johnson, an HIV-positive 14-year-old survivor of sexual abuse. At the publisher's request, Maupin wrote a jacket blurb for Johnson's 1993 memoir, A Rock and a Hard Place. In 2001 Tony Johnson was exposed as an invention of his supposed adoptive mother, Vicki Johnson, in a New Yorker article by Tad Friend.

The Night Listener is now a film due out in August from Miramax.

So Robin Williams plays your alter ego, Gabriel Noone.

I'd known Robin since the late '70s. When his agency refused to look at the script because it was too little money, we took it by his office to Marsha, his wife. Robin called a couple of days later and said, "I think it's wonderful. I'd like to do it."

The movie says it's "based on true events."

The essential story did happen and felt absolutely like a thriller while I was living it. I've always chosen to call it fiction, though. And [when the book came out], we really were in fear of lawsuits. For all I knew, in the middle of the book tour I was going to be confronted by a one-legged, one-lunged, one-testicled boy who would call me the most horrible monster that ever lived for doubting him.

Everyone's been thinking about hoaxes since JT LeRoy's unmasking.

I must admit I've been rather smug about it: "If you'd read my damn novel, you would have seen it coming a mile away." But I maintained belief [in Tony] even when Newsweek was calling the whole story into doubt. I thought if there was a 2% chance that this person existed, I really didn't want to take it. I'd think, Oh, you crazy bastard, you just want it to be her because it makes a good story. In fact, I was so hung up about the novel that I couldn't write. Terry suggested that I simply call Tony and tell him I'm planning to write the novel. Tell him it's fiction, tell him it takes off from the idea of the boy who may not exist, and ask his permission. And I did so, and Tony said, "I'm a big boy. I know what fiction is. I know you wouldn't betray me."

We're obviously complicit in these hoaxes: We want to believe. And the successful hoaxes tend to have a victim at the center.

Absolutely. That places the confidant in the role of savior. You feel noble. You think, If I give this kid two hours on the phone tonight, he might be alive in the morning.

Did you speak with Paul Monette about this?

Paul was one of the reasons that I blurbed [Tony's] book, because he'd written an afterword. Paul was the one who suffered the most. He was close to death--in the very last stages of AIDS--and his time and energy was being sapped by this imaginary person. And the payback he got is an accusation from Newsweek that he had written the books. I knew that wasn't true. As Paul pointed out, this kid knew far more about baseball than he would ever have. I had that same role in Tony's life. He actually said to me once, "Just because you're a dick-smoker doesn't mean you can't watch a ball game sometime." That was the first time I ever heard the phrase "dick-smoker."

And you heard it from a middle-aged woman in New Jersey.

Yes! Who was persuading me that she was a streetwise 14-year-old straight boy.

Marler writes for the New York Observer and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.