Kevin Killian written by Peter Gizzi

 

                                     photograph by Daniel Nicoletta

 

At the Paris Review Daily, Andrew Durbin introduces readers to the life and legacy of Kevin Killian, whose new book, Fascination: Memoirs  (Semiotext(e), 2018) "brings together Killian’s two early memoirs: Bedrooms Have Windows, a choppy autobiographical story about an aspiring writer named Kevin Killian who endeavors to find his place in the sexed-up, boozy worlds of Long Island and New York in the seventies and eighties, before and in the midst of the AIDS crisis, and its planned but ultimately unpublished sequel, Bachelors Get Lonely." From this piece:

Both Bedrooms and Bachelors concern Killian’s “real life,” though neither dwells on the provable connections between the living writer and his protagonist so much as they attempt, in their corrupt desire to ape and supplant reality with their own exigencies, to stand in place of private memory as a public document, as this book you hold in hand: the realer deal than whatever was once real. Scenes splurge, come and go, elaborate in nonsequential tellings and retellings of Killian’s late teens to adulthood. Self-exiled from the gates of suburban Eden (anyone can be normal if he wants to be, right?), Killian makes regular, restless visits to New York’s profane streets, finding himself occasionally employed, frequently lost, “sealed in with the dismal frightened figures of subway America.” In Bedrooms, while hitching in Smithtown, he meets Carey Denham, a man old enough to be his father, with whom he begins an affair:

“Take me to New York,” I said.

“Show me where it is on the map,” Carey said. His right hand touched my cock. The names of the roads on the map blurred before my eyes like a turning kaleidoscope. That’s the night I fell in love for the first time.

Throughout both memoirs, Killian analyzes this poise of innocence as it becomes increasingly complicated by his growing awareness of it as a poise, as even a sexual politics—specifically through a friendship with George Grey, “the unclaimed son of Gypsy Rose Lee,” who rouses Killian to a hunger for the broad belt of the wider world, for whatever the American mainland holds. (Funny to remember that Long Island, with its postwar fantasy of cookie-cutter America, is just that: an island.) Innocence, he realizes, holds the key to personality—lie around long enough and eventually someone will tell you what to do.

 

I’m not sure if Kevin in Bedrooms or Bachelors could find New York on a map...