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I just so desperately wanted to be published in New Yorker, and I'd so desperately try to get something in it. But I'd always get nice letters back telling me that Mr. Shawn [William Shawn, the New Yorker's editor from 1952 to 1987] just didn't like this or didn't like that about what I submitted.

Kevin Sessums

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Kevin Sessums
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: January 1
Author
Writer
Mississippi
United States
Kevin Howard Scott Sessums
Trying
Published
Something
Editors
Always
Letters
Shawn
Like
Telling
Submitted
Nice
Yorker
Didn
William
Back
Desperately
Wanted
Editor

More quotes by Kevin Sessums

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Is it easier for you to have straight friends, Larry [Kramer], since you seem so often disappointed in your gay friends who can't live up to what you expect of them as gay people?
Kevin Sessums
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If there was criticism about [Oscar Wilde], it was because it was written by a straight man who wasn't very educated about the gay world.
Kevin Sessums
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I don't write poetry for the New Yorker. My poems appear in the Nation, mostly.
Kevin Sessums
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My father always wanted me to be president of the United States, and his fallback position was that I not become a ward of the county. I think my father was okay about my going into journalism, though.
Kevin Sessums
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One thing I learned in sobriety is to stop being judgmental, to always be discerning. When I drive, that will be my bumper sticker.
Kevin Sessums
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I talked to [Larry] Kramer a little bit about it while I was writing 'Remembering Denny' . Denny was one of those people who took a long time to come out.
Kevin Sessums
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When one person mentors, two lives are changed.
Kevin Sessums
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I've done every other thing in life except intimacy. That's the aberration, the thing I've never had.
Kevin Sessums
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There was a lot really awful about that time [in fifties] if you were gay.
Kevin Sessums
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It's always been hard to be gay in Washington.
Kevin Sessums
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Tony Kushner has said that Larry [Kramer] thinks everyone always has to agree with him.
Kevin Sessums
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I was raped: I said no and he wouldn't stop. I also had a scar on my back and blood coming out of my ass. To some that's just rough sex. Some would read that sentence and be turned on by that: the 51st Shade of Gay.
Kevin Sessums
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[Larry Kramer] thinks Charles de Gaulle was gay. He thinks Max Schmeling was gay.
Kevin Sessums
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The first time I remember our being socially in the same place was after we graduated and [author, investment counselor, philanthropist, and fellow 1950s Yalie] Peter Wolf had a party at his house in the Hamptons.
Kevin Sessums
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I was not shoe. That's a misuse of the term shoe, which is derived from white shoe.
Kevin Sessums
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Hollywood needs peripheral people like me. You're not of that world, but you're needed.
Kevin Sessums
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That's why I tried to kill myself when I was a student [in Yale]. I thought I was the only one there.
Kevin Sessums
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I think I just felt a sadness at some points in my career that what is available to a straight writer is not available to a gay writer.
Kevin Sessums
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To some people, knowledge and science are everything. To me, God is everything I don't know.
Kevin Sessums
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David Remnick [the New Yorker's editor in chief]is about as interested in anything gay as I am interested in anything to do with baseball. It drives me nuts.
Kevin Sessums