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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
Like
Telling
Submitted
Nice
Yorker
Didn
William
Back
Desperately
Wanted
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Trying
Published
Something
Editors
Always
Letters
Shawn

More quotes by Kevin Sessums

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I'm not denying Christ by not being Christian. I'm a theist, which involves expanding on the Christ narrative.
Kevin Sessums
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[Calvin Trillin] was very shoe, which means he was a big jock, a big deal.
Kevin Sessums
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[Larry Kramer] thinks Charles de Gaulle was gay. He thinks Max Schmeling was gay.
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Larry [Kramer] had already experienced so much loss by then from the AIDS epidemic. But I don't think it changed anything between us.
Kevin Sessums
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When I graduated [from Yale], I went back to Larry [Kramer]. But when I go to Yale reunions, there are still people who call me David.
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Calvin [Trillin] has never done anything majorly objectionable.
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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To some people, knowledge and science are everything. To me, God is everything I don't know.
Kevin Sessums
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Shoe just meant you were a big jock on campus no matter what field you were in.
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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I was raped. That was a hard thing to write about. I never owned that part of it. Guys don't look at themselves as being raped. We're not raised that way.
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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There was a lot really awful about that time [in fifties] if you were gay.
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 have never heard that referred to before, that term: Jewish men from Yale.
Kevin Sessums
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If someone had come up to me at Yale and asked me how many homosexuals there were in my class, I would have said I don't think there are any. There may have been a few who were shy with girls. You have to understand, this was the 1950s.
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
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Weenie was definitely a word we used at Yale back then. But I'm not sure you were one, Larry [Kramer]. Also, you were going by a different name.
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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It's always been hard to be gay in Washington.
Kevin Sessums