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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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Kevin Sessums
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: January 1
Author
Writer
Mississippi
United States
Kevin Howard Scott Sessums
Really
Time
Fifties
Awful
Gay

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When one person mentors, two lives are changed.
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[Calvin Trillin] was very shoe, which means he was a big jock, a big deal.
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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.
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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.
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I don't write poetry for the New Yorker. My poems appear in the Nation, mostly.
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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.
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I could appear in this million-word book [Larry Kramer] are working on. Nobody would even notice me.
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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.
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I don't think everybody's gay. But I think a lot more people are than the world knows about.
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I've done every other thing in life except intimacy. That's the aberration, the thing I've never had.
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I think it's a Jewish Yale custom. I wasn't aware that other people celebrated Christmas. My wife was very big on Christmas, and I was very big on my wife.
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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?
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Shoe just meant you were a big jock on campus no matter what field you were in.
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Hollywood needs peripheral people like me. You're not of that world, but you're needed.
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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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[Larry Kramer] thinks Charles de Gaulle was gay. He thinks Max Schmeling was gay.
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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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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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I wasn't a [gay] activist, really.
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.
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