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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
Time
Fifties
Awful
Gay
Really

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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 have never heard that referred to before, that term: Jewish men from Yale.
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Hollywood needs peripheral people like me. You're not of that world, but you're needed.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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[ John] Winthrop was the man who first said America was a city upon a hill, which [Ronald] Reagan then appropriated. There are incidents like that all through history. We have been here.
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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.
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I'm not denying Christ by not being Christian. I'm a theist, which involves expanding on the Christ narrative.
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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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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.
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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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I've done every other thing in life except intimacy. That's the aberration, the thing I've never had.
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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.
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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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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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It's always been hard to be gay in Washington.
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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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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