Howdy from Nawlins. I was going to say I’ve finally caught up on my rest after the nightmarish trip down here from Iowa City but I don’t think I’ll really be able to catch up on my rest this entire book tour. Book tours, I was warned by friends who have experienced them, are grueling. But it’s always been one of my dreams to be able to complain about a book tour at some point in my life - so I ain’t going to complain about being able to complain about this one. Aaahh - there’s an epiphanic koan (to mix my religious vocabularies) to commence the day in this most Catholic of southern cities: Complaint as Blessing.

A couple of days ago now I went out to the Jefferson Parish Library in Metairie to do a reading and signing. The library is quite beautiful and we had a good crowd. Jim Davis from the library - a better-looking Shelby Foote - introduced me. He’s got one of those southern accents so thick and deeply rooted in the region one expects to see moss hanging from it. I was so moved to meet several people who had already read my book and were touched by it in specific ways because it spoke to them about their own lives in the south. It’s been a humbling experience - I do mean that: I am humbled - when people come up to me at these readings to speak so intimately to me about their own lives and struggles and how they too have emotionally survived. My readers - a new term in my life that is another blessing, sure not complaining about that one - are a new source of inspiration and solace to me. I didn’t know when I started writing this book how much it would be a bridge for us all to reach out to each other - reader to writer, writer to reader, stranger to stranger, white folks to black folks, black folks to whites, family member to estranged family member, friend to friend, reader to potential reader, straight to gay, conservative Christian to Christians not so conservative …. Shit, I’ll stop the litany. I’m beginning to sound kind of corny. But I am kind of corny - always have been - beneath this urbane guise of mine. My old friend Andrew Sullivan (see my blog links over there) told a writer from Bookslut.com who just interviewed me for its April postings that beneath my urbane exterior, I’m “a Flannery O’Connor on acid,” that I’m a “one-off,” which in his British parlance and own one-offness is a compliment. I think part of that is my ability, still, to claim my corniness after living in a land of avenues and numbered streets where corniness is scorned. It’s something else I’m just not ashamed of.

After the reading at the library I went and had a delicious dinner at Meaux Bar on 932 Rampart Street in the French Quarter. The place is owned by a couple of buddies from New York who moved down to New Orleans a few years ago, Matthew and Jim. It’s a really cool restaurant with really cute waiters - hell, Matthew and Jim are really cute themselves. So if you want to see sexy guys and gals at other tables and flirt with the staff, head over to Meaux Bar when you’re in New Orleans. Matthew is the chef there and the food is great. They even have valet parking.

Yesterday I got up early and caught the train to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where my nephew Jake goes to school at the University of Southern Mississippi. When Jake came up for my book party in New York a few weeks ago, he couldn’t believe I hadn’t booked Hattiesburg on my trip because down a couple of blocks from his loft is a great place called Main Street Books run by a lovely couple, Diane and Jerry Shephard. I had St. Martins look into it as an adjunct to my New Orleans stop and I’m glad I did. We had a great turn out and I sold over 50 books there after my reading. It’s a beautiful store in downtown Hattiesburg. If you’re ever passing through that part of Mississippi, check it out. (There’s also a great little cafe in town down by the railroad tracks called SouthBound, owned and run by Chris Hackbarth, an ex-model who somehow landed in Hattiesburg. Chris is even from Iowa City, so we had fun talking about my stop there. Check out Chris’s bagels, so to speak, if you’re ever in Hattiesburg after buying a book from Diane.)

The range of people in my audience at Main Street Books surprised me - though I don’t know why I continue to be surprised by this tour. Each day brings new and welcome ones. We had a middle-aged preppy man-and-wife from Laurel. Gay men of a certain age from around southern Mississippi. Mothers and their children. And cool college students - some straight, some gay - from several of the colleges from around the area. I do think Mississippi Sissy, despite that second word in its title, can be a cross-over kind of book. And the audience in Hattiesburg helped prove that to me.

Finally, seeing some of those Mississippi college kids around the streets in Hattiesburg as well as the ones that came in to the store to buy my book, made me think of that Mississippi college kid I write about back in the 1970s in the last chapters of my book, the one that got in that Ryder truck and drove to New York City when he was 19. I hate writing about myself in the third person but looking back at that kid from the perspective of a 51 year old almost makes me seem like a different person in my own eyes and yet I know the basis of who I am today sitting here in this hotel room blogging was being formed then by the people who knew and loved me. One of those people, as you know if you’ve read the book already, is Carl Davis. A nice result of writing the book has been getting back in contact with Carl after all these years. Late last night, after Jake drove me back down to New Orleans, I signed on to my email and found this image from Carl. It is a photograph of me from those days in Mississippi when we first knew each other. For those of you who have complained that there are no pictures in the book, here’s one of me that Carl took when I was 18 or 19. My dear friend Peter Staley, the builder of this site as well as his own - aidsmeds.com (see links to the side) - said I should post it. I always do what Peter says. So here it is. It is the face I can’t help but see in the young people who come to meet me at my readings, a face I no longer see in the mirror but one that will always stare back at me from the past I’ve tried to conjur again in my book, a past that is now speaking through all our broken panes.

Publishers Weekly ran a starred review of my audio version of Mississippi Sissy this week. I spent five days back in the winter reading an abridged version of the book myself and getting in touch with my Juilliard School of Drama roots. It was exhausting but fun as well as artistically fulfilling. When Publishers Weekly puts a red star next to a review it means Attention Must Be Paid. So I’m paying attention. This is what it said:

Kevin Sessums, read by the author. Audio Renaissance, abridged, five CDs, 6 hrs., $29.95 ISBN 978-1-4272-0039-6
As an eight-year-old boy coping with the horrific loss of his parents and a nagging sense of being “different” from his peers in the Mississippi town of Forest, Sessums assumes the persona of What’s My Line panelist Arlene Francis. “Call me Arlene!” he insists, and his grandparents—despite their rather reactionary stances in the realms of politics, religion and sexuality—manage to lovingly comply. In performing his electrifying coming-of-age memoir, Sessums adroitly introduces the cast of characters who shaped his journey. The vocal renderings of such memorable figures as the family’s loving and devoted—as well as self-confident and determined—maid Matty May, who repeatedly recites “Poitier” as a mantra in the days and weeks following Sidney Poitier’s 1963 Oscar win, resonate with remarkable clarity. Listeners accustomed to contemporary autobiographical titles should be forewarned that they are entering unapologetic gothic territory akin to that of Eudora Welty (a friend and mentor to Sessums) or even Flannery O’Connor. Raw human emotions of love and hate play starring roles, refusing to remain mere stage props. Simultaneous release with the St. Martin’s hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 6). (Mar.)

This week Mississippi Sissy is #22 on the Booksense Best Seller List. This is the national best seller list for all the independent bookstores in the country. And it has the added honor of being designated ON THE RISE, a designation Booksense gives to the book that seems to be gaining steam and getting noticed by buyers per the numbers sold the previous week.

Also, I just found out that Sissy went up seven spaces on the New York Times Best Seller List to be published this coming Sunday. It will be #27 up from #34. I still long of it to be in the Top Ten so I’ll keep plugging away. I want to be able to see it in the New York Times Book Review itself since they only print the top fifteen sellers in each category. Thank you all out there for helping me get this far. It’s impossible for me to express fully how much I appreciate your support. Only 12 more places to go before they have to put the name of my book in the Review instead of only putting it online. It would be such poetic justice after the hatchet job they ran when reviewing it. It would be another dream come true. The ultimate dream, of course, is to be #1. Revenge - unlike the meal I just tried to eat here at O’Hare Airport while waiting for my flight to New Orleans - is a dish best served cold.

Today is my 51st birthday and I’m stuck in the airport in Cedar Rapids on this tour trying to get down to New Orleans. We’ve all got our nightmare travel stories so I’ll spare you my latest one. I just hope I get to New Orleans by 10 p.m. tonight. (Update: I made it to New Orleans at 12:43 a.m. and walked into my hotel room at 1:09 a.m.) I left my hotel this morning in Iowa City at 9:30 a.m. Do the math. Though math is the last thing I should be doing today as my years on this earth just added up to, yep, 51. But it’s a blessing. As is this tour. I keep repeating that as my mantra today as the announcements keep being made about our flight not taking off and my missing my connection in Chicago. (Another delay was announced just as I typed that last sentence.)

Let’s see. What’s happened since last I posted. I went to Fairhope, Alabama, to read at Page and Palette bookstore, a wonderful store in a wonderful town on the gulf. Fairhope was founded in the 1890s as a socialist uptopian experiment and it retains its artsy fartsy allure for a certain sort of southerner. The owners of the store there and the people who came to hear me read and buy books could not have been nicer. It’s a beautiful place and I suggest you check it out - and Page and Palette as well - if you’re ever in the vicinity. It’s a very welcoming place.

The next morning I got up to fly to Iowa. It’s my first visit here. As my plane approached the airport in Cedar Rapids, the quilt of farmland laid out beneath me was quite beautiful, the landscape dotted with silos and old farmhouses. Iowa City could not have been lovelier - on lots of levels. The town itself is quaint and funky and the town seems to be a campus since there are so many students roaming around from the University of Iowa located there. I was flattered to be invited to read at Prairie Lights Bookstore since the Iowa Writers Workshop is like a mecca for serious writers and I always fantasized as a young writer about being accepted there. (All you Christianists out there hold your fire - I’m using the word mecca as a figurative compliment.) An old boyfriend of mine, Steve Nelson, went to Iowa Workship and lived in Iowa for a while and I couldn’t help but think of him when I landed here. Steve came out of the closet in the early 1990s when he arrived in New York City. I was one of the first men with whom he’d ever been physically intimate. He was an amazing playwright who was influenced by Albee and Beckett. He died of AIDS before his 30th birthday, an ending that Albee and Beckett combined could not have written in the tragic absurdity of such a loss. (And no, I didn’t infect him. I didn’t convert to HIV positive until many years later.) I’ve thought of him so much these last two days while here. He was a gentle spirit and so talented and, yes, sexy in that corn-fed way of folks around these parts. I miss him every time I go to the theatre in New York. And I’ve missed him, achingly so, these last 36 hours while I’ve been in Iowa. Thinking of Steve, made me say a prayer this morning for Elizabeth Edwards and Tony Snow and all the brave souls who are not as famous as they are who are battling all kinds of diseases with dignity and strength. It puts a book tour and Amazon numbers in perspective. (My Amazon numbers, alas, are losing traction but I trust you’ll keep telling your friends to order my book there or keep ordering it yourself - or buying it at your favorite local store - as a gift for other people. That would be the best gift you could give me: giving my book to others.) Speaking of numbers that are more important than those on Amazon, I got my blood work done before my tour started - those who’ve been reading this blog since I started already knew that I’m HIV positive even before I mentioned it above - and my meds are still working, thank God. Literally: thank God. My viral load is still undetectable and my t-cells are up around 700. All the other blood work proved I’m really, really healthy for a now 51 year old man. Each day is a blessing. Though when you’re stuck in an airport on your birthday it’s hard to think of this particular one as such. But it is.

Oh: I had a nice time last night with some of the people who came to my reading at Prairie Lights. I was getting some cash out of a ATM machine when I heard my name called. They asked if I had plans - I didn’t - so we went to a local coffee place and visited. They could not have been nicer to me and fun to hang with so a shout out to Anne and Alan and Rory and Jay. Jay is a great photographer - Google him at Jay Diers - and see his work. He’s got a sexy book out called Raw Youth. Buy it and see some of the local talent he’s discovered here.

I went back to my hotel last night - the Hotel Vetro owned by the Moen Group, a real estate concern run by the goodlooking blonde-headed Bobby Jett, who also came to my reading. A shout out to Bobby. The Vetro is an oasis of chic in Iowa City; it’s beautifully appointed with a great sushi restaurant downstairs. The Vetro had the most comfortable bed I’ve had on my tour so far and I fell fast asleep - the first time I’ve rested well this whole trip - and dreamt of Archie, my dog. Steve Nelson was holding Archie and looking happy and healthy and wholesomely sexy - in the way of all Iowans it would seem - just like he looked the first time I ever laid eyes on him in New York back in those gay ’90s all our own when he waited on me at The Bagel on West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village, lingering next to me after I ordered scrambled eggs and bacon and I felt my heart race faster the first time I noticed his presence. I can feel it race faster right now remembering that moment. I can still feel his presence. You rest well, too, Steve. Rest well.

I got permission from Marjorie Williams, the lady who wrote me below and to whom I responded, to publish her next letter to me here on the blog. I responded to her once again after she wrote a second time. I think we all need to read these missives since it shows if we do reach out to one another across the great social divide that is out there in our country - one person at a time even - then that divide just might be closed a bit. I’m hopeful that my book, if read with the openheart with which it was written, can help close that divide as well. Hope, sometimes, is all we have. And, sometimes, it’s enough … Let’s all stay hopeful.

Therefore:

Kevin,
I was not being judgemental, nor was your other writer, I don’t
think. I’m afraid that you took the things that were meant to
be challenging for your life to be a put down of you because you have
had to deal so much with that.

The words you used that many people consider crude turn us off from
anything good you are trying to say. (words like ass, etc. that may be
common in New York as well as MS, but I teach my children not to say
because they do not enhance our lives.)

I remember you, your sister and brother when you were little, and want
the best and highest for all of you regardless of your location or
choice of living. Don’t let the people around you keep you from being
the best you can be in work, society or worship. Your are too good a
writer to let others keep you from being your best.

Now I’m raising my grandchildren who are about the age as I remember
you, so I need your prayers for raising them in the kind of world of
drugs, violence and yes–sex that they are going to be living in.

Thank you for the time you took to write. Marjorie in Columbia

My response:

Honey, I didn’t sleep last night thinking I was too upset and mean
toward you with my letter back. And indeed did pray about it a lot
this morning. It was the paragraph with my parents and grandparents
names that set me off and “the God they worshipped in Harperville”
since it was that “God” they worshipped back in the dark days in
Mississippi that allowed so many “good” people to either turn a blind
eye to the racial evil going on around them, or, worse participate in
it. I heard the n-word a lot from the pulpit growing up and how evil
Civil Rights workers were - it used to scare me to death to hear all
that. But I will continue to pray for you and your grandkids - if you,
in turn, promise to pray for me. Deal? Truce? I’ll let all my blog
readers know.

All the best - any grandmama raising kids has a special place in my old
cynical heart.

Kevin

Under the comments section in my post Queens and Kings, I got one tonight from someone defending the young woman and the note she gave me in Memphis that I wrote about in that post. As you all know, I have always written back to you privately to your email addresses when you’ve been so kind to send along your comments to me. I think that is the proper way to respond to you. In this case, however, I’m going to post my private email letter back to this woman. Perhaps I was a little strong in the “blood on your hands” remark. If so, I apologize to her and any one who is offended by that remark. Perhaps my whole email is an overreaction - to her, but not to the scores upon scores upon scores of people who think like her and say much meaner things in much meaner ways. But I wrote it to her in the white heat of my anger and exhaustion tonight. Sometimes YOU’VE JUST HAD ENOUGH. Why must it always be the ones who are insulted who have to “rise above it,” as my beloved grandmother used to advise me to do. So I’ll own that remark and not edit it out. I’ll own the whole email. I think we’ve all developed a brutally honest cyber relationship here on this blog - even between my detractors and me now, I guess. Anyway, her comment is under the name Marjorie Williams under Queens and Kings. This is my reply to her:

I’ll pray for your judgemental soul also. As Matty May says in the book when she hears me use the n-word in her presence. “God made me in His image, so if I’m a n—–, than God’s a n—– too. You think about that.” God made me in His image as well - YOU THINK ABOUT THAT - whoever you are. There is a part of God that is as gay as my sister and I are . My sister Karole is a proud lesbian CHRISTIAN and I’d stack her goodness and her redemptive grace against the judgemental likes of you any day. It really does become more and more difficult to put up with the self-righteousness of the rightwing Christianists like you who only focus on the sexuality of people, a sexuality that is as much a gift from God as yours is. Quote me a passage from the Bible in which Jesus mentions homosexuals. His presence on this earth was about reaching out to those who others, like you, scorned and spurned, to the poor, the marginalized.

People like you have blood on your hands each and every time a gay or lesbian teenager kills him or herself. We’ll all have a lot to answer for someday - but folks like you especially will.

And how DARE you invoke my parents and grandparents names when condemning me. I loved them with all my heart and they loved me. Whoever you are, you really stooped low.

But I’ll make a deal - you continue to pray for me and I’ll take a breath, I’ll calm down - and I’ll pray for you. Let’s pray for each other. I trust God to hear both our prayers. Let’s let Him decide whose sin is greater. That decision - no matter how self-centered you obviously are in your religiosity - is not yours.

Kevin

My sister Karole and her partner, the great Misssissippi artist H.C. Porter, gave me and my book a wonderful event in their gallery and loft in downtown Vicksburg last night. Well over 200 people showed up to listen to me read from Mississippi Sissy and Karole, who had ordered 100 books, sold every one of them. I enjoyed meeting new friends and seeing old ones and signing all the books. It was a night I’ll always cherish and I’d like to thank Karole and Chris (H.C. to all you art buyers) for their hospitality and their love. Even The Simpson Lady and her son, Ken, showed up. For those of you who’ve already read the book, you know what a wonderful surprise that was for me although I was a bit apprehensive as well to discuss their roles in my life story with them. But they could not have been more gracious to me and understanding why I had included them in the book. And The Simpson Lady is still a looker! The three of discussed the pivotal scene that they are involved in - I won’t spoil it for those of you who haven’t read it yet - and she said that though is was still traumatic for her to think about what had happened she understood that it was my story I was telling in the book and I had a right to tell it. I was thrilled to see them after all these years - well, over 40 - and if they are reading this blog right now then I want to let them know seeing them last night was one of the best parts of the evening which had so many wonderful aspects to it. (The best aspect? When Karole gave me my father’s baseball glove I didn’t even know she had kept all these years. It is the glove I’m wearing on the cover of the book. I couldn’t help myself. I broke down and cried when I realized what was in the gift wrapped package. I am sitting here right now staring at at the old glove where I’ve placed it on my hotel room desk. I’ll place it - a relic of remembrance and a father’s fierce yet unconditional love - on all my hotel desks on this book tour.) The crowd last night really loved it when I told them, before the reading, that a good buddy of mine had bought 20 copies of my book to give to his diverse circle of famous friends, including Nancy Reagan. (There were a lot of Nancy Reagan fans in the audience.) If you had told me to name the last person in America I thought would be reading my book, Nancy Reagan might have been the name to pop into my mind. But I love the idea now of her knowing who Matty May is. And I bet she was even friends with Arlene Francis, whose son now teaches law out at a university in San Francisco. A student of his discovered the book and brought it into class and told him about my love of his mother and how the book was a valentine to her. He read the book and was quite moved by it and called the documentarian, Jackie Sanders, who is making a film about his mother and told her about it also. She then called me and now wants me to be interviewed about my love of Arlene in the film. I’m honored.

I wonder what Nancy Reagan is making of Aunt Vena Mae in the book. I dreamed last night in my exhaustion that they were having dinner and Mrs. Reagan was rolling her eyes as so many of us did at the lovingly exasperating Aunt Veence. Karole drove me over to Neshoba County today to do a signing in Philadelphia, where Aunt Veence lived for her entire adult life. The Store on the Corner sold out its entire stock in an hour and Karole and I had a great time hanging out with some relatives we hadn’t seen in many a moon - Margaret Francis and her naughtily witty husband and her sister Carol and “Little” Rita. A nice, slightly shy, rather sexy resident of Tupelo, where the book and I were banned by Jack Reed, Jr., from his department store’s book section, even drove all the way down to Neshoba County to buy a copy of the book. So I’d like to thank him here on the blog for doing that. I was quite touched. At one point at the signing, Stanley Dearman, who had been the Editor of the Neshoba Democrat newspaper for forty years, came in to get a book signed and sat down to shoot the breeze with me. Again, I was honored. Mr. Dearman is a an old-time gentleman of the south who has begun to read lots of Henry James and Edith Wharton and Anton Chekhov in his retirement and is thinking about writing his own book. I hope he does. I think he has a lot to say. We talked about writing and all the things he’d been told off-the-record in his years as editor of the newspaper there since 1966. Dearman is a rather Chekhovian name for a dear man like Stanley

Karole drove me back to Jackson where I am right now at a hotel close to Jackson-Evers Airport. It’s named for Medgar Evers, something I never thought I would witness since when I lived down here the airport was named for the racist mayor of Jackson when Medgar Evers was shot. Maybe Mississippi has changed. Let’s hope. After reading online for the first time the extended NY Times Best Seller List - it finally seemed real that Mississippi Sissy was on it when I saw it with my own eyes - and yet being disappointed that my Amazon number seems to be losing traction though I haven’t given up hope yet to get it below the 100 mark at some point in the future (I know: tiresome but it means a lot to me) - I walked down the road to eat dinner at a restaurant with Grill in its name. I sat next to a table of high school kids, the boys in their sherbet-colored tuxes, the girls in their sequinned gowns, all eating dinner before they headed off to their prom. After dinner and telling the kids I hoped they all had a great time but to drive carefully, I walked down to a movie theatre in a local mall. There was nothing I wanted to see so I walked back over to a drive-through Starbucks and had a double expresso and madeleines and watched the long-haired boy who had served me go get his skateboard and ride it outside the window where I sat. He slung his hair back and glanced over at me with a slo-eyed knowingness. His slim hips kept balance on the skateboard as he road back and forth, back and forth. I was mesmerized by his skill, his hips. One Mississippi, I began to count to myself as I watched him each time he passed by me while I slowly finished my last madeleine. Two Mississippi. He gave me another slo-eyed look. Three Misssissippi. Tomorrow I’ll be in Alabama.