Comments on: Sorry I Have Been Absent

by: Kay Baumgartner

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 08:18:28 +0000

Dear Kevin,
So here’s the thing:

I was born in Hattiesburg in 1957. Mama raised in Corinth. Biological father from Mississippi, but I actually don’t know where he was born; they met at Millsaps (where Mama took a class or two with Eudora Welty, by the way) and married shortly thereafter. (Mama was on the rebound from her high school boyfriend, who went in the service and finally acknowledged he was gay. But not to her. But that’s another story.) My adoptive father (second marriage) was from Macon, Georgia. I moved to New York straight out of college and never looked back; lived there for 28 years till I moved to Dallas a couple of years ago to take care of Mama. Sang in NYC with moderate success and a few triumphs, but never had the guts to go for a serious career. Met my share of the famous, though nothing like you, of course. Made so many friends of such extraordinary caliber that to have known even one was to have lived a blessed life. Lost so many of them to AIDS, from ‘83 to ‘94, that it felt like a war zone; I knew the insides of every hospital in Manhattan before I was 30.

We moved around a lot when I was a kid; my odyssey runs Mississippi-Florida-Ireland-Alabama-Pennsylvania-Louisiana-New York, and now Texas, God help me. So I wasn’t as steeped in Mississippi as you were by a long shot, though Corinth figured prominently into my childhood as the only stable place I could return to while my grandmother was alive.

All to say that I picked up Mississippi Sissy at O’Hare last Sunday, when I left the book I was reading on the plane, and had time to kill while waiting for my flight back to Dallas. And I connected. Well, of course I did. Couldn’t spend much time with you till last night, but I have read pretty much nonstop from then to now, stopping only to sleep, eat — I started to add “shit,” but realized I took the book to the pot, too. TMI, I readily concede.

So when I turned the last page and got up and looked around, I had an email waiting for me from my friend Michael Conwill, who’s from Tupelo and lives in Hell’s Kitchen (OK, “Clinton,” if you like the developers’ coinage) with his pug and two black cats. And I found myself writing to him, at 2 AM of a Sunday, about your book. (Which he’s probably read long since, but I hadda rave, just in case.) Saying I thought you were still living in NYC (though the book tour may make that merely a nominal residency for a while yet), and that he should try to find you. Not so much in the role of yenta, mind you; but he’s wise and loving and truthful, and has likewise been through the shit, and you’d have much to say to one another, I suspect, whether friendship or love ensued. He’s possessed of a fine baritone and a wicked sense of humor, and is in waiting-list demand making furniture strictly on a word-of-mouth basis when he’s not singing.

OK, enough about my beloved Mikey. Regardless of your policy on blog setups, I want to tell you thanks, for being unflinching and generous with your stories, your truth, your preternatural powers of observation — and your recognition, thank God, that some of the insanity you lived through would make a helluva good story if you just quit crying for a second and paid attention. I am so happy to have made your acquaintance. (Talk about cutting straight through the small talk.)

Love and all good things to you, from a fellow Mississippian who also knew she didn’t belong, but was similarly glad she brought the experience with her. Found out who I didn’t wanna be that way, but also found out what I loved and held tight onto, buried in the midst of that dross. Know what I mean?

Kay

by: frank drummond

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:00:26 +0000

i grew up in Jackson, Mississippi in the fifties and sixties and I’ve being reading as much as I can find on this time period. I’ve read several books on this tumultuous period but “Mississippi Sissy” is by far the most interesting. I knew several of the people in this book so it made it even more interesting for me.

Are there more books by Kevin in the works?

by: Tim

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:41:28 +0000

Wow…I just finished reading “Sissy” last night and found it to be extremely powerful, so much so that this morning I have “googled” Sessums and came up with this blog. Just feel I have to respond to the book. Once I started, I felt compelled to progress onward through its pages, despite the painful content of your story. Most of the time I read for entertainment, not enlightenment. I avoid biography whenever I can. Or perhaps it would be more true to say I read to avoid pain, rather than confront it, to lose myself in storybook fiction. Nonetheless, I could not stop, did not wish to stop reading, and I found in it disturbingly accurate echoes of my own “sunbaked southern childhood.” Happily, I was spared the trauma of parents’ deaths, sexual molestation, and discovering a loved mentor murdered, but not the sense of not fitting in, of being different in some sinister way, and the fear of ultimate rejection becuase of it. That always haunted me and I can’t honestly say that I’ve completely shed that today. The backdrop of the southern mentality, gentility, and racism captured so aptly in your book are there for me also. One might say perhaps that you were steeped in it more strongly, perhaps, being a generation older and several hundred miles deeper, but much of it resonates for me. All in all, a powerful experience. It is the kind of book my friend Chuck, the Frank-like mentor of my adolescence, would have adored, and would have immediately recommended to me. He was a huge admirer of Welty, of all things southern, and utilized the “gay coming of age” genre to help me feel less alone. Thanks for your gift

by: DONALD MICHAEL AUCUTT

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 14:23:53 +0000

Kevin. What is that “ball” painting in the photo in today’s New York Times? Who is the artist? Story should have been longer.

by: michael

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 09:58:19 +0000

you should have written in a month or two instead of a day or two.
:-)

by: denis moore

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 03:26:42 +0000

Hi Kevin: i just finished Mississippi Sissy. It was very powerful. Thanks for writing it. I admire your courage.

by: Ronald

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:42:21 +0000

I just had to write. Thank you so much for this book. I’m not quite finished, but 10 minutes ago read the section where you were under that tree by the cotton fields speaking with Matty. I just about lost it during silent reading with my students. In fact I had to stop them, tell them a bit about your story and read aloud that section. “Love ain’t enough for the likes of us. We standin’ on the same ground but we folks from different lands… [love] ain’t never ’nuff in a crooked-letter state like this.” Indeed. The same could be said for this community where I teach. Where sports is God and love is “defined” in terms of gender opposites. Thank God, my kids get me here, and those sissy boys and butch girls in my classes know that love exists even if it’s on the outskits of Smithville or in downtown Kansas City. Thanks, Kevin. You made my day today.