BY THE TIME I was born in Jackson, Mississippi (1985), Kevin Sessums had long left the Magnolia State’s kudzu-blanketed highways for the culture and promise of New York. At 23 (in 2008) I sat at the bar in the now defunct L&M’s restaurant on North Lamar in Oxford, eagerly reading my copy of Mississippi Sissy, which Sessums had signed at the local Mecca of independent bookstores, Square Books. As a young gay Mississippian, it was like talking to family — even better: Here was someone else who had grown up “different,” and found refuge in the arts community, with a voice that evoked N. State Street, Belhaven, and New Stage Theatre — Miss Welty’s Jackson, my own Jackson. What culturally literate devotee of Designing Women wouldn’t read Mississippi Sissy and have moments of wanting to shout, “Yes, Lord!”
Our affinity aside, I hadn’t revisited Sessums’s work or kept track of his career until June 2014, when I was putting the final touches on an anthology of essays and poems I’d been working on for two years. As I was talking with my publisher about voices that I wanted that were not yet included in the book, I scanned one of my shelves and saw Mississippi Sissy. I re-read the first chapter, which ends on the image of Eudora Welty, well-bourboned (of course), picking up Sessums’s jockstrap from the seat of his car: I knew that no book exploring the queer South would be complete without that voice or that particularly queer image.
Read Full Article »
