All My Kevins

I was remembering a point in time when there was too much magic. I was switching to prose, reflecting on the power of tense. “Funny way to be spending the apocalypse,” I thought, driving slightly above the speed limit from grocery store to grocery store, remembering and then forgetting items I anticipated I needed or would need a month from now.

I was envisioning this essay would be about how it felt to visit Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian’s archive at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. To lay a metaphorical wreath over my friend’s artifacts from life on Earth. When I scrolled through the archive's folders and boxes online, I noticed a photo Kevin took of me (YCAL MSS 1090 b. 80 - photograph of Sara Wintz). I don’t know what it is. 

Can the contours of a literary friendship be revealed by what the living requests from the dead’s archive? I requested these documents from YCAL MSS 1090:

b. 73 Sara Wintz;
b. 73 Wizard of Oz confetti at Wattis Institute, September 2008;
b. 2 Autographs of the Stars;
b. 42 Initiation to the Magic Workshop;
b. 42 Diary, 1958, 1959· 1961;
b. 62 Creature from the Black Lagoon;
b. 60 Elizabeth Bishop house;
b. 60 Dodie Bellamy as "Faith" in Jack Spicer's play, Young Goodman Brown, Halloween 2005;
b. 50 Poets Theater - 20 Folders;
b. 80 - photograph of Sara Wintz

It is strange that literary figures ultimately become a series of papers meticulously organized inside sequestered cardboard boxes.

Before I arrived, COVID-19 closed the Beinecke. A two-hour drive from Providence to New Haven, and halfway there I learned the entire Yale campus had suddenly closed to anyone without a Yale ID. It felt like being denied access to a friend’s grave... Was this a message? There was always something ephemeral about Kevin. About being with Kevin and Dodie together.

When I moved to Oakland in 2011 my boyfriend and I celebrated Kevin and Dodie’s 25th wedding anniversary with a crowd of their friends at Café Macaroni, where it was said that theirs was the first gay marriage in San Francisco. As they stood before us, a crowd of resplendent Flaming Creatures cheering, I thought, “I only want my life to be this type of magic.” Our initial conversations became part of a decade-long kitsch-sweet Midsummer Night’s Dream.

This is not to minimize Dodie, a glittering gem in the pantheon of queer, experimental, feminist writers. (A mere morsel of my Dodie appreciation lives in this interview we did in 2012 for Harriet.) I’m writing about Kevin because I haven’t, he’s gone, and I miss him.

Kevin was/is a magical person, with whom I hesitate to use the past tense because his psychic material is still around us. A fine gold dust… glitter. Every once in a while, I listen to the news and think, “Royals are moving to Canada amidst Brexit pandemonium? Kevin would have a field day with this.” It’s like a phantom limb in my social media timeline.

Kevin drove me and my boyfriend home after dinner in San Francisco. As we sailed across the Bay Bridge, Kevin turned to the backseat expediently, his hair swept up by the wind, a smile and a concerned look on his face, and he asked with imperative seriousness, “What’s your favorite book that I’ve written?” I said, “Argento Series.” “Then I’ll read from that, at our reading together.”

Standing behind the microphone in front of the fireplace in Jackqueline Frost and Zoe Tuck’s living room in Oakland for their Condensery Reading Series, he read from the book “in honor of Sara and her reading.” I felt like a queen. Kevin saw everyone as movie stars from the pantheon of Hollywood. I hesitate to say “like,” as in, “like movie stars from the pantheon of Hollywood” because his was a more direct comparison than that.

I really wonder what I looked like in that photograph. I imagine that it’s a photo Kevin took of me after a reading I curated for Small Press Traffic in 2011: Simone White and Alli Warren. One minute, I was standing in front of a wall, watching the crowd, the next minute, Kevin was standing in front of me and asked if he could take my picture. I complied, because… Who doesn’t want to be photographed by Kevin? I must have responded with a whit of self-consciousness because after the first snap he paused and asked sympathetically, “Do you get uncomfortable in the spotlight?” That’s the photograph of me that I imagine is in his archive. Me and him at that one moment in time.

I miss being in the orbit of someone who saw everybody as a film star (whether or not they were comfortable with acting like one). If, in poetry, we write ourselves into a lineage, I’d like to write myself into a lineage that includes Kevin and Dodie. To carry forward the best of Kevin in my actions. This seems akin to what Kevin said in his National Poetry Foundation Keynote Address, “Activism, Gay Poetry, AIDS in the 1980s,” on June 29 2012:

I felt, in a very real way, connected by transmission all the way back into a previous, more fabulous time. The time of Paul Swan or Hart Crane or Langston Hughes or Ramon Novarro. In this way, time seemed to flatten out, dissolve, so that all gay men and women were living more or less on the same mobius strip of continual desire and renewal.

I was listening to his reading at Jackqueline Frost and Zoe Tuck’s house, noticing the laughter in the audience from people who do and don’t live in the Bay Area anymore. Kevin appeared before me for the first time in 2010 at the Poetry Project celebrating The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater. An impossibly entertaining performer, he was like the Zeus of poetry readings and performances. One of the only solo readers who I always felt could “go long” and read for longer than the pre-ordained 20 minutes… And that would be fine. As the reading came to a close, I approached him and asked, “How did you get so good at this?” He said, “Oh, I’m just a ham.” It was at that moment that I knew I would never be as good at Poets Theater as Kevin.

In one of my favorite moments from our Condensery reading, Kevin provides a close reading of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” music video. From his vantage point, she zigzags “like a Pharaoh across a field of barley, poplars swaying behind her… hugging herself as though like Heathcliff, she had been cast out of society by some unnamed offence related to her fabulousness.” I wondered then and now, “How is Kevin’s writing so funny?” It’s in his delivery, but his delivery sticks to the page.

We know Kevin by the references his poems contain, by the places and experiences he maps. We learned to do “The Chloë” from Kevin. Then, we taught each other. Through sheer social transmission, we in the Bay all learned how to do this one move that Kevin originally told a very small group of people, was exactly like what Chloë Sevigny does in photo shoots: a brief look down and then a quick, mischievous look up and off into the distance. Within weeks, his version of her face had launched a thousand ships of cool and devious look-alikes.

I knew Kevin best from his letters because, like Kate Bush’s Cathy, I was and am always zigzag-ing through barley wanting to be let in to San Francisco’s window. We were never in the same place for very long. When I grew older, I moved from Oakland to the small town of Rhinebeck, NY for a job. Instead of the familiar police helicopters overhead, I lay awake in bed listening to the disquieting sound of crickets at night in a building supervised by a former NY State Trooper. I was lonely and this genre of adulthood was not for me—felled from a cosmos of protests, hugs, and creativity onto a shooting star bound to a course destined for nothingness. One particularly glum day, out of the blue, I found a postcard peeking out of my mailbox and when I turned it over to the back, I recognized the handwriting immediately. It was from Kevin:

Hi Sara, here in SF we

will always be

missing you, and I

hope to see you

again, either HERE

or THERE, as often as

possible. Don’t forget

us. Love Kevin and

Dodie.

A few weeks later, I drove alone to the DMV to trade my California Driver’s License for a New York State Driver’s License. It took two or three takes, and one very patient DMV photographer, but I managed to perfectly nail “The Chloë.” Even if it wasn’t my driver’s license, I would have taken it with me everywhere.

 

With thanks to Xander, Zoe, and AK for their close listening.