Kevin Killian, essential writer

Kevin Killian has died, a tragically sad and unbelievable piece of news, an irrevocable loss for those who loved him and a stunning gut punch for those of us who knew him from the world of writing, where he was a kind of foundation upon which many other things stood—books, poems, plays, anthologies, classes and lectures and social happenings. If you knew Kevin you knew he was talented, original, generous, well-liked, gossipy, and he popped up everywhere. And if you don’t know who he is that’s a sad testament to the way a writer with a three-decade body of work and a crucial role in the queer San Francisco literary scene (and beyond) can still be somehow marginal rather than essential, which is what he was.

When I first started timidly telling people in my early 20s that I wanted to pursue a life of writing, a slightly older but far more artistically pedigreed friend said to me, “Well, if you’re going to be a gay writer you have to read Kevin Killian, you have to read ‘Shy.’” I went to St. Mark’s Bookstore in the East Village, when it was still on St. Mark’s Place, and found a copy, back when books by or about gay men always had a shirtless torso on the cover, which damned a whole generation of gay male writers to the tyranny of low expectations. But “Shy” was more interesting and cooler than anything I’d ever read before.

I loved the way the narrator was named Kevin Killian, same as the author, and that in Chapter 1 he was at his typewriter in his rented apartment when the other characters entered his life, as if he was writing them into existence. Which he was, since this was a novel, but it also seemed true, like a memoir. I didn’t know then that Kevin was a pillar of a movement dubbed New Narrative that made literary tricks such as this the point of literature, but instead of feeling tricked I felt awake to new possibility. I loved that his teenage characters had absorbed David Bowie’s lyrics to the point that they saw the world through the wisdom they found there, which was foolish and fabulous at the same time. I loved the unmistakably homo point of view, where “Kevin” could write of a character: “I thought he was kind of boring. Right at first sight. You could tell he was straight: he fairly vibrated with nasty heterosexual strings.” I absorbed with astonishment that this was a novel that wasn’t asking anyone for permission to be what it was going to be.

I was an MFA student at San Francisco State when I first met Kevin. I wound up after a reading at a table full of people where I had no business being and everyone seemed knowing and fabulous and gossipy in a way that must have been charming but mostly just intimidated me. Then years later we met again and maybe because I was older or maybe because he was, he was very easy to talk to. After that he always greeted me with a friendliness that seemed steeped in admiration. We once talked in the aisle of Trader Joe’s for 20 minutes about five hundred different things. He was irresistible. 

Later still he was writing review after review on Amazon that were little works of literature themselves, a kind of performative review cycle, and I said something like “I don’t dare ask you to review my novel,” but he smiled and said he would. His review of “You Can Say You Knew Me When” had the subject line title, “You Asked for It,” a message from him to me. In it, he said some of the most amazing things that have ever been said about my writing, like, “Soehnlein's details are like pinpricks of starlight in the black velvet vistorama of his novel.” Yes, I’m bragging, but, I mean, velvet vistorama! Thank you, Kevin, forever, for that. Worth noting: he also took the time to call out, delightfully, the fact that I incorrectly referenced when Ingrid Bergman was in Italy having her affair with Robert Rossellini; by the date I cited, the affair was “cold as ashes,” Kevin noted in a perfect aside.

Kevin was high and low in one, writing about Dario Argento, Kylie Minogue, Jack Spicer and the Black Mountain School. He was nice to everyone, knew everyone, told stories about everyone, collaborated with everyone—that is all the everyones who populate a literary underground, where you can make your life if not your living from art. He died at 66, which is grievous, stupid, and horrible, leaving behind his wife, the brilliant writer Dodie Bellamy, and countless friends, collaborators, former students, readers, admirers, and people he schooled on Ingrid Bergman. “Shy” seems to be out of print, which someone needs to correct immediately, but in the decades since he wrote dozens more, including his last, the brilliant “Fascination,” which came out in 2018. Go find one of his books and read it.

Comments

[Russell Graves]

Such a tremendous loss. Thank you for sharing this, Karl.

[K.M. Soehnlein]

Thanks for reading it, Russell.