Kevin Sessums

Kevin Howard Scott Sessums (born March 28, 1956) is an American author, editor and actor.

Kevin Sessums was born on March 28, 1956, in Forest, Mississippi.^[1] His brother is artist J. Kim Sessums of Brookhaven, Mississippi.^[2]

Sessums attended, but dropped out of, the Juilliard School in New York City.^[3][4]

Sessums served as executive editor of Interview and as a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, Allure, and Parade. He was a Editor at Large at Grazia USA. Other work has appeared in Travel+Leisure, Elle, Out, Marie Claire, Playboy, Thedailybeast.com and Towleroad.com. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of FourTwoNine magazine, as well as the Editor at Large of the Curran Theatre in San Francisco. In 2022, he sold or donated almost all his possessions and set out with a couple of suitcases to be a cultural and spiritual pilgrim in the world. He lives half of each year in a small room in London and the other in small rooms around the globe. His column, SES/SUMS IT UP, appears on Substack.

In 2007, Sessums published a memoir titled Mississippi Sissy, a narrative of his conflicted life as a self-aware gay boy growing up in Forest, Mississippi. It made the New York Times Bestseller list and won the 2008 Lambda Literary Award for Best Male Memoir.^[5] His audio recording of Mississippi Sissy was nominated for a 2007 Quill Award.^[6] In 2015, he published his second memoir, I Left It on the Mountain, which made the New York Times Celebrity Bestseller List.

Sessums portrayed Peter Cipriani in the miniseries adaptation of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City.^[7]

Sessums was banned from posting on Facebook for 24 hours on December 29, 2016, after he compared the supporters of President-elect Donald Trump to a "nasty fascistic lot" in a post.^[8] The company subsequently issued an apology.^[8]

Sessums has been criticized about the veracity of his writing, with Julia M. Klein of the Columbia Journalism Review calling his memoir "I Left It On The Mountain" "not a pretty book," further stating that "it’s a work that hints at the narrator’s unreliability," noting that he recalled with novelistic detail conversations for which there were no notes or journals.^[9] Sessums claims "I was not carrying around a recording device when growing up in Mississippi. But what I did have, even then, was my writer’s ear. I listened.” The publisher of Sessums' book claimed on the copyright page that it was a work of fiction, while Sessums maintained it was a memoir. This added to the controversy.

Sessums also lost some credibility in the journalism world when he interviewed Ty Goldwater, the gay grandson of Senator and Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.<https://www.poz.com/article/Ty-Ross-Comes-Clean-1863-2393/> In an interview written for POZ magazine, Sessums admires Goldwater's naked body, ultimately admitting that the two men slept together. The piece concludes with this: "Naked, our bodies find the ways they must fit. I kiss his neck, his chest, that scar that surrounds our heart." Richard Johnson of the New York Post criticized a New York Times profile of Sessums that detailed his drug addiction, his homelessness,https://pagesix.com/2014/08/12/ny-times-glosses-over-gay-relationship-with-sessums-bio/ but not mentioning this embarrassing moment in his writing career.

Sessums is openly gay and HIV positive.^[10] In an August 2014 interview with The New York Times to promote FourTwoNine, a magazine, he claimed to have used crystal meth.^[10] At the time of the interview, he resided in San Francisco,^[10] and he subsequently lived in Hudson, New York. Sessums left his home in Hudson, New York, rehomed his cats, and now spends time in London, Paris, and Santa Fe, posting many times a day on Facebook of his life and adventures.

• Sessums, Kevin (2007). Mississippi Sissy. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 9780312341015. OCLC 71812897.
• Sessums, Kevin (2015). I left it on the mountain. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 9780312598389. OCLC 892514325.

• Web site for Mississippi Sissy Archived 2007-07-08 at the Wayback Machine