Fascination: Memoirs

by Kevin Killian, Andrew Durbin (Editor)

A memoir of gay life in 1970s Long Island by one of the leading proponents of the New Narrative movement. Fascination brings together an early memoir, Bedrooms Have Windows (1989) and a previously unpublished prose work, Bachelors Get Lonely , by the poet and novelist Kevin Killian, one of the founding members of the New Narrative movement. The two together depict the author's early years struggling to become a writer in the sexed-up, boozy, drug-ridden world of Long Island's North Shore in the 1970s. It concludes with  Triangles in the Sand , a new, previously unpublished memoir of Killian's brief affair in the 1970s with the composer Arthur Russell.  Fascination offers a moving and often funny view of the loneliness and desire that defined gay life of that era—a time in which Richard Nixon's resignation intersected with David Bowie's Diamond Dogs —from one of the leading voices in experimental gay writing of the past thirty years. “Move along the velvet rope,” Killian writes in Bedrooms Have Windows , “run your shaky fingers past the lacquered Keith Haring 'You did not live in our time! Be Sorry!'”

Genres: Memoir, Queer, LGBT, Nonfiction, Gay, Literature

312 pages, Paperback

First published November 16, 2018

About the author

Kevin Killian was an American poet, author, and playwright of primarily LGBT literature. He is also a highly regarded editor. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi, won the American Book Award for poetry in 2009. His novel, Impossible Princess, won the 2010 Lambda Literary Award as the best gay erotic fiction work of 2009. Killian is also co-founder of the Poets Theater, an influential poetry, stage, and performance group based in San Francisco.

He is married to Dodie Bellamy.

Reviews

[Bill Hsu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dec 2019: revisiting "Bachelors Get Lonely", the 2nd of the three sets. Perfect balm for a stressful week, a little hope (however depraved and deranged!) in dark times. Most (all?) of the pieces have appeared in other collections, but it's great to enjoy and admire them in one volume. Funny, I always thought the "hits" like "Hot Lights" and "Spurt" were fiction, so smart and sexy and outrageous, but here they are listed under the (not so) sombre subtitle of "memoirs". I never got around to asking Kevin how much of (for instance) "Spurt" actually happened. He probably would have been vague anyway, and that's very New Narrative.

There are lots of fine quotes peppered through the other reviews here. I'll just add one, from the end of "Hot Lights", after (among other things) a rather torrid and hilarious pornographic sequence:

I kept thinking, I'm wearing way too many clothes! And I fled. Finally night fell and I looked up at the moon that shone over Morningside Heights, its white soft beam so limpid, full of the poetry of Shakespeare and the Caribbean and George Eliot --- the antithesis I suppose of the hot lights I had grown to need. How relaxed, how relieved I now felt, in the white moonlight. Relieved of the chore of playing with the big boys. My clothes seemed to fit again, I became myself. The moon's fleecy lambency corralled my pieces and re-linked us, we joined "hands" as it were, and sang and danced in a circle, very Joseph Campbell, "me" regnant, manhood ceremonial. Birth of the hero. I became Kevin Killian. Birth of the hero. Did I make a mistake?

[Alvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Killian's playfully twisted prose makes reading about his depraved youth an absolute delight. The book is chock full of literary and musical references ranging from highbrow to vulgar, and there's plenty of weirdly unsexy sex, too. Loved it all from start to finish!

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book collects three memoirs in a single volume, one of which (Bedrooms Have Windows) has previously been published, while the other two (Bachelors Get Lonely and Triangles in the Sand) have never appeared collected in print. It is this epic ternion format that makes me think of this book as the Lord of the Rings of the New Narrative movement, only instead of Middle-earth the action unfolds on the North Shore of Long Island in the 1970s, and in place of elves and hobbits we get twinks and Allen Ginsberg. Killian seems to have a sort of homoerotic Midas Touch, in that much of the things he describes in this book becomes queered. Tetris blocks shapeshift into buttocks, sailboats that bump up against each other are likened to "Frank O'Hara in bondage," a dildo machine transforms into a "Giger maquette from Alien," and, in my favorite example, on page 178 we're presented with "...a sassy full-length shower curtain of hot pink vinyl hung from it dramatically, the drag queen of all shower curtains." How gay is this book? Even the shower curtains are gay! And though the subject matter frequently crosses over into dark territory (loneliness, alienation, torture porn, the specter of AIDS, impalement, old guys who like to dress up as Santa Claus and engage in undinism), I found the book very funny in places: who can't find humor in sentences like "...his muscles opening and closing like the factories Bruce Springsteen is always moaning about"? Also, as a fellow lapsed Catholic, I find myself responding to such sentiments as "I'm on a search for God that never ends and won't be satisfied."

[Jee Koh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Who would have guessed that the North Shore of Long Island was so full of incident and pathos in the 70s? This three-decker memoir is in search of lost time, the writer's teens and twenties, lived in a haze of drugs and drink and drool-worthy boys. "Move along the velvet rope, run your shaky fingers past the lacquered zigzag Keith Haring graffito: "You did not live in our time! Be Sorry!""

[Dan Hildersley · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars overall, last memoir, Triangles in the Sand, my favourite, is 5 stars.
My introduction to New Narrative writing, this collection was as tender at points as it was gritty and grim all the way through. Seemingly, Killian's writing style flies in the face of the notion of an 'unreliable narrator', with its brutal and unflinching honesty of his traits, decisions and predicaments. He has an ability to adjust his recounts of his experiences to the appropriate level of understanding (or lack of it) he would have had at the age he was at the time of the events, which is profoundly jarring and immersive. It became clearer as the book went on that this is a tool of honesty vailed in misunderstanding, delusion and vulnerability, causing you to follow his downplaying of events until the reality hits you in the reminder of context and the unsaid. Yet at twists and turns in the book (especially the ending of Bedrooms Have Windows), you as the reader realise your understanding of honesty v.s. fabrication is in the hands of Killian under lock and key. His writing of his own apathy, recklessness and at times brutality is a reflection of all that he reveals he is conditioned and groomed by, but his honesty, present introspection and tenderness shine through in what are resilient and intoxicating memoirs.

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Triangles in the Sand, the last memoir in this collection)
Moving and charming and funny; Killian's writing is casual in a familiar and purposeful way. Def wanna read more of his stuff.

[Cameron · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first of Killian's work I have read, though its been in the pipeline for while now. I enjoyed the book, but I feel I could have done with reading each book of the memoirs separately, over time, rather than in one big binge. The book is simply too much info, of what is really a lot of vague, blurry recollections or fantasies. It's neither stark or sharply shocking enough to keep one on edge, like say Dennis Cooper or Bret Easton Ellis, authors I admire and place in the same cannon.

I realise, it's not fiction, though in places it presumably is, so perhaps the comparison to the authors above is a bit unfair. However, it does want to shock, or at least shake the reader out of their moral complacency. This is does, but in ways I felt I have read before, and kind of expected. There is one scene that stick out, and I say scene because is very cinematic of a sex game in motel gone very wrong, which gives the reader a jolt. But most of the moral shake up come from a blurring of traditional family or authority roles: older/younger, teacher/student, landlord/tenant, boyfriend/lover..These roles are what Killian loves to bend and play with, and we don't know for certain if they are true experiences, partly true or fantasies. Theres also a sex scene towards the end of the final book, that could be straight out of some porn fantasy, but is also a micro tale of exploitation, abuse, desire, and hypocrisy which concludes after a tense crescendo of moral possibilities.

The last book, Triangles in the Sand, is the most distilled of the three books. I almost could have done with just reading that. It charts his relationship with musician Arthur Russel , via Allan Ginsburg, from meeting him and thinking ' he would be an easy lay ' to realising it was to be more complicated than that. AR worked in infinitely more complex ways than the quick grab style of Killian and in the end, Killian admits a certain kind of defeat, which I wont go too much into for the sake of spoilers.
What one can be sure of though, is that the final pages of the book are deeply honest and its touching to see Killian, then in late middle age when writing , effectively holding his hands in surrender at AR's talents and the writer's admission of his own youthful arrogance - which reads with the pathos of a death bed confession.

[Sergio Caredda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Questo libro raccoglie tre parziali biografie dell’autore Kevin Killian, creando una sorta di trilogia del New Narrative movement. È uno stile di scrittura solare, spesso divertente, che racconta anche momenti macabri o di sesso estremo con frasi e modalità che non ti fanno abbandonare il racconto. E il tutto con un messaggio forte dell’autore e di tutti i personaggi: ricordate.

[Critic in the making · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books where you can read it over and over again and never get tired of it. It's delicious with juicy encounters, tantalizing details of an exciting era in gay culture before it lost all its allure to marriage and domesticity. Killian is a wizard with words and his prose and command of language is something to aspire to for any writer.

[Jon-Carlo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bro i really read through 260 pages just for Kevin Killian to call Arthur Russell pizza face 😭 Nah but on some real shit RIP to Kevin Killian, this was a life changing read.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A new world was swimming into my ken, like hoagies into a flashlit net. Bedrooms have windows to spy into, to comport oneself before, the way you or I might first read a book, then write one." (90)

"Much of my early life remains clouded in mystery. Like the--inside of a balloon." (92)

"I don't think he really knew what he was doing. Sometimes watching his body I wished I had a shroud made of blotting paper I could swaddle him up in. Like a huge industrial strength Bounty, the quicker picker upper. Know how tear gas works? It sucks out from the body all its moisture, so that the flesh swells out under protest. Sean seemed so full of juices that for the first time I understood vaguely what I hadn't since kindergarten, when they us the human body in 99 per cent water. This irritated me more. A vicious circle. All about Sean. Why, I wondered, why can't it ever be all about me? I. Me. Kevin Killian." (275)

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first reading experience with Kevin Killian's work. Fascination is a collection of three memoirs; the previously published "Bedrooms Have Windows", and the unpublished "Bachelors Get Lonely" and "Triangles in the Sand". This is a wonderful read of an honest portrait of the artist as a horny, young gay man coping with promiscuity and substance abuse. He has quite an interesting writing style using random thoughts, poetic flights of fancy and realism sometimes in the same sentence or paragraph but once you get used to his style, it reads easily. There are a few of his poems scattered through the text.

[Zoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

didn't write a review in the moment which i deeply regret. this book was AMAZING. i love kevin killian. this is maybe one of my favorite new narrative works, especially bedrooms have windows. pushing reality to its limits, past them, loose dodie/eileen sentences, joy and absurdity within them, so much sex, so much gossip, timejumping, luxuriating in the everyday details, love&care for friends and lovers, and WOW again for the sentences.

[Tom Buchanan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished this on Valentines Day! He is very honest about how much he fixated on Arthur Russell's acne.

[Kashif · Rating 3 out of 5]

jumbled book, never really got going for me, though shades of plenty, enjoyable enough, maybe i'll appreciate more once read more of killian's work

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this selection of memoirs and it has taken me ages to review because I didn't know what to say - it is so funny in parts - I loved the story of teenage Killian sitting in nothing but his fruit-of-the-looms having breakfast with the wife of the man he was having an affair with and who had a son his age who Killian never met but was obsessed with; of the various queer priests at his Catholic High School, in particular the one he discussed which of the new boys 'could be had' as the boys arrived for their first day; or his spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to be seduced by Allen Ginsberg (his account only confirms me in my belief that Ginsberg was a jerk living off the reputation of one poem and a couple of Vietnam War protests. In any case Killian was probably to obviously queer, Ginsberg liked giving blow jobs to 'straight' boys after his campus visits. I actually doubt that many were 'straight' - how many straight boys studied poetry back then?).

These memoirs are beautifully honest and confirm what I knew as a child about Long Island and its rows of safe suburban streets, that there was a rottenness at its core more foul than any city sewer. They are also wonderfully frank about his own foibles and failings and giving a beautifully honest and refreshing portrait of the sexual freedom and the adventures to be had in those years before things began to change. I like his emotional and intellectual honesty even when it reveals his naivety such as when he is about to perform in a gay porno film and worries whether the film wasn't insulting demeaning and giving a retrograde and false impression of who gays were. He also asks the 'director' for a script and what his 'motivation' is.

The memoirs republish his early 'Bedrooms Have Window' and two longer sections composed of, in part, shorter pieces many of which had previously been published in various anthologies but do not have the completeness or unity of his first book of memoirs. Many of these short pieces were the only things I knew of Kevin Killian, a writer whose work it is almost impossible to get hold of in the UK. Despite reading definitions of the 'New Narrative' and what it was and how Killian played a key role in its development I have never been able to retain that definition long enough to apply to any individual literary work, not even this one, but, if these memoirs are a prefect example of the New Narrative then it is a movement that has produced literature that will live.

[Zach Werbalowsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some solid writing, tender and funny. Full of quips and odd sentences that bend to some the authors odd will. Interested to get deeper into the a Killian hole (lol)