Kevin Killian

Kevin Killian was born on December 24, 1952, in Smithtown, New York.[6] He was raised Roman Catholic and attended a Roman Catholic parochial school run by Franciscan friars.[7] He discussed these experiences in an essay in the edited work Wrestling with the Angel.[8] He was also the New York City spelling bee champion.[9] He attended Fordham University and graduate school at Stony Brook University in the 1970s.[6]

Killian moved to San Francisco in 1980.[10] A year later in 1981, he met fellow author Dodie Bellamy, both are bisexual.[1][6] The couple were married for 34 years.[1][11][12]

Killian admired the work of JT LeRoy (later to be revealed as the pen name and persona of author Laura Albert), and held public readings of LeRoy's work in 2000.[13]

As a beginning novelist, Killian tied for first place in the "Hamming Up Hammett" Dashiell Hammett bad-writing contest in San Francisco in 1988.[14] Author Dodie Bellamy featured him as a partially fictional character in her vampire novel The Letters of Mina Harker.[15] His poetry has appeared in the anthology The Best American Poetry 1988, the magazine Discontents, and the anthology Good Times: Bad Trips.[16] Killian once based a volume of poetry on the work of horror film director Dario Argento[17] (motivated to do so as a response to the AIDS epidemic). Killian also helped author Alvin Orloff polish chapters of his novel Gutterboys.[18] Noted author Edmund White described his work as "a kind of mandarin American casualness that is peculiar to … West Coast writers … a school of refined but deceptively offhand stylists."[19] The Village Voice called My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi, "impeccably edited".[3] The work was also highly praised by The New York Times.[20]

Killian's 2009 collection of short gay erotic fiction Impossible Princess won the Lambda Literary Foundation Award for best gay men's erotica.[21] The first story in the collection, "Young Hank Williams," was written with Canadian cult writer Derek McCormack.[22] The collection was inspired by Kylie Minogue's album of the same name and, in turn, it inspired Conrad Tao's piano composition "All I Had Forgotten Or Tried To".[23]

Killian was founder and former director of Small Press Traffic.[24] He also edited the poetry 'zine Mirage.[25]

Killian died from cancer on June 15, 2019.[26][12]

Killian's interest in theatre emerged in the early 1980s when he saw experimental plays by Carla Harryman.[27] Harryman and Tom Mandel subsequently cast him in their play Fist of the Colossus.[28] He co-founded the Poets Theater in San Francisco,[5] and acted in as well as wrote pieces for the group.[27] As of 2001, he had written 31 plays.[28] He co-authored the performance art piece The Red and the Green in 2005 with cinematographer Karla Milosevich.[29] In 2009, Killian and David Brazil co-edited a collection of Poets Theater pieces, The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theatre: 1945–1985.[5]

Killian was also active in bringing attention to important LGBTQ artists and writers of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. He held poetry readings of a wide number of influential poets and writers and participated in a number of panels, art installations, retrospectives, and memorials. For example, in 2008 he was a featured speaker at a University of Maine "Poetry of the 1970s" conference.[30] He and artist Colter Jacobsen also helped organize a tribute ("Kiki: The Proof Is in the Pudding") to the Kiki Gallery, an influential art gallery in San Francisco in the 1980s that featured the work of LGBTQ artists.[31]

• Links to online works by Kevin Killian
• Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.