New Series of Essays at Social Text Focus on Kevin Killian

Social Text Journal's newest dossier, Periscope, will feature one essay a week on the work of Kevin Killian. "The writers here—Steven Zultanski, David Kuhnlein, Kay Gabriel, Eric Sneathen, Cam Scott, and Rob Halpern—examine a wide breadth of Killian’s genre-spanning work," writes editor Marie Buck in her introduction. First up is Zultanski's piece: "Very Good: On Kevin Killian’s Fascination," explores Fascination, a collection of three earlier works, edited by Andrew Durbin and published by Semiotext(e) in 2018.

Bedrooms Have Windows, Bachelors Get Lonely, and Triangles in the Sand were "written decades apart but [are] all concerned with gay life in Long Island and New York City in the 70s and 80s." More:

...In each book, the narrator (always a character named Kevin who is suggestive of but not identical to the author) navigates love and pain, sometimes getting his heart broken, sometimes getting used by older men, and sometimes badly hurting others: in one scene, he tricks a boy into sleeping with him to amuse an older lover; in another, he cynically offers a boy for sex to bribe his landlord’s son.

I don’t think I’m unduly or fetishistically focusing on moments of emotional and physical violence because Fascination, as a whole, is pervaded by interpersonal ugliness. Moreover, mingling representations of sex and violence was part of a communal aesthetics: New Narrative writers were taking inspiration from the work of their friends like Kathy Acker and Dennis Cooper, whose writing married formal experimentation with self-consciously excessive content. Such work was, of course, an attack on hypocritical straight mores (which find perversity everywhere but in the violence they legitimate), as well as a giddy affirmation of the destabilizing power of fantasy, however antisocial it might be.

This aesthetic also served as a reflection of oppressive social structures, as a vehicle for a simultaneous critique and celebration of a sensationalized media, and as a strategy for writing through the link between sex and trauma without submitting one to the other. But regardless of the seriousness of purpose, in Killian’s work (as in Acker’s, Cooper’s, and Dodie Bellamy’s), intentionally unconscionable scenes are written with a palpable pleasure: one gets the sense that the author is enjoying the spectacle of cruelty and hopes the reader will enjoy it as well.

Read on at Social Text.