I’m not going through his whole bio, it would take too long as the man has lived several lives, and counting. He was born in Mississippi, but according to Kevin Sessums,
“I couldn’t wait to escape the place.“
He did and headed to NYC to attend The Juilliard School… fast-forward to years of being an actor, he accepted a job at Andy Warhol’s Interview as one of its Senior Editors before being promoted the next year to Executive Editor.
Vanity Fair’s Editor in Chief, Tina Brown hired him away and his work has also appeared in Elle, Marie Claire, OUT, The Advocate, Playboy, Travel+Leisure, and others.
Oh… and he also played Peter Cipriani in the first miniseries based on Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City plus, he’s written two best selling autobiographies, Mississippi Sissy & I Left It On the Mountain.
Now he has his own online magazine, sessumsmagazine.com…
Speegle: We are both upstate guys now, me in the Catskills and you in the Hudson Valley. But right now I’m in Merida, Mexico for a month. Are you sick of winter yet?
Sessums: “No .. I lived in San Francisco for five years so I’d get sick of it in the summer out there. I moved back east last year after five years living on the top of Telegraph Hill. It was a fairytales-of-the-city place in many ways, that garden apartment. But my Cinderella days are over. I love a good snow storm and one is heading this way tonight. You’re going to miss it. I am heading over to London next week for month though. So as much as I love Hudson, New York, and small-town life – I say Hudson is Mayberry if it were directed by Wes Anderson – I still need a dose of city life every few months.
I am busy booking interviews with West End actresses for the next iteration of sessumsMagazine.com and planning other stories from there for a special London issue.”
Yes! The reason we are talking, your online magazine. How is doing a magazine without having a physical product? We both worked for years in publishing… is print going to die altogether? It’s certainly on life support, it seems, with a few exceptions…
“This is not going to turn into a a chronicle of a death foretold. Let’s keep it positive. I wish everyone well in the print world but it is a different universe now. I’d still take a job in that world and find new ways to explore it. But I could not do what I am doing now digitally in a print version. So, in that regard, It does open up possibilities and new pathways to ‘publish’ one’s voice and one’s vision. I sort of see sessumsMagazine.com as a true hybrid though. So many digital sites do not have the feel of a print magazine. I think I’ve hit on something with my home page that sort of feel like a printed broadsheet in digital form, the way it flows in a narrative arc visually and story-wise.”
It does have a more journalistic quality than a blog or some websites or printed versions of magazines. We met at Vanity Fair and now since Graydon Carter left, it seems he’s doing his own experiment with Air Mail, an email subscriber newsletter. Curious how this will look and read, as opposed to a website. You’re sort of competitors now, as much as a blog like The Wow Report can have content the same as any multi-million dollar operation.
“Well, I am a one-man editorial band and had no financial backing and art direct it all myself too re: the structure of it all. I do most of the writing. I wish I could compare myself to Graydon but he’s in a league of his own. I just realized from my Facebook ‘footprint’ and the following I have developed there that I might be able to generate a bit of an audience in this form too. Facebook for me is much more political a venue for me however. I hold forth more about issues and Trump and shit over there. I have purposefully edited sessusmMagazine.com too be more cultural. And as its tag line says, it is “often artful, sometimes tactful.” I hope so, at least.”
I see the distinction being one of your many followers on FB. So this current issue, is it themed? How did you develop the lineup. You are a master interviewer, you have have done some 25 Vanity Fair cover stories, that part must be easy. But you have great visuals too. Guess it helps to know some of the best in the business.
“This issue is a mix of archival stuff and new exclusive interviews with Pat Cleveland in which she talks about the legendary African American fashion designer Patrick Kelly for whom she was a kind of mentor in the 1980s. He, like me, was a sissy from Mississippi. Pat convinced him to move to Paris and the town made him a star. He died of AIDS alas on January 1, 1990. So many people don’t remember him so I wanted Part One of Pat’s interview to be about him. I combined my talking to her about Patrick for a book proposal I have out right now about him with content for sessumsMagazine.com. I have had to learn to multi-task and conflate endeavors. Part Two in the next iteration is kind of mind-blowing since Pat really opens up about her childhood in Harlem and her artist mother and the creative people around whom she grew up. Eartha Kitt was like Auntie Mame to her and she even tells me for the first time that her mother as a teenager was accosted sexually by Paul Robeson.
I excerpt an old Vanity Fair story I did on Dolly Parton that reads as if we could have hung out last week. And I write about the morning that I went to Diane Sawyer‘s office at ABC to do a cover story on her for Parade when I’d been up all night doing crystal meth – I am in recovery now for the last 7 years- and how Diane in her way put me on that path of my recovery that very morning. There’s that kind of mix of content on the site – and that’s just a fraction of it. Visually, it’s tricky. I credit photographers I curate for the stories but do not have the money to pay them. I have to be honest and say – since you asked about it – that I might be skirting some issues there. But I hope within the context of the site and the beauty of it – which they are such a part of creating – that they understand. It is a tricky issue though – getting back to digital vs. print.”
Wow. That’s a LOT. You cross-pollinate. I love that about the magazine and the way you think. We both had good Condé Nast training from some of the best Editors in Chief of the last century. And to that you add the life experience of Zelig. That’s probably one reason you like Hudson so much. Firstly, access to NYC but you don’t have to prove anything at this stage and with your own magazine, whatever limitations, you can do or say whatever the fuck you like.
“Well .. I did say ‘sometimes tactful’…”
“Mostly not”
“That’s the tagline for your digital magazine, Trey.”
OK. I’d better write it down. Hey, wait a minute…? I just registered the shade of it…
“Can one ‘register’ shade as in copyright it? If anyone can, you can. And World of Wonder. They sort of have, come to think of it.”
I think RuPaul probably beat us all to it…
So, you have a special treat just for Wow Report readers, yes…?“Yes, I have freed from the subscriber wall two exclusive interviews this month with two Broadway stars who happen to be out gay men too. Gideon Glick – who’s been out since the seventh grade, he told me – is starring as Dill in the new Broadway production of To Kill a Mockinbird. And Gavin Creel who won the Tony for his work with Bette Midler in Hello, Dolly!. He told me that the turning point in his career and his attitude toward his life really was when he told himself,
‘I am going to put my dick back in my pants and I am going to seize this moment.’
To get some context for that, go read the story.”
Thanks, Kevin. I will.
