Kevin Sessums

Kevin Sessums was born in 1956 in Forest, Mississippi. His brother is artist Dr. J. Kim Sessums of Brookhaven, Mississippi.[1]

Sessums attended, but dropped out of, the Juilliard School in New York City.[2][3]

Sessums has served as executive editor of Interview and as a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, Allure, and Parade. His work has also appeared in Travel+Leisure, Elle, Out, Marie Claire, Playboy, Thedailybeast.com and Towleroad.com. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of FourTwoNine magazine and the Editor at Large of the Curran Theatre in San Francisco. Currently, he is the Editor in Chief of sessumsMagazine.com which he founded in October 2017.

In 2007, Sessums published a memoir titled Mississippi Sissy, which is about the conflicted life of 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.[4] His audio recording of Mississippi Sissy was nominated for a 2007 Quill Award.[5] In 2015, he published his second memoir, I Left It on the Mountain,which made the New York Times Celebrity Bestseller List.

Sessums portrayed the character Peter Cipriani in the miniseries adaptation of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City.[6]

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.[7] The company subsequently issued an apology.[7]

Sessums is openly gay and he is HIV+.[8] In an August 2014 interview with The New York Times to promote FourTwoNine, a magazine, he claimed to have used crystal meth.[8] At the time of the interview, he resided in San Francisco,[8] but now lives in Hudson, New York.

• 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