Bedrooms Have Windows

by Kevin Killian, Stan Leventhal (Editor)

He's an adult now, but once upon a time, he was a teenager. A typical lad growing up in the suburbs of New York, doing all the things that typical American teenagers do.

Like having an affair with Carey Denham, who's old enough to be Kevin's father; wondering what it would be like to meet Carey's teenage son. And then there's George Grey: Kevin's best friend. George is absolutely certain that he is the unclaimed natural son of Gypsy Rose Lee. And there's the Bernhardt Brothers, Michelle, Karoll, Sean, and the Boys from Brazil. They make Kevin laugh, they make him cry, they make him horny.

Genres: Fiction, Queer

134 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1990

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

[mark monday · Rating 3 out of 5]

postmodernism, meet queer fiction. surprisingly accessible. lots of sex. lots of stream-of-conscious rambling and musing. sentences melt into each other. irritatingly blank and passive protagonist - reminded me of dennis cooper, at least the dennis cooper of my imagination. surprisingly sweet and thoughtful overall. guess that must be the gay influence because po-mo is not known for being a sweet and thoughtful genre.

[Stephen van Dyck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Killian says "More important than its plot, it's the quality of feeling that strikes me now--something out of this world, 'outlandish' in its literal sense." And: "What is the trick of description, that writers must use? How do I make him more clear, vivid, real--or even imaginary?" This is an experimental memoir about teenage Killian's relationship with a man old enough to be his dad, and his friendship with another boy who's an aspiring writer. It's trying to render the real embodied feelings of a time--the horniness, insecurity, longing, ambivalence--whether the details truly happened or not. And the reader's embodiment, meaning it's very titillating, very yuck, wow, yeesh. At times the humor and dialogue felt like I was watching a camp classic. Constantly deep, thoughtful, hilarious, and devastating.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful memoir of breaking free from the restrictions and confines of the Long Island suburbs - I can understand everything about it, I was a decade younger than Killian in the years of this book but I remember visiting those soulless Long Island suburbs to visit grandparents. I couldn't tell you where they lived but I thought it was one of the saddest places I'd ever seen. It was so far from everything and yet close to nothing.

This is the story of Killian's involvement with an older man and another youth who wants to be a writer - it is about sex, and sex as part of growing up and all the other parts of growing into something and away from being a child - it is a tale of the scramble to get away from who you are and to be someone or something else - thank goodness I stopped myself from using a butterfly metaphor! - but it invites, or at least tempts me, into cliche because, just as Freud said "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar", and sometimes tales of our bildungsroman journey is a cliche because there are only so many truths and revelations to discover and for every new generation of young people they are new and fresh and exciting - but they are ploughing a furrow through well worn territory.

What Killian's tale reminds me of is how much more freedom we had fifty years ago - there were endless amounts of things we were not supposed to do but, maybe because there were so many more of us born to parents in the post WWII years, they were more willing to let us wander.

I loved this tale, it is a pity it has been so long unavailable, it is a pity so much of Killian's fiction has passed so quickly out-of-print and never been reissued. Maybe it is available on one of those internet archives of great books - I hope it is, though I haven't found it. This is a beautiful little work which probably explains better than any description of what Killian and others were attempting to do with 'The New Narrative'. I can only keep praising it - I won't go into specifics - discover and be shocked, if that is your way of dealing with what is different, a time different to now but in which the essentials of being young are the same.

[Zoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

oh this was genius and melting and more than i ever could've asked for....so many sentences stopped me in my tracks, i had to read them aloud or like explode. sentences of surprise, of sex, of heartfulness, of looseness, of strange silly depth.

"one spring afternoon i left school on my bike and rode downhill about fifty yards to a tiny, mushroom-like delicatessen that sold delicious Fudgsicles"

"i was silent too. i heard nothing but our labored breathing and the moist susurration of the towel swamping the floor"

it is also a heartwrenching ode, about writing & queer friendship/love, i love the way it is an intertwined unstable text that is kevin & george. i read this too fast for sure because i had to gobble it up, but i do regret that, need to go back and spread out in the sentences and the affect and the construction of the book as a whole.

"'it's so easy to write a novel, and this is how,' he said. 'just pretend you're writing a letter to me'"

& now dodie and kevin's marriage makes even more sense, their tone is so mirrored!

"my vocabulary did this to me, i attest. jiggle the vertical, horizon, definition. i can't get it straight. bang the box. i can't get it straight" <3

[Liv Archer · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The face is the most valuable of icons, how else shall I remember people? I blank out their weights and heights, and colors of hair; in my memory, as well as intercourse, genitals run into a blur. Tone-deaf to voices, insensitive to touch direct, I see money, l’argent, in the human face, as if in a mirror: had I a photo of George I would kiss its mouth and act very Salome all over it.”

[Matty B · Rating 4 out of 5]

A risky and brief autobiography of a gay writer whose life is full of understated intrigue. As I remember it precocious queer boys read Proust and get drunk and get it on.