LGBT Book, Film & Video Blog

Candy Everybody Wants: a loosely autobiographical romp

by Josh Kilmer-Purcell

AMY CAVANAUGH
Friday, June 13, 2008

Not many people have gone from being a jet-setting drag queen to raising goats in upstate New York, but writer Josh Kilmer-Purcell has done that and more. Kilmer-Purcell, 38, who two years ago penned “I am Not Myself These Days,” a memoir about balancing his day job working in advertising with his nightly exploits as a drag queen, has written a new book, “Candy Everybody Wants,” a work of fiction that was released in May.

The new novel is about Jayson Blocher, who adds the “y” to his name in kindergarten, since he needed the “extra flair to set himself apart from the other, obviously less special Jasons in the class.” Jayson is tired of being a slave to pop culture and wants to be part of it, so he sets off from rural Wisconsin to a New York escort agency for Broadway chorus boys and then to a Hollywood sitcom set.

Kilmer-Purcell, who is gay, says that “Candy Everybody Wants” is only loosely autobiographical.

“The first chapter is drawn from my childhood,” he says, “It’s about a boy from my hometown who thinks he was born to be a celebrity and films a soap opera pilot in his backyard, which is something I did. So I started there, and wrote about how my childhood would have gone if it went as I wanted.”

It didn’t.

“It was so boring, and if it wasn’t, I would have written about it,” he laughs, “I had a very typical mid-Western upbringing.”

The novel is set in the 1980s, which Kilmer-Purcell deems “the birth of celebrity culture,” offering a critique of our celeb-worshipping obsessions.

“When we elected Reagan, an actor, to act as world leader, we headed down a path where [we went through] a primary season that [was] as ‘American Idol’ as we [could] get,” he says, “It’s not good or bad, but that’s how we’re progressing as a culture. There’s virtually nothing scripted anymore, and entertainment is entirely ‘reality based.’”

Full review of Tasty ‘Candy’ in DC Blade

posted by Tom Jackson @ Wednesday, June 18, 2008