by Jameson Currier

Duncan Grant at Charleston
pencil
art by Jameson Currier
20180422001

I would have no cognizance of gay history if it were not for my friendship with Kevin Patterson.  We met in our early twenties when we were both theatrical press apprentices working in New York City for publicity firms that represented Broadway, off-Broadway and touring theatrical productions.  Kevin’s battle with AIDS in the late 1980s would inspire many of the stories I would write and publish in my first collection, Dancing on the Moon, and his friendship was the background and events that shaped my first novel, Where the Rainbow Ends.  

But his influence would persist beyond my writings on AIDS.  Kevin was also a writer – shortly before he died his play on Alan Turing was produced off-Broadway. He was a devoted Anglophile. We would talk giddily on the phone after viewing the latest episode broadcast of Brideshead Revisited. Kevin had a particular fascination for the Bloomsbury group of artists and writers, writing a play based on the love triangle of Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey, and Ralph Partridge.

Kevin also introduced me to the art of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, as well as their life together at their country house Charleston in East Sussex. (Years later, Duncan Grant’s erotic drawings would inspire me to write the ghost story, “The Bloomsbury Nudes,” collected in The Haunted Heart and other tales).

A year after Kevin passed away, I traveled to London with his mother and we scattered his ashes in a park in Bloomsbury.  I have revisited the site several times in subsequent trips to London, most recently in 2015 to celebrate my sixtieth birthday.