WHEN RAQUEL WELCH LIVED WITH MY BROTHER AND ME IN MISSISSIPPI

THE RADICALIZATION OF A SEX SYMBOL

(Above: Raquel Welch being photographed by Terry O’Neill for the publicity campaign for the film version of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge.)

"Raquel Welch died. I thought of your bedroom,” I texted my brother, Dr. J. Kim Sessums, last night. Such a text is cryptic to anyone other than our sister, Karole, who probably turned to her wife in North Carolina last night and told her that she too was thinking of Kim’s bedroom when we were kids and were tentatively - then tenaciously - entering the hormonal tyranny of our teenage years for there in Kim’s bedroom out in the Mississippi countryside was a life-size movie lobby standee cut-out likeness of the wondrously steady Raquel. She was like our fourth sibling, an ironically silent Cassandra of sorts beckoning us to a life of fame and symbolism and the importance of sexuality in one’s identity. Dressed in the white jumpsuit-like outfit she wore for Myra Breckinridge, she was gussied-down to be less revealing for downmarket little towns like the one we lived outside of called Forest. Indeed, the movie theatre where we’d often go to Saturday matinees was simply called The Town. When we said we were going to The Town theatre, we precisely were. It wasn’t like the town theatre; it was The Town theatre. It was also the place where the quest I am still on in my life began in the dark where the light flickered and where I realized Raquel Welch didn’t turn me on, first when I was ten years old marveling at Fantastic Voyage - a, well, seminal movie of my childhood in which she and, more important, her myriad male costars were submerged inside a male scientist’s body in a tiny submarine to explore its bodily fluids in order to cure him of something seemingly incurable inside him - and then four years later staring rather aghast at her in her starring role in Myra Breckenridge. Seeing and experiencing her, I began to create myself positively within that negative space where such children and such teenagers in a heterosexualized world must wander in search of something we cannot name until we come to call it ourself. “Of course magic was involved at the beginning of my quest,” wrote Gore Vidal as an invented diarist in his satirical, polemical novel of the same name which deals defiantly with gender roles and sexual orientation and feminist tropes within societal constructs. “But I have since crossed the shadow line, made magic real, created myself … No similes. Nothing is like anything else. Things are themselves entirely and do not need interpretation, only a minimal respect for their precise integrity.” Reading those lines this morning along with the texts from last night can still put me back in that town in the Town, the former the place from which I ran but the latter forming me in its darkness and its light.

"Strangely, that life-size cutout of Raquel was never about the sex symbol," Kim texted back. "It was about the cool factor of the crafted standing image in a residential setting. We were strange kids."

"Where did it come from?" I asked.

"For some reason, a boy named Robert Chambers had stolen it from The Town movie theatre in Forest, I believe, and was trying to get rid of it," he texted.

Me: "People bemoan social media but I wish we had visual documentation of that time in our lives. I was always amazed that Mom allowed it to remain in the house. The Forest High School football coaches were priceless in their amazement at it when they arrived to talk to me one year and then you in another later one about playing football."

Kim: "Yes. I remember Coach Amis sitting in the chair next to it trying to convince me to play football my senior year. Coach James Clark looked at Raquel and grinned. Sex appeal is color blind."

Me: "There was some radical politics embedded in that bedroom out in that Mississippi countryside in the early 1970s when we got a Black football coach turned on by a white sex symbol in a home that housed two queer siblings of a straight brother longing to be an artist who would grow up to sculpt life-size versions - often larger than life-size for some commissions - of other famous people. It has always amazed me that you had the bandwidth not only to become a sculptor but also an OB/GYN. There is some connection there to your living your teenage years with a life-size facsimile of the most famous sex symbol alive who no longer is.”

Kim then texted me the photo above of the bust he'd done of the man who later became his artistic mentor, Andrew Wyeth, the only bust Wyeth ever posed for. It has always struck me about the narrative of the lives of these two strange kids, these Mississippi orphaned brothers raised so lovingly by our Mississippi grandparents, Mom and Pop, that we - he a renowned sculptor mentored by Wyeth and I once the Executive Editor of Warhol’s Interview where I started my editorial and writing career in magazines - grew up to have the two very different ur-Andys of American art, Andy Wyeth and Andy Warhol, as such significant presences in our lives. I guess that’s because although we had a deeply provincial provenance - calling it “provincial” gives it even more cachet than it had out in that Mississippi countryside - we were far from “Andy Hardys” ourselves.

This is what Kim finally texted after texting me the photo above: “Just stumbled across this photo of Andy looking at ‘Andy’ in his studio looking at the artist who had a life-size cardboard cutout of Raquel in his bedroom. The photo is circa 1996. He would have thrown his old head back and cackled at the thought of it all.”

I too threw my old head back. I cackled also. But then I ceased my cackling and looked at the word “artist” my brother had texted me in reference to himself and how he so easily owns it. I haven’t been as hardy in my own Andyiness staking my claim to being one. Sometimes I feel as if I am the cutout life-size cardboard version of what an artist should be. I am still attempting to create myself positively in the negative spaces my life has left for me to inhabit. That quest continues. But of this I am certain: I am grateful that my brother and I - so different as adult men - can bond over our having been such strange kids. And Raquel Welch stood watch over us, giving agency to our strangeness. I am glad in her death she stood watch again and through our texts about her we two very different men became less strange to each other. That too has been the quest of my lifetime: not to be a stranger to my little brother. Thank you, Raquel.