Jun 13, 2008  |  By: AMY CAVANAUGH  | COMMENTS     

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.’”

MAKING THE MOVE from writing about actual events to crafting a novel isn’t always a smooth transition, but Kilmer-Purcell says he ultimately enjoyed writing the novel. 

“It’s kind of more difficult in a way, but every once in a while I would sit back, pinch myself, and say that I could let anything happen,” he says, “With a memoir, you already know what happened since you lived it, so it’s about how you tell it, but with fiction it’s about what you’re going to tell.”

Much of Kilmer-Purcell’s fame came from his days as Aqua, a drag queen who wore live goldfish in her aquarium bra (raising the ire of animal rights group PETA) and performed all over the world. But over time, drag is “one job that fell by the wayside,” he says, “it was the most work for the least reward and got me in the most trouble.”

So though he has made a name for himself as both a successful advertising executive and a drag queen, in Kilmer-Purcell’s next book, which he is working on now, he writes about the goat farm in upstate New York he bought with his partner, Brent Ridge. The couple manufactures organic goat milk soaps and Kilmer-Purcell describes the book as his “coming of middle-age story.”

Since both of Kilmer-Purcell’s books have gay themes and he also writes a column for Out magazine, he does harbor some concerns about being pigeonholed as a gay writer.

“It’s a constant struggle,” he says, “I’m gay writing from a gay perspective, but I hope that the themes I touch on are more universal, and I don’t just read things written by gay people. But I do write things that I know gay people might enjoy.”