In I Am Not Myself These Days: A Memoir, Josh Kilmer-Purcell, who is now a creative director at SS+K, New York, chronicles a time in his life during the late 1990s when he had just moved to New York City and was working as a junior art director at an ad agency by day and as the drag queen Aquadisiac, or Aqua, at night. The book also chronicles his relationship with “Jack,” a male escort who had a drug problem.
The memoir has made it onto the New York Times Best Sellers list, and has been received well by reviewers, and importantly, by Kilmer-Purcell’s friends and colleagues. “That’s the great thing about SSK, where I work now, is they cherish having all sorts of different personalities working for them,” he said. The book has been optioned for a movie and Kilmer-Purcell completed a screenplay in December.
RISING STAR Kilmer-Purcell began to dress as Aqua in Atlanta in 1995 for fun, but when he moved to New York it became a good way to supplement his income and he sometimes worked five nights a week in drag.
He was interested in dressing in drag, he said, because it looked to him like drag queens were always having the most fun as well as getting free drinks. Creating ideas for the costumes appealed to the art director in him. His gimmick was a bra with two clear plastic domes for breasts that contained a goldfish in each.
“I was immediately comfortable [in drag] and people think that it was very brave or very daring, but I have to say I’ve never ever once gotten any sort of bad comment from people on the streets or cab drivers or anything,” he said. “I used to have to get made up and go out in the middle of the afternoon to go to some private party or something and I’d be standing on Twenty-third Street hailing a cab fully dressed as Aqua and everyone would smile and holler out or whistle. It’s kind of infectious; as long as I’m having a good time, then they’re having a good time.”
Though the outfits were playful, there were dark sides to this world too. For Kilmer-Purcell, drinking was a large part of his personality in drag because it allowed him to overcome his inhibitions and deal with the extreme pain he experienced from the tight corsets and high heels.
Out on the town at night, Kilmer-Purcell attracted a lot of attention, but it was the attention from a man called “Jack” that helps drive this memoir. After going home with “Jack,” Aqua soon moved into his luxury apartment where much of the story takes place.
Kilmer-Purcell had been telling stories about this time in his life for a while and began to notice that his friends also seemed to remember one boyfriend who stood out and often fell into the “bad boy” category. Of all of the people he and his friends had dated, he wondered why one seemed to stand out in each person’s memory.
“I just started to think to myself, ‘Why do I remember this one and why does everybody always remember the one that was supposed to be bad for them?’ And then I realized that we all started making jokes out of all of these people but they stuck with us so there had to be something more important in the relationship that we weren’t looking at,” he shared. “So it was really a conscious effort to try to figure out why ‘Jack’ stuck with me for all of those years.”
The late nights and partying took a toll on the author, but he credits his youth as one reason he was able to sustain such high levels of activity all day and night–he was in his 20s at the time. His job at the unnamed agency, where he worked for clients like Kudos and on Emmy-award winning work for an ABC Television anti-drug campaign, didn’t suffer according to his account and is evidenced in his progression to his current job at SS+K.
“Because of my Midwestern upbringing, I had a really strong work ethic and I really liked my job so to me going to the advertising agency during the day was as fun and adventurous as going out,” he shared. “It wasn’t drudgery to get up at eight in the morning, after having been asleep two hours, and going to work. There was something new and exciting going on at work, too.”
Kilmer-Purcell continued to perform in drag after the time chronicled in the book ends. But, he said that as his advertising career continued to go well, he had to decide what he would focus on and retired from drag in 2000.
“I do [miss it], but I don’t miss it enough to do it again. It’s an awful lot of work and as you can tell from the book I got myself in trouble on a regular basis,” he noted.
Though the subject matter in his memoir is often daring and includes detailed descriptions of sexual encounters and drug use, the author said that he doesn’t see any of it as particularly embarrassing and that it has made him who he is today.
Now that he has put his wigs away and only drinks with dinner, his life has mellowed dramatically. He lives in Manhattan with his partner of six years, a physician, and describes his life as “vanilla — it’s just the two of us and our cat.”
