Relationscapes: Exploring How We Relate, Love, and Belong
The Slow-Motion Inevitability of Becoming Yourself (with Kevin James Thornton)
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Introduction – 0:00
BLAIR HODGES: This episode includes brief discussion of abortion and also a lot of discussion about queerphobia. Listener discretion is advised.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: I got in super late last night, and this whole day today I've been just running around trying to—
BLAIR HODGES: That's the best way to do an interview, is when you're just completely harried and scattered. So that's awesome.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Oh, I know!
BLAIR HODGES: I always ask people, “Do you have a lot of stuff scheduled right before the interview?” We prefer that for maximum confusion and distraction.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yes. Perfect. That's where I'm at.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, good. I got the script up here. The recording is on. Let us begin. Take a little sip of the old…
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Gin? Oh, honey!
BLAIR HODGES: Later on, after we're done, I'm going to record a fancy intro. I'll use some clips from the interview, but you're not going to hear that right now. Just trust me. It's going to sound so NPR it'll blow your mind. Or bore you to tears. Either way, I hope that's okay.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah, for sure!
BLAIR HODGES: All right, here we go. [music begins]
Welcome to Relationscapes. We're mapping our lives along the terrains of family, friendship, gender, sexuality, race, ability, and more. I'm journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, and our guide in this episode is comedian and author Kevin James Thornton.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON CLIP: I think sometimes people hear my stories and I'm laughing at it, so I think they think, “God, I love this guy's really silly sing-song TikToks.” But I sometimes think about how absolutely conflicted I was because I really believed it.
BLAIR HODGES: In his super fundamentalist church back when it was the 90s, Kevin James Thornton really believed it. And he also had a big secret. He actually had a lot of secrets. But it wasn't safe for a teenager like him, who was quote-unquote “struggling with his sexuality,” to share those secrets at church.
Decades later, Kevin started singing about those old secrets on TikTok, and the videos went viral. You've probably seen some of them, but until you read his book, you won't know that underneath the humor there was also a lot of pain and a lot of unexpected twists in his life that brought him to where he is today.
His new memoir is called Big Baby: On Endings, Beginnings, and An Interdimensional Cat.
And he joins us to talk about it right now.
Nostalgic for the Nineties – 2:45
BLAIR HODGES: Kevin James Thornton, welcome to Relationscapes.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Hey, thanks for having me.
BLAIR HODGES: Can I start with a risky question? And I guess you have to say yes because I'm the host, so—
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yes!
BLAIR HODGES: Okay. This one's risky because I think nostalgia can be risky to indulge in too much, but I want to give this a try anyway.
Your signature statement, the thing that introduced me to you, is your “it was the 90s” videos. And it usually follows a little story about something from the past that's nostalgic but also funny, sometimes crappy. Like, you always kind of drop something in there about smoking. But it was the 90s, so that's what we did in college.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON CLIP: I was a chain smoker. And I know that's disgusting, but you have to remember, it was the 90s. And it was that point in the semester where I was almost out of financial aid, which is how I paid for essentials like cigarettes and Hot Pockets. Cigarettes and Hot Pockets. Cigarettes and Hot Pockets.
BLAIR HODGES: Or how you believed something problematic from your super fundamentalist church. Because it was the 90s. And the phrase is a reminder that things change. But I wonder how you would use it in a positive sense to be like, “Because it was the 90s—ah, that was great.”
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Oh, gosh. Right now it would be something to do with the lack of cell phones. I know it's kind of ironic because that's how I reach the world, was through the cell phone and social media. But now I think we're in some sort of weird reverse universe where we're sort of regressing into some kind of modern awfulness.
Yeah. So “it was the 90s” in a positive way was: we were not absurdly connected to these screens all the time because it was the 90s. It was amazing.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And I guess boredom was more of a possibility in a different way. Because we can get bored by screens, but our dopamine's still taking hits while that's happening. I feel like we're experiencing a different kind of boredom today, where it's a boredom of just a flood of stuff in our face versus, “I'm a kid and I'm sitting out on my back porch and there's nothing good on TV.”
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: I hate to admit it because I love stillness and quietness and being reflective, but I am totally an addict to that dopamine thing. Like, if I'm having a moment of nothing to do, a hundred percent I'm like, “Pick up and scroll.”
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, me too. There's been kind of an ongoing question I've been asking several guests about. My wife and I have this disagreement about whether the internet's been a net positive or net negative. And I know that's an extreme question, and I don't think we can answer it, but it gets you thinking. How would you process that question? Do you think this kind of connectivity that's led to our devices is a net positive or net negative? Where would you fall today, anyway?
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: I think we're honestly just in kind of a really awkward transition period. I think ultimately we'll sort it out. I mean, it might be another 20 years, but I think in the moment we're just in— I mean, if you think of a decade ago, it wasn't like this, you know? And it's really recent. We're really crossing into a brand-new technology that we have not adapted to yet. I think that's all it is. I really think that's all it is.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay. Well, some people have said it's just a net negative and they wish it never existed. But I think I kind of align more with your answer.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah, I think ultimately it will be positive. I mean, in so many ways. I can think of a young, in-the-closet person who feels like they don't have anyone to talk to. I didn't have that. I felt like I was the only one.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: And in today's world, I don't think I would feel like that. There would be other terrible things to come along with it, of course. But, you know, there's connection, and that's good.
BLAIR HODGES: I think it can be what we make of it, I guess.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah.
Christian Clown Show – 06:41
BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about the book here. You describe this youth group you're involved with. And part of the book, you're taking a trip to the big city, and you're all about to put on this play for the public in New York City. And everybody's dressing like clowns that represent various sins.
And here's a quote from the book. You say, “This entire production was sex obsessed. In my memory, though, I sometimes wonder if I'm overemphasizing that. During that youth group era, I was tangled around my own sexuality, so messaging about my body and sexuality might have stuck down in my brain a little bit deeper.”
So as you're reflecting and doing this memoir, you're also thinking about the story you're telling and how time may have warped it a little bit. But take us back there to the clown show.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. It was my junior year of high school, I think, and we went to New York for a mission. It was one of those youth group mission trips. There was one every summer where it was basically a high school group vacation, but we had to give it a purpose. So this time we were going to New York.
There was a guy from my church who had moved to New York to have this inner-city ministry. So he connected our Indiana youth group to Spanish Harlem in 1990. And we devised this whole plan of dressing the youth group up in clown costumes, and we were gonna wander around the parks of Spanish Harlem doing this super kind of—honestly, condescending—sort of message, weren't we?
BLAIR HODGES: Were you AIDS clown, or was someone else AIDS clown?
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah, no, I was definitely AIDS clown.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: So yeah, each clown had a cautionary tale we were gonna talk about in the park. And we're like 16-, 17-year-olds in New York City. We came from Indiana to save New York.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: You know, the iniquities of New York City.
BLAIR HODGES: Yes. But this is your first time in the big city, right?
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Oh, yes.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: And it was total—honestly, it was totally formative for me because I had never seen anything like that.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: You know, I grew up in Indiana in a small town. And suddenly we're in Manhattan, and it was mind-blowing in good ways for me. Honestly, it planted a lot of seeds inside me. I think that was like, “Oh, you need to get out of Indiana and come to a place like this.”
BLAIR HODGES: No offense to all of our Indiana listeners out there, all seven or eight of you.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Well, you know, I think they'll all agree with me.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, they probably would!
So you were AIDS clown. You talk about the sex obsession of this group, and you're not quite sure if it really was that saturated or not. I think it probably was.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Me too.
BLAIR HODGES: You know, it reminded me of that thought experiment where someone says, “Try to think of anything except a pink elephant.” That's how these youth groups operate. You're not supposed to be doing sex, but they talk about it so much that you can't help but be thinking about it all the time.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Well, and, you know, if you're dealing with a group of teenagers and puberty and emotion and hormones, and you're in this scenario where you're supposed to be talking about biblical concepts of purity and marriage to 16-, 17-year-olds who are sort of going crazy, I think it just by default becomes the lead message.
BLAIR HODGES: Yes. How did you end up there in this—you call it the super fundamentalist church. You've referred to New Horizon Tabernacle. You give the name in the book. And your parents weren't religious. This was my assumption, and I think a lot of people's assumption, that you were raised in this. But you chose this.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: I did choose it, and only because in that time period—again, it was the 90s, so there was no internet—and there really was not a lot to do in my hometown as a teenager other than get into trouble or go to church.
So that church put on big pizza-party youth-group productions. So it was super enticing. If you were 16 years old with nothing to do, you could go to one of many youth groups around town on a Saturday night, and they were having a concert with pizza and 100 high school students. It was a party! With a little Jesus tacked on at the end.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, that's how they're going to save the kids. They're fishing for souls. You gotta put some bait on the hook, you know?
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. So, I mean, that's how I entered that world. And at the time, I think my mom and dad thought it was positive.
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: You know, it's like, “Oh, our son is going to church. Isn't that respectable and amazing?” And it's not that my parents were not religious, because I think they would say that they are.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: But they're sort of religious in a liberal Methodist kind of way, you know?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, that makes sense.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: But they weren't churchgoers at the time, and they certainly weren't really strict fundamentalists. And when I say fundamentalist, that means different things to a lot of people.
BLAIR HODGES: Sure.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: This church had a rock band, and we all dressed like—some people, I think, hear “fundamentalist” and they think the women are wearing skirts and—
BLAIR HODGES: And they don't cut their hair and—
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah, right. It was not that brand. Yeah, yeah. Whatever that is.
BLAIR HODGES: It was biblical fundamentalism in the sense of having restricted ideas about the Word and what that meant for the world. But they wanted to make use of the world to bring people in. And like you said, there's pizza parties and stuff like that.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah, yeah. So the presentation of it was trying to be very cool. We had a smoke machine.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: We had lasers. It was theater.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, I think Jesus did. I'm sure he had lasers at some point.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah, that's in Matthew, I think.
BLAIR HODGES: It's in Matthew, yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: At the Sermon on the Mount.
BLAIR HODGES: Matthew 5. Sermon on the Mount. Yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: He had a smoke machine and lasers.
BLAIR HODGES: Exactly.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: I'm pretty sure.
BLAIR HODGES: Exactly.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: It was more primitive back then, pre—
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it was sort of the early form of the laser. They would just reflect light off the scales of the fish that he was delivering.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Right.
BLAIR HODGES: Yes, yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: It was a magnifying glass and fish.
Navigating Dual Worlds – 12:50
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, exactly. You had this internal battle going on, not just about your sexuality, but about the world in general. Because you also were really into pop culture. You loved MTV. And so there were some tensions there too about making sense of your church self and your worldly self and your gay self.
So I already see at this time these sort of divisions growing up in you, and that's going to cause tension throughout the book, throughout your life.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. You know, sometimes—I mean, that memory is 30 years ago. I'm about to turn 53, so more than 30 years ago. But I sometimes think about that, how absolutely conflicted I was and just sort of torn apart inside because I really believed it, you know, whatever that is at the time.
I wasn't faking it. I wasn't trying to put anybody on. I think sometimes people hear my stories and I'm laughing at it, so they think I was just sort of a teenager who was full of shit or something. But I believed it. But also, I'm me. So I wanted to go see cool bands, and I was kind of a pervert. I still kind of am, you know? And I like perverty things. So I was just really full of conflict.
BLAIR HODGES: Your grandma's lamp with the naked lady.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. I mean, yeah. Even as a 10-year-old, you can tell this child is going to be smut obsessed someday.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, with that then, how did you first start recognizing that you were gay?
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Well, it was in the context of that church, so it was seen through this lens of something I had to overcome. As soon as I was able to verbalize it and admit it, it came along with, “And I'm not giving into this. I'm gonna fight it. Ultimately, I'm going to get married and have kids and be a pastor.”
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. "Gay" as a temptation, not an identity, kind of a thing.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Exactly. So for a hot minute there, when I was in my late teens and even a little bit into my early 20s, it was something I was trying to resist.
BLAIR HODGES: I mean, your story about Timmy in the seventh grade was particularly touching. This is one of your close friends at the time, and you had this falling out where you were buying Guess jeans at the mall like we used to do. And he said that you looked like an f-slur. And you hadn't necessarily really thought of gayness, but that sort of—it seemed like that scared you a lot or just was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” you know?
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. So that's a story early on in the book when I'm maybe in the seventh grade, right before high school. And the f-slur, as you are saying—I guess that's how we're gonna say it on this show. [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: I'm not gonna say it!
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: But people know what we mean. In that time period, that's a word teenagers threw around all the time.
BLAIR HODGES: I said it all the time.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: And I was 10 years younger than you, and we said it all the time.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. And it didn't maybe have any literal meaning. It was more just a thing you say to piss off your friends or something. But yeah, that is sort of a formative moment because I had a friend, and we were both maybe 12 years old, and he kept saying it. And it was so frequent, it sort of pierced through the commonness of it and started to pierce into, “Oh wait, he knows something about me.”
And it was really scary.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: To hear someone saying that over and over. He was a close friend, so he was starting to pick up on something more, and in a 12-year-old sort of way, just kept drilling it.
So yeah, it's an awful memory. I mean, yeah, it's a thing that when I tell it, either in the book or sometimes on stage, I have a way of spinning all of this into an awful funniness.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. Well, we'll talk about that more too, because there's some stuff in the book where I was like, “That's a little different than the story I remember from TikTok.”
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah.
Jesus Journal Confessions – 17:07
BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about your Jesus journal for a second because this is really cool. This is documentary evidence that you had real-time evidence of how you were quote, “struggling with your sexuality,” as a teenager, and you write about it in the book.
You're about 17-ish. You had led on a girl, Christy. This is the pastor's daughter. And you had made friends with a rebel girl named Trish. I mean, this could have been such a good sitcom or some sort of—yeah, it's perfect for it. But talk about the journal as an artifact from that time and what it was like drawing from it.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. I probably filled up maybe a dozen of those paperback journals you would get at a drugstore throughout my teenage years. And I wish I still had them. At some point, I threw them all in a dumpster.
Because I was sort of pretending on paper, and I'm not sure for who. I guess myself. But I was writing these journal entries of what I thought a Christian man would document about his personal walk with Jesus. And little by little, honest sentences started creeping into these journal entries.
And I have a memory of—I was probably 18 years old. It was right at the end of high school. And I wrote the words “I think I might be gay” in this book. And I sat there and looked at it for a second, and then I tore the page out and threw it away.
And even years later, when I would flip through that journal just to remember where I came from, I would see that torn-out page in the book. And I wish I still had it, even for myself. It was poignant, even 10 years later, to be like, “Oh, there's that page I tore.” I tried to be honest with myself, and I could only bear it for a moment.
BLAIR HODGES: Is the throwing-away part of that same story? Was it a thing of, “I can't schlep these around anymore,” or was it like you needed not to have these? That's a sort of tearing a page out too.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Maybe. Yeah, you could be right.
I remember—God, you know, later in the book I become this sort of lost vagabond for a long time, for all of my young adult life. And I was just tired of carrying so much shit around with me. So I had this box in the trunk of my car of those journals, and I remember I was moving and moving and onto the next place, and I'm like, “I need to lighten this load.”
And I remember grabbing that box of journals and thinking, “I don't need these.” And I chucked them into a dumpster. I wish I still had them. But I don't now.
BLAIR HODGES: I still do that occasionally, but I'll take a picture of it on my phone that I'll never look at ever again. I'm like, “I took a picture of it, so I feel better about it.”
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah, yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: So this is where the story starts getting really spicy. You're still trying to figure yourself out, and it seemed like you pursued sex with a girl maybe in part because you weren't supposed to be doing that because you were Christian. But at the same time, it also seemed like you were trying to be like, “It's more important to be hetero than to not be having sex,” and that maybe was making this okay.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Completely. I mean, that goes along with the total conflict I was in on so many levels and layers. And it's hard to describe to someone who maybe hasn't done it, the way you can wall things off in your own mind to make sense of this cognitive dissonance you're living in.
And I did that to big extremes. But yeah, what you're saying is right. Premarital sex was a sin, but I would rather that happen than be gay. So maybe if I go ahead and start doing this, something inside me will fix itself or something. It's a lot of f*cked-up layers, I guess.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And I mentioned Trish earlier. She became pregnant. To me, this is a part of the book I didn't expect at all. I don't remember seeing any TikToks that sort of explore this, and I don't know how you could do it in your typical way. She got pregnant, had an abortion, which in your faith was also a catastrophe.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Oh, man.
BLAIR HODGES: And at the same time, you're still part of the youth group, and they're raising money to send you to go live in New York as a kind of mission trip. So it seems like the story of a hypocrite here, if people want to read this really unkindly. But I see a person who's torn between who they are and who they think they need to be, trying to bring those worlds together.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: And so, I mean, you're right. That's the part of the book that I think, for most readers, is where things are going to take a really unexpected turn. And I had to make a choice about what kind of book I was writing.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: And I know one comment that's already going to happen is, “God, I love this guy's really silly sing-song TikToks.” And here's this book that has a lot of funny moments, but it also has a lot of heavy moments.
BLAIR HODGES: Sure does.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: I just decided not to try and mold it into what I thought a social media audience would want. I just wrote the truth. And for better or worse, I just wrote the truth.
Melanchomedy – 22:35
BLAIR HODGES: See, but I think people who paid attention could see the undercurrent of feeling. Like, you've done some videos—I remember this one you did of you walking around an empty mall. I think you had gone back home for the holidays or something. And it's such a melancholy, beautiful little short film. And there's so much heart to it.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: That in recent years, when I come to visit my parents, I'll come take a stroll through this building.
I don't know why.
I don't even know why it's still open. There's almost nothing in here.
It's actually only been in recent years that they finally shut off this water fountain. I have a memory of being really young, like 7 or 8 years old, and the way the water used to just shoot up and then fall back down upon itself. And I remember telling my mom that I thought the water looked like people throwing their clothes off.
I'm in such a weird place. I don't know what's next, and I feel good. But, you know, I don't know. For most of my life, I've usually had some kind of sense of where I'm headed, and I don't right now. I don't know what 2024 has in store.
To everyone embracing change or uncertainty or heartbreak or the unknown, I hope your 2024 is everything that it's supposed to be. Happy New Year.
BLAIR HODGES: So I see what you're saying. And I think, yeah, casual people who watch your TikToks and just kind of know you as “it's the 90s guy” maybe didn't catch all your stuff. I think there are some surprises here in terms of, “Oh, this isn't just funny, goofy stuff.” But I think people who pay more attention to your stuff—I don't think it'll necessarily come as that big of a surprise if they've really been following you.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah, you're right. And that's sort of one of the weird things about a social media audience. An algorithm sort of divides everyone up into different categories, so I have different kinds of audience members.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Even if they don't know they're different kinds of audience members. But you're right. The truest me is—I have a lot of melancholy in me, and it goes along with the comedy stuff. I have a lot of things going on, even still today.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Well, and when people meet you on the street, I think I've seen you talk about how they might think you're just always happy-go-lucky. But sometimes maybe you're having a shitty day or you're just taken off guard or something.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: And that's also because during the pandemic, when my videos started to take off, the nature of what I was doing sort of allowed the viewer to make me whoever they wanted me to be.
So for sure, a lot of people were like, “Oh, this guy is this sort of extremely extroverted, really bubbly person.” So I would see people in the cereal aisle—and I mean, it still happens—and if you aren't ready for it, it's like, “Oh wait, you're kind of shy and introverted. Why aren't you singing right now next to the Grape-Nuts?”
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. You don't have your headphones, your earbuds in. What's going—this isn't auto-tuned at all.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Right. I mean, not that that is not me, but it's a little sliver of me.
BLAIR HODGES: Sure.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: And it's a me that really takes me a while around close friends to be that guy. So weirdly, strangers are getting a version of me that I really, in the past, would only show a couple of people. It's a weird thing to live through.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, and you also do standup too.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yes.
BLAIR HODGES: People might assume someone who does that wouldn't be so introverted. But of course, anybody who's spent any time paying attention to standup folks also knows there's introversion there. It's not like everybody in that work wants to be in everybody's face.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: I mean, standup comedians are either very extroverted people who rarely turn off, or very introverted people who only turn it on when the mic is in their hands. And I'm one of those people.
Shamala Hamala – 26:46
BLAIR HODGES: The pandemic was when I got introduced to your stuff, and I still remember the first video I saw, probably one of your most viral ones, where you're talking about speaking in tongues. But the backstory is really interesting.
So you have this experience with the girlfriend at the time. The abortion happened. Your church raises money for you to go live in New York. You do, but then the chickens come home to roost. They kind of find out what you'd been up to, and you gotta go back home. You're kind of the prodigal son returning.
And so that's the setup for this TikTok reel, which I'm pretty sure is the first one I saw of you. And I'm going to play it here.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON CLIP: In my super fundamentalist church, we did not speak in tongues, but we were open to the idea of speaking in tongues. And that Sunday morning, I sort of knew I was going to do it because I'm dramatic.
And in the middle of the service, I said out loud, “Shamala Hamala.” And everyone around me was like, “Oh my God, it's happening.” And everyone started saying, “Shamala Hamala.” And I was sort of like, “You guys are just copying what I'm saying.” But now we're all crying, saying, “Shamala Hamala.”
And my pastor said it was the language that angels spoke. And I imagined the scene in heaven where the angels were like, “What's up, Jesus? Shamala Hamala!”
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so, love this story. And these videos played a big part in changing your life. But I think you're dropping hints in the video that there's more to the story. And we get that in the book. Like, you say you sort of knew you would speak in tongues because you're dramatic. That's a funny line. But there's real stuff behind that. That's a way of glossing some real pain that was going on.
And your book adds so much context to this story that's otherwise this funny, cute little video. This story is a heavy story, actually.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, really, to be honest, almost every single one of my auto-tune hits on social media comes from fairly dark places. And it was an accident that I started singing the stories into that little audio filter people associate with me.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: But that was the thing that started to tickle me. I think the thing that worked was: this is an awful memory, but now I'm singing it in that sound. It was just like, “This is a level of absurdity that makes me laugh.”
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: And I think there's something in that, whatever that is. The mix of this awful memory that's familiar to a lot of people—a lot of people have similar stories—but to sing this terrible memory in this ridiculous sound was almost healing in a way.
And I think it was for other people too, to remember where we came from. And sometimes it was really awful. But you know what? I'm good today.
And when I think about myself now in my church—and the thing you're referring to is, I was trying to make everyone believe. No, that's not the right word. I needed everyone to believe I was good.
BLAIR HODGES: Can I have you read this, actually? Because I think from the book—and this will be great, stacking up against the TikTok version of the story. So this is on page—in my copy it's on 77. This is an advanced copy, so it may have changed. But this is your “Shamala Hamala” chapter, and I loved reading this, having already seen the reel and kind of getting this other story.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: It was around this era that Pastor Greg started preaching about the gifts of the Spirit, an umbrella term for certain magical powers followers of Christ are alleged to be capable of if they are good enough believers.
Some are not so remarkable, such as wisdom, knowledge, and faith. But others, like prophecy—channeling direct messages from God himself—sounded fascinating. One such trick was known as speaking in tongues. It's where you can speak in a language you've never learned, specifically the language of the heavens.
Pastor Greg said it was the language of the Holy Spirit and what the angels speak. The Holy Spirit, of gifts-of-the-Spirit fame, was allegedly an entirely other entity from God and Jesus. In fact, what they were telling us was that God and Jesus don't interact with us much at all except by way of their liaison, the Holy Spirit.
So the way I was reading it, that was the juiciest part of the whole religion. I thought if everyone at church saw that I had the gifts of the Spirit, they could finally see that I was good and they would take me back in.
Unfortunately, in order to understand the messages delivered by someone speaking in tongues, you need another superpower called interpretation of tongues. But hey, you gotta start somewhere.
I visited a Pentecostal church in town. I had heard spoken tongues, and it was electric. Most of the congregation sat with their eyes closed, hands raised to the heavens, all speaking in tongues at once. I couldn't believe my ears. They made it look so easy. Just open your mouth and let the Holy Spirit take over.
Back at my home church the next Sunday, as Pastor Greg brought the worship music down quiet and eventually ended in silence, I tried to poke around in my heart and find if the Holy Spirit had anything to say. Not that I could afford to give his ghostliness an option. Come on, Holy Ghost, show up and use me.
I didn't know how to tell if I was filled with the Spirit, but I knew I was bursting at the seams with sorrow and loneliness. I couldn't exist like this any longer, so something had to change if I was going to continue living. My life depended on it.
I'm gonna bring the Holy Spirit in here.
And then it all spilled out.
Shamala Hamala!
I heard a few quiet gasps as I squeezed out a few more nonsensical syllables before choking on the nerves. A few people started to mutter some feeble attempts at tongues of their own, but this was not commonplace for our congregation.
Mostly, they were confused and uncomfortable. After the world's longest silence, Pastor Greg, without a word about my Holy Spirit eruption, said a prayer to bring our worship service to a close. And I sat there alone in my wet armpits, feeling like everyone behind me was glaring at the back of my head.
When I exited the sanctuary alone after service that day, I spoke to no one. I wasn't sure if the Holy Spirit had moved through me, but it didn't feel like it. And it wasn't clear whether anybody else believed the Spirit had moved through me either. My attempt at redemption had failed, and now I was even more humiliated. I just wanted to say, "Guys, I'm good. I'm good. Please see me and accept me as I am."
Though my tongues gambit failed to yield direct results, time had its way with people. Over the course of the next few weeks, the faces of the congregation softened. Maybe they took pity on my pathetic attempt at tonguey greatness. Or maybe I had spent the requisite time contrite.
Slowly, then all at once, I was back in the fold.
How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.
Shamala Hamala Redux – 34:42
BLAIR HODGES: That's Kevin James Thornton reading from Big Baby: On Endings, Beginnings, and An Interdimensional Cat.
Like I said, Kevin, it's such a different telling than the auto-tune version. But I like what you said, that there was maybe something healing about recasting it in that way and sort of just sharing it widely. And I don't think that erases the original story. Obviously, you still carry it with you. You're telling it in this book. But I think there are times when you can feel healing about something that might have still left a pretty big scar. Anyway.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. I mean, I thought I was all healed up. Like I said, these stories are 30 years old. And as I started telling them again, more just in the absurd, like, “Listen to this insane thing I did when I was a teenager,” hearing other people say that it did something to them and they related with it and it was in some way similar to their story—it changed me in some way.
And it's made me think about that younger version of myself and sort of reach back and connect with that person again. And it's been good for me. It's been good to be kind to a past version of myself that I thought I was done with.
BLAIR HODGES: And when you say you were done with it, did you just feel like—did you have contempt for that person? Or was it just like, “That doesn't even feel like part of who I am”? What was that feeling for you?
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: I was just so worn out with Jesus and worrying about the afterlife and worrying about, “Does God care what I do with my genitalia?” I had just worn it out.
And I got to a point in my life, especially toward the end of my college years and into young adulthood, where I had just thought about that stuff enough for three lifetimes. You know what I mean? It was just sort of a burned-out-on-spirituality kind of feeling.
So I entered young adult life just kind of done with that and sort of like, “You know what? That gets no more of my attention.” And that seemed like that was the end of it for probably 20 years.
BLAIR HODGES: Wow.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: And then you pull it out as a story you can share, and it sounds like it suddenly was connecting with people. And maybe that's kind of what brought you back to think about it a little more seriously.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah, it's just sort of a happy accident. When I started telling the stories on social media during the pandemic, I was just at home like everybody else, and I was like, “You know…” And the more I told those stories, the more people were tuning in. Like, “Let's hear more of those stories.”
I'm like, “Okay, I haven't thought about this in a second, but here's this other thing that happened.” And you start turning those wheels, and it brings the memories back.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: It's like these doors open up. Yeah. Like, if I drive on the streets where my house was that I grew up in, it's literally like opening a box. It's really weird.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. And honestly, that's that melancholy thing. Nostalgia and melancholy and sort of looking back and pondering where you came from—that's where I exist. I love that stuff.
Not the Straightest Guy in the Theater Department – 38:03
BLAIR HODGES: You mentioned college. You decided you had to get the hell out of the hometown situation. You went to Central Indiana State College. You decided to pursue, like most guys who are trying to become as straight as they possibly can, musical theater.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yes.
BLAIR HODGES: But this is where you really got to spend some real time inside of a world where being gay was—
All right, here's a quote from the book. You say, “I met actual lesbians in the wild, just living their lives. More than that, I'd never been around people who couldn't care less that there were lesbians in the costume shop, just living their lesbian lives, making lesbian costumes with their lesbian sewing machines.”
The world's cracking open here. This is a different world. It's inviting you to consider.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. You know, it was the first time in my life—which sounds maybe like it doesn't line up because I spent a little bit of time in New York City before this—
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: And even in my very brief time in New York—
BLAIR HODGES: Where you first kissed a man, if I remember correctly.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. There were some experiences in there, but I still somehow managed to keep myself feeling like I was separate from all of this worldliness.
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: And when I showed up at college, I was in a different place. I was ready not to separate myself anymore. And so when I showed up at the theater department of this big state school, and suddenly there were gay people—and like in that story, the people in the costume shop were gay—and it was way closer.
You know, we weren't in a club in New York City. Now we're in a tiny little theater department room, and I am participating. And these are now my friends.
And it's hard to explain, but in that moment—again, pre-internet era, so my mind was not exposed to as much as it would be for a young person today—it was the first time in my life where I was suddenly around people, not only gay people, but people who were not gay and absolutely did not care if anyone else was.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: And I somehow didn't even understand that that was a possibility. I know that sounds crazy today, but at the time it was just like, wait, there are gay people, and we're not really gonna even think twice about it or give it any of our energy at all.
BLAIR HODGES: It's almost incidental instead of all-encompassing.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. Yes. That's a great way to put it. And it was a real turning point for me. Like, wait, this has consumed my entire interior world up until this point. You know, at that point I'm maybe 21 years old, and I'm like, “Wait, I don't have to think about this that much.”
BLAIR HODGES: Was that scary at all too, though? Because here, I mean, at this point you're still kind of a Christian believer. I mean, you joined the campus Soul Wave or whatever, the kind of cool Christian group.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. So when I went away to college, it was definitely sort of escaping with my life from insanity. I knew instinctually I needed to get away from my hometown, even though I didn't have the reasons why totally thought out.
And when I showed up at college and into this theater department, it was not like a light switch. We were now in sort of a slow transition where I was ready to do something else. I was ready to think about something else.
But yeah, my first couple years of college, I still went to a super fundamentalist Christian campus church.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: But I was now in sort of a transition phase. I was ready to walk away, but I couldn't do it instantly. It was going to be like a slow walk.
BLAIR HODGES: Did you know that? That's the question. Did you know it would be a slow walk out? Or is that a retrospective awareness? Like, “Oh, yeah, yeah.”
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: It's absolutely looking back. And when people say, “What was the turning point?” or “When did you finally decide you were okay with yourself?” there was never a singular moment.
For me, the whole thing was this sort of slow motion. I mean, it was still intense, but I drug it out for a decade.
Worlds Collide – 42:30
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. There were some big things that happened that could have been that moment. I'm thinking about this chapter about crossing the lawn, where you're involved with the campus church, but you're also involved with this theater group. And you've kind of got these two worlds cooking.
You're actually dating a boy. You're sort of seeing this guy named Brad, who's hot. You love this. But you're also doing the Christian thing, and it all comes together. These worlds collide on the lawn at school where you're with Brad, and then your Christian fellowship friend is like, “Hey, what's going on here?”
And I think he said something about, like, “You said you were struggling with homosexuality,” or something like that, which Brad heard and was like, “What the hell? You're struggling? I thought I was your boy. What do you mean you're struggling? I'm your boyfriend.”
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah, it was—God, it was. You know, I made a mess of it. It was a mess of my own making.
But during that era, it was funny the way it was even set up, because the back doors of the theater department opened up onto the same lawn as the back doors of the building across the way where the campus church met.
BLAIR HODGES: It's so on the nose. A producer of a show would have done this to save time building a set.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yes. Yeah.
So these two groups—and again, this is like 1996 or something—these two groups that were opposed to each other literally opened onto the same battlefield.
And during that era, on Sundays I would go to the church, and then I would be that person, and we'd all go out to dinner and talk about church things. But then Monday morning I'd go back to my acting class and be kind of a different person. I was sort of experimenting with two different people.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And it seems like without consciously thinking of it that way at the time, right? You were just being you.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Of course. Yeah. I mean, this is only looking back that I can see so clearly. It's almost like an early-80s sitcom plot. There were a lot of plots in those sitcoms of that era where someone had two dates to the prom.
BLAIR HODGES: I think every show did that.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. They had to run back and forth between the two dates. That's what I did.
BLAIR HODGES: I'm actually recording a second podcast right now, so whenever you're talking, I'm going to my other guest and interviewing them. So just—
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah, of course. Of course you are.
BLAIR HODGES: But this moment, I thought, might crack you open because Brad—you really liked Brad—and then he witnessed this moment with this fellowship. And I was like, cool, this is probably the moment that kind of busts it open. But like you said, it was something that took a lot longer for you to really distinguish for yourself.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: I didn't realize how cruel I was being to that guy. I was so caught up in my own personal drama.
And I have to forgive myself for that because it was a lot. It was a lot.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: And I was 21 years old, and I was not equipped, and I was dealing with it mostly alone. So I have to look back and forgive that guy.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And your prefrontal cortex was still developing, so—
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Totally. [laughter] But yeah, when I look back, I'm like, “Oh, I really put that poor guy through it.”
BLAIR HODGES: It's a painful chapter.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. And we really loved each other, but it was sort of 21-year-old-not-fully-developed-prefrontal-cortex love.
California Dreamin' – 46:03
BLAIR HODGES: [laughter] Right. Well, you end up finishing school late. That kind of blows up some school stuff, if I remember correctly. You end up finishing school a little bit behind that cohort, kind of by yourself.
And this is when you move to L.A. with probably the most healthy relationship I've ever seen. Your relationship with Will, which I think is a pattern any couple would want to follow. You and Will's relationship. Am I wrong? I mean, you tell me. [laughter]
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: It was—yeah, it was really wonderful in every possible way. And that's how the book ends with me and—
BLAIR HODGES: No, this was a hasty move-in. It seems like you guys weren't that compatible.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: You know? So yeah, the book does—honestly, it's one of my favorite moments of the book. And I don't know how people will perceive it because, as you might expect, the first half of this takes place in the 90s and that kind of journey. And then we come to sort of a pause or an ending of some sort.
Like I said, the whole book is about endings and beginnings and the cycle of that over and over again. But the second half of the book picks up 10 years later in Los Angeles. And as I mentioned earlier in this show, I sort of walk out into the world having made peace with myself and Jesus.
But I became, I guess you could say, a lost soul. I'm sort of wandering out into the world not entirely sure who I'm supposed to be without who I was my entire youth.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: So yeah, I end up in Los Angeles, and I'm in another relationship. And yeah, it was a difficult period of my life, for sure. This guy had his own little awkward journey with himself and his sexuality, and we're living in a tiny studio apartment in Los Angeles.
BLAIR HODGES: He wasn't out to his parents, right, if I remember correctly?
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. He was in a different place than I was and had almost kind of—like what I did to the guy in college.
You know, now there's a guy sort of doing that to me. He was not okay with himself, and he had feelings for me, but was just wrestling with a lot internally. And for that guy, it all came out in the form of addiction.
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: And we are living together in a tiny studio apartment in West Hollywood.
BLAIR HODGES: You got bills to pay.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. And I'm living with this sort of person wrestling with all these awful demons in a studio apartment, and I'm just there sort of suffering through it. It's an intense experience, for sure.
BLAIR HODGES: I liked that part of the book too. I liked your relationship with Deb. The boss that you had was really interesting. She seemed really cool, and you kind of were able to live out a story of a relationship in her eyes that wasn't really happening at home.
Like, she knew Will existed, and she'd be like, “How's Will?” But then when it all came tumbling down, wasn't she shocked? Like, “Wait, what? What?”
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. And I guess, you know, here I am again living the kind of duality thing.
Because in Los Angeles, I'm beginning to pursue standup comedy and actually doing pretty well. And I have this job where the character Deb is my employer. So on one hand, I have this life in Los Angeles, and things are going pretty great, and I'm getting on my feet, and I'm breaking into the comedy scene. And that's the version of me Deb knows.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: And then I go home, and it's kind of a nightmare. And I'm sort of balancing these two dual versions of myself.
On to the Next Cycle(s) – 49:41
BLAIR HODGES: And why bring that to your boss, though? I mean, this felt like kind of a different situation. You're still living these dual worlds, but all throughout, the context almost demands these performances from you. That's why I'm saying it seems like a sitcom, because you keep getting thrown into these scenarios that are perfect scenarios for difficulty and tensions.
And like you said, you keep circling back to it, right?
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. And that's what I mean. That's sort of the theme I'm exploring here.
When I think about my life and the things I've been through, it's a constant cycle of—and sometimes the cycles resemble each other. But the interesting thing is, even if I'm going through a new era—I'm going through one right now—some circumstances might be familiar, or I might find myself in, and this is for everyone, I think, a scenario that you've been through before, and you don't want to make the same mistakes again.
But the interesting thing to me is each of these cycles, each of these eras, you are different. Even if the scenario might resemble something you've already been through, you're not the same anymore.
And I think that's an interesting thing to explore, the way you change through each beginning and ending and the start of a new thing. You're sort of carrying yourself, like a different version of yourself, into these new cycles.
Yeah, I guess we're being really, I think, sort of heady about this.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, no. I can understand that you're a first-time caller, not a longtime listener, and on Relationscapes, that's what it's for. We could just give the chronology of what happens in the book, but I'd rather people read the book and then get this sort of extra reflection on it.
So watch me rescue this, because I think the cycles you're talking about really do keep recurring. Your life just keeps unfolding. Like, next up we have your relationship with Dean. Because the relationship with Will—there's so much stuff there. People are—I mean, it's juicy as hell. There's so much going on.
You get into a relationship with Dean after that, and it seemed to be the most integrated you'd been up to that point.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: But even that relationship, then by the end of the book, is ending. And that comes as a surprise, I think. To me, the ending of the book—instead of seeing all the threads weave together into the final tableau that's like, “Okay, I see where all of them came”—your book actually sort of opens outward instead.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: So I wondered what it was like then, writing about Dean in this book, because you're still pretty fresh off the end of that what was, I think, a decade-long, really important relationship to you.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. So the third section of this book, I wrote in real time as it was sort of happening. And I didn't set out to do that. Even when I agreed to write this book, a lot of those things had not even happened yet.
I got to the point in the book where I'd written about things from the past that I wanted to write about, and I was in the middle of basically a divorce. We weren't officially married, but we were together for a long time.
BLAIR HODGES: And you had been engaged.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah, we were engaged. It was the longest relationship of my life. Our lives were completely sewn together, and I was about to turn 50 years old. And that's what was unfolding as I was writing this book. And it's really all I could think about.
And it's what I decided for the third section of this entire story. It was unfolding in real time as I was writing it. So it definitely takes on a different tone, I think.
And people are always like, “What's the deal with the interdimensional cat that's on the cover of this book?” And I say at the opening of the third part of this, I was going to lean into my imagination and almost mythology to try to describe to you what I was living through.
Because it was so fresh. I had no space to look back and reflect. It's happening right now.
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: So I sort of turned my cat into this magical creature that's guiding me through a super painful thing. That's, I think, my tendency to find something absurd in the middle of everything, I guess.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And this is a cat that you'd had with Dean, right? Didn't you guys have two cats, if I'm remembering correctly?
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Three cats.
BLAIR HODGES: And this particular cat, you went to pick her up—
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: This one came with me.
BLAIR HODGES: You got custody. Cat custody.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: I have custody of this cat, yes. [laughs] Yep. He's at home right now.
BLAIR HODGES: And this is the interdimensional cat. Were you worried about—is Dean a pseudonym, I assume?
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: Were you worried about—how did Dean feel about it? Because you're not overly specific about the end of your relationship, but you have a huge audience, so you have an opportunity to kind of talk about what you were going through that I assume Dean doesn't have in the same way. And maybe he wouldn't even want to be able to tell the story. But how does he feel about being part of a story that you share?
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Well, he has no idea. He hasn't read the book.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay. See, I would want to. Maybe that's just the type of person I am, but I'd be like, “What the hell is he saying about me?”
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Well, you know, I have to say, my hope is that it will be healing for him to read what I wrote. My intention was kindness toward him. And I would think that when he does read it, it will be a good thing. That was my intent.
BLAIR HODGES: I mean, your relationship lasted a decade. People always want to know, like, what happened. My brain always—when I find out someone's getting a divorce, I'm like, “What happened?” I want to assess. I want to see what the fault was.
And I think there's also some anxiety to figure out, like, “Is there something I'm doing that I need to change in my life? Could this happen to me?”
When you think about telling people why you guys split up, what's the story as you've come to formulate it now? Knowing that you don't have as much distance to be able to assess the accuracy of it. But what's the basic story? And is it a shared story? Do you and Dean kind of have the same story about what happened?
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: I think that we do. It might be slightly different. And I do my best to describe this in the book, but there was something about being 50 years old—both of us—and deciding to start over at that point in life. It was really—well, it still is. I'm only a couple years past it. That's a very hard choice.
There's something about being 50 that feels like, “Okay, this is what my life is. This is my human experience.” To decide at 50 to pack up and go out into the unknown again is very hard. It's very hard.
And it's not like—because I packed up and left many times in my life—but when I did it when I was 20, or maybe again when I was 30, it is way different than when you're 50.
BLAIR HODGES: You know, is it a sense of not as much time? Because it's like, boy, starting over again—you need to have a lot of runway to get something going. And maybe in your life, you don't have that runway anymore.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Well, I don't know if I view it like—I mean, I guess that's true, but it's more—
BLAIR HODGES: Well crap, now I planted the idea. Sorry. [laughs]
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: I'd like to believe, you know, with medical advances, I have a decent amount of time left.
But when you're 20, you can say, “Fuck it,” and go get a random job to piece it together. And it just gets harder and harder to do that sort of thing. Especially when you've been through enough cycles of like, “Okay, I've already done this a few times in my life, and the last time sucked. And I told myself I wasn't going to do it again.”
And here I am deciding to put things in my suitcase and walk out the door. And it's going to be way different this time because I'm not 20, I'm not 30. There's not a little coffee-shop job waiting for me tomorrow.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Or the Olive Garden.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. Or the Olive Garden or whatever it is. I'm probably a little too old to go get a waiter job at the Olive Garden beginning at 53, you know? It's not impossible.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you could. But you couldn't live that differently.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: It's just different. And not just the logistics of a job. It's emotional too. It's like, wait, I've been through a lot just to get me to this point in life where I'm stable with another person. We have pets and a house. What am I doing? Am I gonna leave? What?
You know, I do my best to express this in the book, but again, I'm still living through it, so it's hard to find—I mean, I think in another decade I could look back right now and verbalize it way better than I can right now. That's just sort of, you know—
Starting Over at 50 – 59:29
BLAIR HODGES: Sure, you'd get all that time to reflect on it. But you've written about it here, and you're experiencing it right now. So how did you know that it would be a better choice for you to end that with Dean? As you said, it was not an easy decision.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: There's a lot of emotion in this answer for me, actually. When I read this part of the book in the audiobook, I struggled to get through it in the recording because the emotion of it was so fresh. You'll hear it if you listen to the audiobook. I struggle to get through this part of the book.
I think this is a thing that a lot of people experience in long-term relationships. Over time, as you get older, things can fade. And it's not because anything is wrong. It's not because something bad has happened. It's just time can do that to people.
And we both got to a point where things had faded and faded, and we loved each other and we respected each other and we were living together and we had a stable home life. But time just kind of did its unfortunate thing to us.
And I remember we were just talking, and he said something to the effect that he wasn't enjoying his life. That we were just kind of going through these—life had become this very ordinary, unfulfilling thing. And I don't think he meant it directed at me, but when he said that, it pierced into me.
And I was like, “Oh my God, we have to get away from each other.” That's unacceptable. And I think I had been holding on because I thought it would be better for us to hold on to each other till the end. And when he expressed that, I was like, “Oh.” As hard as this is gonna be, that's not the better choice. The better choice is for us to walk away from each other and start over.
And so that's what I chose.
BLAIR HODGES: Did you choose it with an eye toward possible relationships in the future? Or do you think—Dean, like, is that even on the radar? That's a long relationship to leave. Are you like, “I'm kind of done with relationships for now”? Or is it just something that could organically happen?
I feel sort of driven toward—I love my marriage, my relationship. It's hard not to situate myself there and be like, “What would I do?”
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: You know, again, that's that whole, “What does a new relationship look like after 50?” After you thought you were maybe kind of done with—like, are you gonna get on a dating app? Or what are you gonna do?
No, I will say it was the right decision because from what I have felt in my own life in the last couple years, and what I have observed from afar in his life, we broke the spell with each other. And it was for the better.
I think when it was happening, I would have said, “Never again. I don't want another relationship. No, thank you.” And he even verbalized something like that as well.
But now we did do the difficult task of starting over, and it's a whole new world. Anything is possible.
That's the thing I think I've discovered, is that—wait, I didn't see this coming, but you can do anything at 50 years old or 60 or 70 until you're gone. It's not over. You can do it. You can do more.
BLAIR HODGES: Maybe the choice parameters are set, but you still have choices to make within those parameters, I guess. Like, there's still—because when you say you can do anything, I'd love to have a number one podcast, but you and I both know maybe that's not happening until this interview hits the podwaves—
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Hey, right!
I understand why you would say that. However, I had thought my chances of any sort of standup comedy success were absolutely over, and the tides did not even begin to turn for me until I was 50 years old.
Yeah, it's wild. And I would have absolutely said the same thing. Like, “Well, you know, I wanted to be a famous comedian, but that's not going to happen.” And then it kind of did.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, but I missed the TikTok window. As you've talked about, the algorithm's different now. It's totally different. I appreciate that, though, Kevin. You can take me on tour with you. That's what we'll do. That's what this interview thing was all about.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: All right! Yeah. But TikTok did not even exist.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Like, the technology did not even exist.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. And now it's ruining the world.
The Importance of Being Earnest – 01:04:19
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: You're so done with this interview— [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Well, you know, we'll see if this episode even gets released.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Oh, great!
[laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: No, wait, I have a way to save it. Let's talk about earnestness.
Right before we get to our regrets, challenges, and surprises segment, I have a question about earnestness. And this kind of circles back to where we started out, or where we were talking about “Shamala Hamala,” the different versions of that story that you can tell. And both of those stories are true in their own way.
Like, when you put out the auto-tune one, that papered over a lot of the emotional turmoil. There was truth in that story. The way you tell it brings different truths in the book, and I think a little bit more earnestness.
I think there's earnestness hidden in the TikTok video. You talked about being dramatic. It's a funny punchline, but it's also true.
Earnestness is something that I've seen you excel at, at the risk of what kids—I don't even know if they're still saying it—but cringe is a thing now. Like, “Oh, that's cringe.” And maybe being so forthright about our feelings or getting emotional is cringe or whatever.
But some of your stuff has an earnestness to it that I don't see enough of on social media. And I wanted to play an example of this from a song that you put out. And if I remember correctly, this came out around the time that ICE had been shooting people dead in the streets of Minnesota.
It seems like forever ago, but it wasn't. It was just the beginning of this year, and we're still living in the aftermath of it.
But you took your tool of auto-tune jokery and turned it around into this song where there's no punchline here. And I want to play this for people really quick here.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON CLIP:
Today is a dark day. You might feel afraid.
And that's super valid. You should let yourself feel afraid.
And you might ask yourself, ‘Am I next?’ And if you have to ask, the answer is yes.
So let yourself feel whatever it is
and relieve yourself of the slow-motion uncertainty of the inevitable.
“And then let's join together in a collective rage and stop those motherfuckers.
How far will they go? All the way.
History has shown us they won't stop until they're stopped.
So let's join together in our collective rage. It's gonna take a long time. Not just a couple of protests. Like, a really long time. Several years.
Maybe a generation…
BLAIR HODGES: I was in a dark place when that came across my feed. And videos like that can make a difference. It was probably better for me to get off my phone in general at that point, but I just wondered what it was like putting something like that together. What was happening with that song for you?
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: So actually, that was a repost. I actually recorded that on the day that Roe versus Wade was overturned.
BLAIR HODGES: Oh.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: And interestingly enough, I could probably have reposted it again yesterday when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.
BLAIR HODGES: I know.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: So that was a repost. I don't remember the exact day I reposted that, but I was like, “This is appropriate again.” And we might have a couple more moments where it's appropriate again because we're living through kind of an awful period of history.
And the line—my favorite line of that—is something about the slow motion of the inevitable, or whatever I say.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: And is it cringe? Maybe so. I don't know. I think Generation X is sort of immune to that, maybe.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Maybe I'm just seeing other creators—and I'm not trying to disrespect them or anything—but I'm seeing plenty of other creators who aren't doing stuff like that. They're putting out their same skits, and that can have a helpful role to play too in brightening people's lives.
But people who say something—I respect it so much more. You took a second to put something out that was direct and earnest and in your auto-tune voice, where I've laughed so many times in other contexts. And here it was something that really moved me.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah. Well, you know, it's a strange thing we're living through. And social media, like we talked about at the beginning of this, has its great things and it has its awful things. And we're working through it.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Well, I'm glad you put stuff like that out.
And now we've got a book to enjoy. It's called Big Baby: On Endings, Beginnings, and An Interdimensional Cat, which I encourage people to pick up so they can learn more about that. I didn't want to give everything away.
We talked about abortion. We talked about the stuff—I'm sure people, given the choice between talking about abortion and an interdimensional cat, would probably choose abortion. That's just my sensibility.
But also, Kevin, I should mention you have about 3 million followers on social media. You've traveled the world doing comedy across the U.K., Europe, and Canada. You were a headliner at Netflix Is a Joke in 2024. You have a comedy special, Be Yourself, that people can check out on Amazon Prime and Apple TV.
You send out a secret Sunday email message that people can subscribe to. You've got your shop, Shamala Hamala. That's kind of a cool art-photography space. And you also had a podcast—actually you've had a few—but the most recent one was Call Kevin, which I really loved. I loved Call Kevin. I even appeared on it once.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Oh really?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, people would just call and leave you messages. That was a fun show. So there are many things our listeners can check out that you've done.
But I do recommend first the book. And I want to check out the audiobook version. I think since you're the reader, that probably adds new angles to it.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah, I think it will definitely be a different experience to listen to it, for sure. Because like I said, there are parts where unexpectedly I got choked up quite a bit as I was reading it. You know, I'm carrying all the subtext inside of me.
BLAIR HODGES: No doubt.
Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 01:10:52
BLAIR HODGES: All right, well, let's end with “Regrets, Challenges & Surprises.” The book's just now coming out, but you probably finished it a little while ago. So is there anything you'd change about it? Are you pretty happy with where it's at? Or you can speak to what the hardest part about writing it was, or what kind of surprises you encountered along the way. Maybe a self-revelation or something from your past you were working through. You can speak to any of those, wherever the best story lands.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: You know, I knew it was going to be a difficult task. I wasn't under any sort of illusion that it was going to be an easy thing to do.
And I've written quite a bit over the years in different ways. I've never written something of this length before. And also, just the climate we're in of the internet and social media, like we've been talking about—I didn't realize how much my attention span had deteriorated to some extent.
And there were lots of moments where it was very difficult to stop my life and focus. And I will say, I bothered myself on multiple occasions with the realization that I had let my attention span suffer.
And I got to the end of it. I did it. It was difficult, but I pulled it together. But now that I've done it once, I'm like, “Oh, that will never happen to me again.”
I've already started work on a second book, and I'm like, “I'm getting my brain back.” And, you know, I got it together for this first book. I'm super proud of what I wrote, and I'm very happy with it. I can't wait for people to read it.
I also can't wait to continue on my writing journey with a more focused mind.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, I hope to read whatever you've got coming next. I will definitely read it. Kevin James Thornton, thanks for talking to us about the book today.
KEVIN JAMES THORNTON: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Outro – 01:12:48
BLAIR HODGES: All right, another Relationscapes journey comes to an end. Thanks for being here with me. And if this is your first time, welcome to the journey. I hope you'll check out some other episodes while you're here.
There's a Fellow Traveler episode I can recommend: my interview with comedian Paul Scheer about his memoir, Joyful Recollections of Trauma. You'll want to check that one out if you liked this one.
And if you're enjoying the show in general, I hope you'll take a second to rate and review it in Apple Podcasts or rate it in Spotify.
I actually got this very kind review in Apple Podcasts from mspassell. And I know her, so maybe it doesn't count, but maybe it does.
She writes, “What a gem (this show, and also Blair). Every single episode is more powerful than I could have imagined, even the ones I don't think will interest me. It's because Blair is one of the greatest interviewers on the mic. I'm not just saying that. His engagement with his guests is next level. So tell your friends about the show and don't just listen to an episode you think applies to you. Listen to them all.”
Lauren, thank you so much.
Lauren's been a guest on the show. Also a terrific interview about adoption, so you can check that Fellow Traveler episode out as well.
Another way you can help me grow the show is by recommending it to a friend. If somebody in your life came to mind while you were listening to this, why not send them a link to it?
Also, if you'd like to see some video clips from this episode and some other bonus stuff, you can follow me on Instagram or TikTok.
Mates of State provides our theme music. I'm your host, Blair Hodges, an independent journalist in Salt Lake City, and I hope to spend more time with you soon here on Relationscapes.
See ya.