Photograph by Andrew Doench
Kevin James Thornton is a social media celebrity with millions of followers. He has been a composer, guitarist, and singer for roots rock bands that brought their tours to Bogart’s. He’s a professional photographer, darkroom skills and all. As a stand-up comedian, he has toured internationally for the past several years. His comedy special, Kevin James Thornton: Be Yourself, streams on Amazon Prime Video. He’s written, directed, produced, and starred in dramatic films and TV series. He penned an opinion column for Huffington Post. He recently hosted a one-man show of his paintings.
If just reading this list is exhausting, imagine what it is like to be Kevin James Thornton. He barely has time to run Shamala Hamala, his art studio and gallery in Over-the-Rhine that opened last year but is closed most of the time. (“You might be a little underwhelmed,” its website warns.) He edits the Shamala Hamala quarterly magazine and writes most of its articles. The spring issue was late to the printer because Thornton had an autobiography to promote.
Wait, did I forget the book? He wrote Big Baby: On Endings, Beginnings, and an Interdimensional Cat (Grand Central Publishing) over the past few years, the same period in which he moved to Cincinnati. Big Baby came out in June. The publisher’s advance for it provided the down payment for his first home with his name on the deed, a condo in OTR, making Thornton an official Cincinnatian.
“It’s been too much,” he admits, in town in the spring between appearances. His idea of “a break” is making and posting multiple videos a day across multiple platforms; gifting a print to every single person who pre-ordered his book; planning a second comedy special (now airing free on YouTube); and, when time allows, hanging out with his boyfriend (they met in OTR at Homemakers Bar).
Photograph courtesy Andrew Max Levy
On a cool spring day we sit down in Shamala Hamala, where the largest table is covered in his watercolors. “Painting With Kevin” is one of the recurring motifs in his videos of late; in them, he’s like a modern Bob Ross, at once inspiring, meandering, and soothing.
He’s a handsome teddy bear of a man. His degree in musical theater shows in his winning smile, mellifluous voice, and precise hand gestures. He wears a tailored beige cotton baseball-style jacket over a coral pink shirt, white chest hair and tattoos poking out, and track pants and sneakers. A well-trimmed beard and thick-bordered black glasses frame his face.
Where do I even begin our conversation? I’ve been a fan since the pandemic, discovering his hilarious videos about growing up as a closeted gay man in a conservative Christian community. His reminiscences— spoken or sung into a vocoder for an AutoTune effect with the tagline “It was the ’90s!”—went viral during the 2020 lockdown. A sample:
In my super fundamentalist church when it was the ’90s, we used to do this thing called binding Satan. While we were praying someone would just start talking directly to the Devil and say, “We bind you, Satan!” And it’s not super clear how long the binding lasted but probably not very long because we did it all the time. And then we would pray a hedge of protection around the person, and I never thought it about it at the time but I think just hedge means bushes, which doesn’t sound super protective, which is why we had to bind Satan so he couldn’t get through the bushes.
There’s so much ground to cover on his foibles, failures, and fantasies and how the internet blew open the many different doors he’d been beating on, unsuccessfully, since he was a teen. Some might see him, I suggest, as an Energizer Bunny with a big ego. Without skipping a beat, Thornton adds, “…who is pleasantly delusional!”
Thornton is a charmer; add that to the list. A cavalier comment doesn’t ruffle the man who has struggled for decades. He didn’t just starve for his art—he lived in his car for short periods. Today, he’s finally and unexpectedly comfortable. So he is turning his search to something as elusive as his pre-internet fame: an “off” button.
Thornton is unique, and yet you’ve likely met someone like him. He’s the wickedly artistic polymath, whether the outlet is spicy stand-up, moody short films, subverted macho music, or experimental painting. He cannot stop creating. He will find—no, make—an outlet no matter where he goes.
He struggled with his sexuality and wrestled with his faith. After discovering the alternative holy trinity of Andy Warhol, John Waters, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, he emerged out, proud, and wildly productive. But not necessarily successful. That would take years of trial and error.
Photograph by Andrew Doench
Of course Thornton grew up middle class in a small town: Evansville, Indiana, on the Ohio River three hours west of Cincinnati. Its in-decline Midwestern-ness is captured in photos throughout the opening credits of the sitcom Roseanne. His family wasn’t particularly conservative or religious—his parents voted for Democrats—but he was personally drawn to the town’s thriving Christian scene.
“It’s so hard to remember the world before the internet,” says Thornton. “In 1988, my whole little world was the mall and high school. You could get in trouble or you could go to church. Those were your options.” For him, the choice was easy. “The churches went big on teenagers, so every single weekend there was a pizza party, a rock concert, a big gymnasium event.”
Besides free food and fellowship, church also offered something he didn’t yet know he yearned for: a platform. Thornton and his teenage friends performed sketches and plays at Coffee Café, their holy homemade hangout, where the novelties of “expresso” and “la-tays” were served. (This was before Starbucks caffeinated the heartland.) “I feel like I’m at Lollapalooza,” he recalls a fellow parishioner saying to him, painting DayGlo stripes on its basement walls, “but, like, without the sin.”
Thornton remembers marveling, They’re gonna let me get on stage and do something in front of a built-in audience? He says he wasn’t conscious of the appeal, but it nurtured the beginner artist in him. One of the performances, on a mission trip to New York’s Spanish Harlem, involved dressing up as clowns, each representing a different sin. There was lust clown, abortion clown, and—embodied by Thornton—AIDS clown. The irony was not lost on this closeted kid.
Well into his 40s, Thornton could look back nostalgically on the bizarre religious subculture and get others to laugh with him about the time. In one post, he recalls attempting to speak in tongues, a charismatic activity not practiced in his church. “Shamala hamala,” he uttered during a service. Fellow parishioners riffed on similar nonsensical phrases until the pastor hastily wrapped things up. The term would have lasting meaning.
“As funny as I make it and reflect on its absurdity, it was extraordinarily painful,” he says of his youth. “One of the darker moments was when I was 12 or 13 years old, drenched in shame. I was thinking of burning a cross into my body. This isn’t funny. It’s very tragic. A tortured 12-year-old trying to fix themself. It’s an awful story.”
When Thornton recorded the audiobook for his memoir, that passage choked him up.
After an attempt at heterosexuality backfired (details in the book!), he moved to New York City. The change of scenery didn’t magically resolve anything for Thornton, who, instead of coming out, returned to Indiana for college. By that time, he says, “I was a shell of a human being. I was fried.”
He smoked and drank and fornicated, pretending not to know students in the campus Christian group, where he also secretly sought solace. “Two lives I couldn’t reconcile, two halves I couldn’t stitch together,” he writes in Big Baby. “All the moments of guilt and fear and shame were so tragically unnecessary.”
To fully come out, he moved to the gay mecca hailed in the Chappell Roan song “Pink Pony Club.” In West Hollywood, Thornton slogged through the foothills of the stand-up comedy circuit while his live-in boyfriend cheated on him and blacked out on booze. What’s an artist to do?
If you’re Thornton, you channel your heartbreak into country western songs. He moved to Nashville, donning muttonchops and a black cowboy hat. His queer-folk band Indiana Queen earned a modicum of success. The timing, however, also did him wrong. The band’s albums dropped in the era of Napster, and it eventually fizzled. Onward to the next incarnation.
He likens his successive artistic modes to a favorite childhood treat. “By the time I was old enough to buy TV dinners on my own, they had lost their appeal,” he recalls in Big Baby. “I’ve learned life is a series of phases like this—wanting something, then growing a little older and not wanting that thing at all.”
Next came filmmaking. Dekkoo, a streaming service specializing in fare for gay men, bought his feature film (How to Get From Here to There) and financed and produced two series (the eerie Soul Mate and the brilliant, moving ensemble Stranger Hearts). In the scrappy tradition of indie filmmakers, Thornton scrounged up the money himself and wore every hat during production.
“Some people are just natural auteurs who have an eye for talent,” says Brian Sokel, president of Dekkoo. “They can work in a space that’s budgetarily hindered but be capable of making something visually beautiful that’s also touching, telling, and revealing. Kevin is a perfect example of that.”
Moviemaking was shaping up to be Thornton’s sweet spot, marrying his writing, visual, and physical gifts. Dekkoo was thrilled with Stranger Hearts. Its premiere took place in Nashville in March 2020, three days before the world shut down.
Stuck at home during the pandemic, Thornton started making videos for TikTok. He didn’t expect or even intend them to be his ticket to fame. Like many newfangled creators, he was just killing time. His first efforts were decidedly un-mainstream: Cupcake Television was a series of absurdist electronica music videos of Thornton in a kind of Tammy Faye Bakker drag. “I am so bored,” he sings in one, “I ate a jar of mayonnaise / I am so bored / Pretend my cat laid eggs.” It channels the zeitgeist of a world gone haywire and showed off yet another of Thornton’s artistic capabilities: contour makeup.
“When the vaccine was about to roll out in late 2020, we all felt like we were about to be free and told ourselves, This is over!” says Thornton. “We were all about to go back to work, so I started a new Kevin James Thornton account, my real social media account. But it turned out the pandemic wasn’t over. That’s when I started making the more personal stories.”
The autobiographical posts blew up to the (auto) tune of hundreds of thousands and then millions of views and fans. “Kevin is authentic,” says Ben Press, CEO of PressPlay Media Advisors. “Everyone is sold to 24 hours a day, and they build up a shield against that. He wasn’t selling, he was giving his truth. People connected with that. It resonated.”
What resonated with Thornton was social media’s novelty and immediacy, sans legacy-media gatekeeping. “This new world of people dancing and lip-syncing, cats falling off counters, and para-social relationships all felt oddly satisfying,” he says. “None of it was particularly new, but it somehow felt fresh.”
TikTok proffered Thornton the proverbial one last chance. “I didn’t see it coming,” he says. “I was settled down in a Nashville suburb with cats and a partner and a normal-ish job. I don’t know that I was still trying to make it as an artist. I had sort of let it go. Happily so.”
In Big Baby, he looks back at his “failed show business” endeavors and sees scorched earth. He writes, “Ambitions are often a pacifier that distract us from our humanity.” And yet the siren song of TikTok seduced him. “I was like, Let’s give it one more shot. How can I not?”
Dekkoo was hot for another series of Stranger Hearts, but Thornton, with soaring popularity, didn’t have the time. Says Sokel, “I remember him saying, ‘I’m somehow famous, and I’m figuring out how to deal with that.’ ”
The career he’d chased in Los Angeles and Nashville was now beating a path to his door.
Photograph by Andrew Doench
That door is currently located in a spanking new condo overlooking Washington Park. How did he get to Cincinnati? It started with his theatrical career, which (checks notes) I have forgotten to mention. In the 2010s, Thornton submitted applications for a one-man show to fringe festivals across the nation. The Cincinnati Fringe Festival, a two-week event produced by Know Theatre, was the first to give him a stage.
“Kevin seemed like a unique voice,” says Eric Vosmeier, the festival’s producing artistic director at the time. “He applied three or four years in a row, and every time he brought us something completely different. We kept saying Yes.”
Thornton’s contributions weren’t limited to his high ticket sales. “We strived to create a community around the festival, and he dug into that,” says Vosmeier, who now lives in Los Angeles. “He was at the afterparty every night, talking with ticket holders and donors and the other performers. He really participated and lifted up the whole community beyond what happened on stage.”
If you asked the younger Thornton where he’d turn 50, he wouldn’t have answered, “In a mid-sized Midwestern city.” But Cincinnati, which he came to know and love on those Fringe Fest trips, “was the home I’d been missing my whole life,” he writes. “It had an arts community that really embraced me, made me feel like a part of something.”
Thornton is a completist in the arts, but not so much as it applies to experiencing his new hometown. When his boyfriend suggested they check out the Cincinnati Zoo, which sits just three miles from OTR, he shot back, “If it’s not between Court and Liberty streets, I’m not going.”
He was only half joking. Home, now that Thornton has one, is where he wants to be physically. Artistically? He wants to be offline. He was jarred when writing his memoir to observe how the internet had negatively affected him. “I didn’t anticipate how much of my concentration had deteriorated from social media stuff,” he says. “I really want it back. I’m upset I’ve lost some attention span, so I have been working on unplugging more and reading, enjoying things in a non-online way.”
Now past the half-century mark in age, he’s trying gently to pull away from the medium that propelled him into fame. “That desire started the concept of this space,” he says of the cavernous Shamala Hamala gallery on Main Street. (A cover line in the debut issue of Shamala Hamala magazine reads: “The Analog Life.”) “When I saw the space, with its arched brick inside, I thought, This is it. I don’t even know what I’m doing exactly, but this is my little dream life.”
Thornton has been spread too thin to fully animate Shamala Hamala, which doesn’t have a staff. But seeds are in place for the artistic community he envisions. One half is his space exclusively, mainly for photography; the other half, more public-facing, has hosted old movie nights, group art shows, and a pop-up 1990s-themed gift shop. Of late Thornton is taking his “Paint With Kevin” sessions, recorded for online dissemination, live. Guests can pay a nominal fee to hang out and ask questions as he works. (Find programming details at shamalahamala.com.)
He still has tour dates to fulfill, not to mention appearances to promote his book. But now, with the pandemic fading in the rearview mirror, he’d like to fully inhabit the 45202 ZIP code. His videos these days are less about growing up religious and more about finding inspiration IRL.
Still, he continues to ruminate in person on the realm that oppressed him and then provided fodder for his rise. “My faith is a constantly evolving thing,” he says. “For a long chunk of my 30s and 40s I would have told you, ‘I’m an atheist,’ and I have softened on that. For a long period I thought I had given enough of my energy to the afterlife, and I am no longer interested in considering it. I had done enough.”
So what does he believe now? “Hell, I don’t know,” says Thornton. “I hope it’s true that there’s an afterlife. It’s a lovely idea. I’d rather live in that hope than not. So why not?”
