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Milan's Biography
AND OTHER FACTS YOU MAY NOT WANT TO KNOW
Milan always felt like a fish on the wrong end of the pond growing up in ultra-conservative Jackson, Mississippi. By middle school, his classmates voted him “Most Mysterious.” He deliberately missed one day of school each year to avoid having to go on stage to receive a perfect attendance award. In high school, he served as the American flag bearer in the ROTC to avoid participating in sports.
After Milan’s evangelical parents made a dramatic attempt to isolate him in a hole in the ground in the wilderness at the beginning of his senior year of high school, he escaped. They soon disowned him, claiming God instructed them to do so. Milan survived a suicide attempt and eventually began to fill the family void in his life by writing poems, drawing, and listening to music.
Milan studied creative writing and commercial design, and advertising in college. Three years after this, he endured years of horrific gay conversion attempts in a powerful and toxic Christian church. This, along with the sexual bullying and abuse he experienced in his teens, inspired his earliest artworks featuring outsider types and expressions of disdain that accompany such loathing. This collection, along with some of his novels’ characters, was featured in his first solo art exhibition, Outsiders and Apparitions, in New York City. These experience also motivated him to be a champion for the marginalized in his literary works, where he has, so far, won three international book awards.
In June 2023, Milan published his memoir, Thirty-Seven-Year Abduction: Memoir of a Gay Mississippi Author Finding Himself Again, in hopes it will help people in the LGBTQIA spectrum or anyone who has been oppressed and bullied by religious oppression and hate.
In June 2023, Milan published his memoir, Thirty-Seven-Year Abduction: Memoir of a Gay Mississippi Author Finding Himself Again, in hopes it will help people in the LGBTQIA spectrum or anyone who has been oppressed and bullied by religious oppression and hate.