Events in March

Join Felice at the 21st Annual 
Saints & Sinners LGBTQ +Literary Festival,
March 22nd-24th in New Orleans, LA!

2024 SAS Program website

Welcome back! Saints and Sinners turns twenty-one and we’re excited to enter our third decade with you all in attendance.

Last year we focused on our amazing first twenty years but now it is time to look to our future and see how the next ten will unfold. Board President Lawrence Henry Gobble and Execuitve Director Paul J. Willis And while we must, as ever, remain vigilant in protecting our rights to exist, the year that has elapsed since the last festival has seen pushback against the hate groups. A lot of the ground made by the hate group takeover of local school boards was lost as voters stood up for dignity and humanity and love. Moms for Liberty took a particularly enjoyable beating at the polls this past year. We may never win the haters over, but we can outvote them. 

As we prepared for our twentieth anniversary last year, things did indeed seem bleak. Don’t Say Gay legislation, book bans (and book burnings) for school and public libraries, newly elected school boards that saw our community—particularly transpeople and drag populations— come under a loathsome attack from hate groups like Moms for Liberty had us all wondering what the future might hold for us. <read more at SASFEST >

     Tickets & Registration --> here

     Schedule of Events & Official Festival Guide Book --> here

First Review of The Reprint of a Classic Memoir

71z8QGzSiJL. SL1280 From Booklife –PUBLISHER’s WEEKLY

Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children

By Felice Picano

Trailblazing novelist and poet Picano (author of Like People in History and The Lure, and co-author of The Joy of Gay Sex) shares, in this resurfaced memoir, a subversive, lubricious tale of his experience as a young boy in the 1950s with “most sinful of childhood crimes—precocious sexuality” and his wayward assembly of identity. Originally published in 1985 by Gay Presses of New York, and “destroyed by immolation” upon arrival in the UK, Picano’s controversial memoir-as-novel is, in this publication round, unedited, inviting readers into a proudly graphic coming-of-age, a revealing burst of sexual samizdat in incandescent prose.

Ambidextrous offers singularly vivid testimony of a queer child’s abrupt entrance to adulthood, plus some insight into the challenges of writing and publishing one’s truth in a “Puritan” America. Picano divides the memoir into three parts, set between fifth and seventh grade, corresponding to three different homosexual and heterosexual romantic situations and simultaneous intellectual and philosophical inflection points in the young author’s life. Picano the child is just as deeply affected by his premature sexual experiences as he is the works of Homer, Huxley, and Yeats, and in the concluding section, literature and sex combine to shocking effect. Scenes of troublemaking, school discipline, and disappointed parents all boast power, wit, and Picano’s brisk, assured storytelling and electric portraiture. Throughout, he captures each moment with striking detail—neighborhood gardens with “blue heads of flowers the size of a tricycle wheel”—and insights.

Picano does not shelter the reader from childhood sexual experiences, detailing adolescent encounters and “basement games” with candid precision but without judgment. Rather, Picano reveals the hidden story of how sex manifested in his early life and the lives of children in his vicinity in the mid ‘50s. His memoir offers visibility to this secret part of his upbringing and of human experience, and in doing so, builds a more complete picture of the human condition.

Takeaway: Memoir of a queer man’s intellectually and sexually active childhood

Fire Island in the 70's & 80's - Three Authors Reminisce

Andrew Holleran (Dancer from the Dance, The Kingdom of Sand) and Felice Picano (Late In the Season, A House on the Ocean, a House on the Bay) are considered founders of modern gay literature, along with other members of the The Violet Quill from the early 80s.

Both authors spent considerable time on Fire Island Pines in the 70s and 80s, turning their personal experiences into some of the most memorable literary descriptions of the liberated post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS era.

Last month Beinecke Library at Yale invited the authors to share stories about their longtime friendship and contributions to gay literature, in conversation with Bill Goldstein. The discussion can be viewed at YouTube <here>

New for Spring 2023!

SixStrangeStories

Six Strange Stories and "H.P. Lovecraft and Time"

Dear Friends, Readers, Scoffers and others,

Yes, I'm at it again. My previous volumes of speculative stories and novellas have found a nice and nicely sized audience, although I write these stories because I'm impelled to do so.

Only one,  Cul-de-sac, is strictly horror/terror, and it's a doozey. The rest are what are called slow-burns to make your hair stand up in the tradition of M.R. James, E.F. Benson, Sheridan Le Fanu, Wilkie Collins, and Algernon Blackwood.  Of the six stories, two were published in anthologies, including Britain's prestigious BEST NEW HORRORS #29.  Another was published in another collection, and the essay appeared in Culture Cult online magazine.

In After Sunset in the Second Drawing Room Garden a hip young couple buy the ideal Beverly Hills house perfect for their Television series lifestyle. Only to discover that one special area holds decades old inhabitants who still exert eerie control.

Two U.S. retirees rent a Regency mansion in the English countryside in The Tapping at Cranburg Grange. But what is that repetitive sound only one of them can hear -- a sound that once found out can never be forgotten?

A lighthearted bicycle tour by an uncle and nephew goes awry leading the elder to an eldritch church with a curious sight that once touched will forever change the very fabric of time in Strange on My Hands.

Also:  A dull bachelor party weekend in suburban Connecticut turns into a night of inexplicable terror. A corporate executive scorns any hint of the supernatural... until he becomes part of it.  A flawed mirror with unusual properties aids a middle-aged man protecting his meal-ticket marriage.

These stories and an essay on H.P. Lovecraft's most original work, with comments by the horror-meister's real life schoolmates, comprise a compelling volume by an author whose earlier work in the field has been called "genius."

135 pages $15.00 US paperback ISBN-10 8196316186
ISBN-13 978-8196316181 electronic

Get it at AMAZON Here!
Get it at CyberWit Here!

Or order directly from Felice for an autographed copy!  Use the contact form to contact Felice - He will reply with payment options. Please add $3.95 for US shipping.
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Felice Picano is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, memoirs, nonfiction, and plays. His work has been translated into many languages and several of his titles have been national and international bestsellers. He is considered a founder of modern gay literature along with the other members of the Violet Quill. Picano also began and operated the SeaHorse Press and Gay Presses of New York for fifteen years. His first novel was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Since then he’s been nominated for and/or won dozens of literary awards. Picano teaches at Antioch College, Los Angeles.