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A Champion of Gay Literature
At a time when, in his words, “nobody was writing about gay life,” he produced groundbreaking novels and memoirs and published books by Harvey Fierstein and others.
March 13, 2025
Felice Picano, who in the 1970s and ’80s helped usher in a golden age of gay literature as the author of groundbreaking novels and memoirs and as the publisher of dozens of books by gay writers, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 81.
The cause of his death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, was complications of lymphoma, said Jenifer Levin, a close friend.
... continue reading at NYTimes.com
Reprint of a Classic Memoir
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>
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The Other Side of the Story - Pursued: Lillian's Story
In Pursuit: A Victorian Entertainment, Addison Grimmins, slum-born but ambitious and ruthless, sets out on a quest to bring back the Lord Exchequer of England’s missing wife.
Now, in Pursued: Lillian’s Story, we get the other side of the story from Lillian, the woman being pursued.
From boat to stagecoach to train, as Lillian and her questionably reliable companions elude her pursuers throughout Europe, Lillian writes to her daughter-in-law on her honeymoon, warning her of what she may expect marrying into the Ravenglass estate and its cursed male line of descent. Lillian recounts how as a girl she entered a dream marriage to the “golden” son of a great Lord. And how, little by little, one misfortune after another, the dream union threatened to become a nightmare that would destroy her reputation—and her life.
Bold Strokes Books
ISBN-13:978-1636791975
Paperback $17.95
Get it at Amazon HERE