The Violet Quill Club, 40 Years On

David Bergman assembles the living VQ members: Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, & Edmund White

FORTY YEARS AGO, we did not have the Lambda Literary Foundation. We did not have The Gay & Lesbian Review. There were local newspapers and magazines, and The Advocate aspired to nationwide coverage, but the number of gay presses was minuscule ...

To make up for this lack of support, gay and lesbian authors came quietly together to back each other up, to read or hear each others’ works, and to discuss specifically gay literary problems. The Violet Quill was one of these clubs, a mixture of gay male friends and lovers and enemies who came briefly together forty years ago—meeting from 1980 to ’81—to enjoy literary camaraderie. Among the issues the members discussed were how close should their fiction come to autobiography, how to indicate to a reader that the campy “she” is really a male, and how do you keep from confusing the reader when a love scene contains two “he” characters. ... Continue Reading

Interviewing the Interviewer

by Felice Picano - special to Seattle Gay News

How do you interview a well-known local interviewer?

According to the old saying, very, very carefully. But first you need a reason, and second you need a topic.

Luckily I have both.

The reason is that I allowed Eric Andrews-Katz to talk me into coming to the Pacific Northwest to do a series of reading events with him. Seattle is the first stop, then Vancouver, and then Spokane. This is my first visit in over twenty years when my big gay saga, Like People in History, was published. The truth is that I didn't need much persuading; I've been so welcomed in the past that I needed very little prodding.

Second is the topic and that of course is the news that the local - and now nationally-recognized - interviewer that Eric Andrews Katz has developed into via the Seattle Gay News, is now an author of three books.

Read the entire interview at SGN - HERE

The Lure: Back in Print in the U.K.

Felice Picano’s controversial story of a serial killer in New York was a huge hit in 1979 – but may also have provoked an armed attack on his home. Forty years on, he talks about his novel

Thursday December 19th, 2019 - TheGuardian.com - interview by Alison Flood

Felice Picano set out to write The Lure, his seminal gay thriller, after reading about a series of killings in Greenwich Village in the 1970s. The murders, which were mainly of gay male entrepreneurs, and the police’s failure to find the culprit, were being covered by the Village Voice newspaper. But then the news stories suddenly stopped. When Picano met the reporter, he said he had been receiving death threats.

“So I thought I should follow it up – it was my neighbourhood,” says the author now, 40 years on. As he writes in a new introduction to the 1979 thriller, which is being brought back into print in the UK by Muswell Press, he had wanted to “detail a section of the gay community as I knew it; sort of the way Balzac detailed, piece by piece, much of early 19th-century French society.”

What he came up with was a layered and lurid thriller about an elusive serial killer stalking Manhattan’s gay scene. After he witnesses a murder, academic Noel Cummings is recruited by police to act as a lure for the killer. Cummings, a widower, identifies as straight but is increasingly drawn to the lifestyle he is assuming. As Out magazine put it: “For heterosexual readers for whom a flagrantly gay novel would, even in the late 70s, have been too much of a provocation, the title character Noel Cummings was a great distancing device that slowly reeled them in to New York’s gay underbelly … Only mid-novel, once Cummings is engaging in drug-infused gay orgies, does one appreciate the skill with which Picano has seduced straight readers.

Read the entire interview at TheGuardian.com

Picano: Mover & Shaker

An interview by Eric Andrews-Katz - Seattle Gay News A&E Writer

Felice Picano is one of the legendary movers and shakers of the modern LGBT literary movement. Felice has been writing since the 1970's, while living in New York, and became a founding member (along with Edmund White and Andrew Holleran) of the famous Violet Quill group, as well as a founding member of the Gay Men's Health Crisis. Between 1988 and 1990, AIDS claimed the lives of four of these men. He's published over 40 books, including the great gay epic saga, Like People in History, as well as short stories and plays, and has chronicled his extensive, colorful life in several memoirs. His latest memoir Nights at Rizzoli, recalls the latter half of the 1970's in New York City when Felice worked at the prestigious bookstore while exploring the city's exploding, pre-Stonewall, pre-AIDS, gay lifestyle.

In Conversation with the Violet Quill: Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, and Edmund White

by Frank Pizzoli for Lambda Literary
April 10, 2013

In November 1980, New York’s SoHo Weekly News tagged a cover story Fag Lit’s New Royalty, referring to Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, and Edmund White, alive today, and Christopher Cox, Michael Grumley, Robert Ferro, and George Whitmore, who have died. Since the publication of that story, which was subtitled A Moveable Brunch – A Fag Lit Mafia,they have brought out the best in admirers and the worst in detractors.

Collectively the seven authors became known as The Violet Quill, meeting only eight times between March 31, 1980 and March 3, 1981. They had a sample “reader” published, emerging later as titans of gay male literature. Their sexual affairs with each other were labyrinth but not unusual in New York City at the time.

Although their status as individuals in gay literature has never been creditably challenged, the Quill’s crowning as an influential group has been called a myth by some, their influence criticized by others.

→ Article Continues at Lambda Literary