General
Felice Picano, Champion of Gay Literature, Is Dead at 81
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.
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.
Mr. Picano, who published 17 novels and eight volumes of memoirs, was a member of the Violet Quill, a group of seven gay male writers who met regularly in Manhattan and on Fire Island in the early 1980s to discuss their work in progress, at a time when gay literature was just entering the mainstream.
Two Violet Quill members, both best-selling authors, survive him: Andrew Holleran (“Dancer From the Dance”) and Edmund White (“A Boy’s Own Story”). If the other participants — Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley and George Whitmore — aren’t as well known, it may be because all four had died of AIDS by 1990.
Mr. Picano often wrote about difficult subjects, including his own early life. His 1985 memoir, “Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children,” described a teacher who brutalized him for writing with both hands. It also described Mr. Picano’s sexual encounters with both boys and girls, starting at age 11. When the young Mr. Picano wrote a story about his experiences, having concealed identities and removed the most lurid details, his teachers insisted he had made it up.
