Felice Picano, who within the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s helped herald a yellowish hour of homosexual literature because the writer of groundbreaking novels and memoirs and because the writer of dozens of books by means of homosexual writers, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He used to be 81.
The reason for his demise, at Cedars-Sinai Scientific Heart, used to be headaches of lymphoma, stated Jenifer Levin, a related buddy.
Mr. Picano, who printed 17 novels and 8 volumes of memoirs, used to be a member of the Violet Quill, a bunch of 7 homosexual male writers who met often in Long island and on Fireplace Island within the early Eighties to speak about their works in exit, at a moment when homosexual literature used to be simply coming into the mainstream.
Two Violet Quill individuals, each best-selling authors, live to tell the tale him: Andrew Holleran (“Dancer From the Dance”) and Edmund White (“A Boy’s Own Story”). If the alternative individuals — Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley and George Whitmore — aren’t as widely known, it can be as a result of all 4 had died of AIDS by means of 1990.
Mr. Picano incessantly wrote about tough farmlands, together with his personal early past. His 1985 memoir, “Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children,” described a tutor who brutalized him for writing with each arms. It additionally described Mr. Picano’s sexual encounters with each girls and boys, founding at hour 11. When the younger Mr. Picano wrote a tale about his reports, having hazy identities and got rid of probably the most lurid main points, his academics insisted he had made it up.
When he printed “Ambidextrous” nearly 30 years upcoming, some reviewers had the similar response: that youngsters don’t have intercourse. Mr. Picano referred them to the definition of “memoir.”
He used to be the writer with Charles Silverstein of “The New Joy of Gay Sex” (1992) and “The Joy of Gay Sex: Fully Revised and Expanded Third Edition” (2003). Dr. Silverstein, who had written the untouched “The Joy of Gay Sex” with Edmund White in 1977, requested Mr. Picano to support put together a 2nd version that would possibly persuade homosexual males to have intercourse safely. Lower than a decade upcoming, the arrival of efficient AIDS remedies, and societal adjustments together with the stand of web relationship and hookup websites, resulted in the 3rd version, which incorporates entries on having kids, rising impaired, bisexuality and homophobia. Just like the alternative two volumes, it used to be organized alphabetically. The B category, as an example, started with barebacking, bars, baths and bears.
However most commonly he used to be a novelist. His first 3 books, together with the mystery “Eyes” (1975), had disagree homosexual issues or characters. Upcoming he had an concept for a tale a few directly guy who has to journey unrevealed within the homosexual global to support clear up a homicide. That was “The Lure,” printed in 1979. it in The Pristine York Occasions Store Assessment, the crime novelist Evan Hunter observed, “The suspense here is as threadbare as a male hustler’s jeans, and the psychology is five‐and‐dime‐store stuff.” The keep made a number of best-seller lists. “So much for bad reviews,” Mr. Picano remarked in an interview in 2019.
Inspired by means of the good fortune of “The Lure,” he started an epic album that follows two cousins, one homosexual and one bisexual, from early youth via heart hour. It used to be printed in 1995 with the identify “Like People in History.” He stated within the 2019 interview that the keep, even though categorised as untruth, used to be “100 percent true and 90 percent autobiographical.”
On the moment, he stated, “Nobody was writing about gay life. I thought I had to get this down in print, or else it was going to vanish.” It helped that Mr. Picano had stored a magazine each and every date since 1968. He additionally had, he stated, an eidetic reminiscence, wherein he intended that he had overall recall no longer most effective of what he noticed but in addition of what he heard, tasted or touched. “Like People in History” was his 2nd supreme vendor and in all probability his best-known album.
He established Sea Horse Press in 1977 to post the paintings of alternative homosexual writers. In 1981, he teamed up with two alternative publishers to method Homosexual Presses of Pristine York. In combination, he stated, the presses lasted 18 years and printed 78 books (together with 3 of his personal). Those who have stood the take a look at of moment come with Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy,” Dennis Cooper’s “Safe” and “Closer,” Brad Gooch’s “Jailbait and Other Stories” and books in accordance with the Rev. Boyd McDonald’s Immediately to Hell magazines. The firms additionally reissued remarkable used works. As a writer, the novelist Catherine Texier wrote in The Occasions Store Assessment in 2007, Mr. Picano used to be each “prominent and prescient.” She added, “Promoting those new gay voices, at the time, was nothing short of revolutionary.”
“He was a life changer for many of us,” Mr. Gooch recalled. Greater than only a writer, “he was a literary matchmaker who helped create an audience for our work.”
Felice Anthony Picano used to be born on Feb. 22, 1944, in Queens, the 3rd of 4 kids in what he described as “a middle-class Italian American family.” His father, Philip Picano, ran a wholesale put together trade, and his mom, Anne (DelSanto) Picano, used to be a branch gather supervisor. Precocious, he astonished his academics with an erudite essay at the “Iliad” when he used to be 11.
Later graduating from Queens School in 1964, he earned cash as a social workman, a novel essayist and an astrologer. He marched on Washington to protest the Vietnam Battle and publicly burned his draft card. He lived on a number of communes and, he wrote within the memoir “Nights at Rizzoli,” “My personal mantra became: If it feels good let’s do it. If it feels good and it’s illegal and it makes old people wince, let’s do it twice — and in public if possible.” He additionally wrote that he “consumed recreational drugs — including LSD-25 — the way most people pop in breath mints.”
He sooner or later took a role at Rizzoli, the high-class bookshop on 5th Street and 56th Side road, the place his shoppers incorporated Salvador Dalí, Jerome Robbins, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Gregory Peck, Elton John, Mick Jagger and S.J. Perelman. Later depart paintings, he would incessantly incrible all night time. Along with his books, he produced articles and opinions for The Suggest, Blueboy, Mandate, Gaysweek, Christopher Side road, Pristine York Local, The Harvard Homosexual & Lesbian Assessment and Lambda Store Record. His grievance additionally gave the impression in lots of normal hobby publications.
In diverse memoirs, he described encounters with the authors Gore Vidal and Edward Gorey, the poet W.H. Auden, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and the actor Anthony Perkins. His spouse for 15 years, Robert Allen Lowe, a legal professional, succumbed to AIDS-related diseases in 1991.
Despite the fact that Mr. Picano spent prolonged classes of moment in a foreign country, he lived in Pristine York Town and on Fireplace Island sooner than transferring to Los Angeles in 1995.
Knowledge on survivors used to be no longer right away to be had.
Of his fellow Violet Quill individuals, Mr. Picano wrote in an e-mail terminating pace: “We shared the hope that one day any lesbian or gay teenager could go into any bookstore or library and get a book about his or her own kind. Our dream has come true!”
