Felice Picano, who within the Seventies and ’80s helped usher in a golden age of homosexual literature because the creator of groundbreaking novels and memoirs and because the writer of dozens of books by homosexual writers, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 81.
The reason for his loss of life, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Middle, was problems of lymphoma, mentioned Jenifer Levin, an in depth pal.
Mr. Picano, who revealed 17 novels and eight volumes of memoirs, was a member of the Violet Quill, a bunch of seven homosexual male writers who met repeatedly in Manhattan and on Fireplace Island within the early Eighties to debate their work in progress, at a time when homosexual literature was simply coming into the mainstream.
Two Violet Quill members, each best-selling authors, survive him: Andrew Holleran (“Dancer From the Dance”) and Edmund White (“A Boy’s Personal Story”). If the opposite individuals — Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley and George Whitmore — aren’t as well-known, it might be as a result of all 4 had died of AIDS by 1990.
Mr. Picano typically wrote about tough topics, together with his personal adolescence. His 1985 memoir, “Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Kids,” described a trainer who brutalized him for writing with each palms. It additionally described Mr. Picano’s sexual encounters with each girls and boys, beginning at age 11. When the younger Mr. Picano wrote a narrative about his experiences, having hid identities and eliminated essentially the most lurid particulars, his academics insisted he had made it up.
When he revealed “Ambidextrous” virtually 30 years later, some reviewers had the identical response: that kids don’t have intercourse. Mr. Picano referred them to the definition of “memoir.”
He was the creator with Charles Silverstein of “The New Pleasure of Homosexual Intercourse” (1992) and “The Pleasure of Homosexual Intercourse: Totally Revised and Expanded Third Version” (2003). Dr. Silverstein, who had written the unique “The Pleasure of Homosexual Intercourse” with Edmund White in 1977, requested Mr. Picano to assist produce a second version that may persuade homosexual males to have intercourse safely. Lower than a decade later, the arrival of efficient AIDS therapies, and societal adjustments together with the rise of web courting and hookup websites, led to the third version, which incorporates entries on having kids, rising outdated, bisexuality and homophobia. Like the opposite two volumes, it was organized alphabetically. The B part, for instance, started with barebacking, bars, baths and bears.
However largely he was a novelist. His first three books, together with the thriller “Eyes” (1975), had no homosexual themes or characters. Then he had an thought for a narrative a couple of straight man who has to go undercover within the homosexual world to assist resolve a homicide. That turned “The Lure,” revealed in 1979. Writing about it in The New York Occasions Ebook Evaluate, the crime novelist Evan Hunter noticed, “The suspense right here is as threadbare as a male hustler’s denims, and the psychology is 5‐and‐dime‐retailer stuff.” The ebook made a number of best-seller lists. “A lot for unhealthy critiques,” Mr. Picano remarked in an interview in 2019.
Inspired by the success of “The Lure,” he started an epic novel that follows two cousins, one homosexual and one bisexual, from early childhood by way of center age. It was revealed in 1995 with the title “Like Individuals in Historical past.” He mentioned within the 2019 interview that the ebook, although categorized as fiction, was “one hundred pc true and 90 p.c autobiographical.”
On the time, he mentioned, “No person was writing about homosexual life. I assumed I needed to get this down in print, or else it was going to fade.” It helped that Mr. Picano had saved a journal each day since 1968. He additionally had, he mentioned, an eidetic reminiscence, by which he meant that he had complete recall not solely of what he noticed but additionally of what he heard, tasted or touched. “Like Individuals in Historical past” turned his second finest vendor and maybe his best-known novel.
He established Sea Horse Press in 1977 to publish the work of different homosexual writers. In 1981, he teamed up with two different publishers to kind Homosexual Presses of New York. Collectively, he mentioned, the presses lasted 18 years and revealed 78 books (together with three of his personal). Those who have stood the check of time embody Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Tune Trilogy,” Dennis Cooper’s books “Secure” and “Nearer,” Brad Gooch’s assortment “Jailbait and Different Tales” and books primarily based on the Rev. Boyd McDonald’s Straight to Hell magazines. The businesses additionally reissued essential older works. As a writer, the novelist Catherine Texier wrote in The Occasions Ebook Evaluate in 2007, Mr. Picano was each “distinguished and prescient.” She added, “Selling these new homosexual voices, on the time, was nothing in need of revolutionary.”
“He was a life changer for many people,” Mr. Gooch recalled. Greater than only a writer, “he was a literary matchmaker who helped create an viewers for our work.”
Felice Anthony Picano was born on Feb. 22, 1944, in Queens, the third of 4 kids in what he described as “a middle-class Italian American household.” His father, Philip Picano, ran a wholesale produce enterprise, and his mom, Anne (DelSanto) Picano, was a division retailer supervisor. Precocious, he astonished his academics with an erudite essay on the “Iliad” when he was 11.
After graduating from Queens School in 1964, he earned cash as a social employee, {a magazine} editor and an astrologer. He marched on Washington to protest the Vietnam Conflict and publicly burned his draft card. He lived on a number of communes and, he wrote within the memoir “Nights at Rizzoli,” “My private mantra turned: If it feels good let’s do it. If it feels good and it’s unlawful and it makes outdated folks wince, let’s do it twice — and in public if attainable.” He additionally wrote that he “consumed leisure medication — together with LSD-25 — the way in which most individuals pop in breath mints.”
He ultimately took a job at Rizzoli, the high-class bookstore on Fifth Avenue and 56th Road, the place his clients included Salvador Dalí, Jerome Robbins, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Gregory Peck, Elton John, Mick Jagger and S.J. Perelman. After leaving work, he would typically write all night time. Along with his books, he produced articles and critiques for The Advocate, Blueboy, Mandate, Gaysweek, Christopher Road, New York Native, The Harvard Homosexual & Lesbian Evaluate and Lambda Ebook Report. His criticism additionally appeared in lots of basic curiosity publications.
In numerous 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 associate for 15 years, Robert Allen Lowe, a lawyer, succumbed to AIDS-related diseases in 1991.
Although Mr. Picano spent prolonged intervals of time abroad, he lived in New York Metropolis and on Fireplace Island earlier than shifting to Los Angeles in 1995.
Data on survivors was not instantly obtainable.
Of his fellow Violet Quill members, Mr. Picano wrote in an e mail final month: “We shared the hope that sooner or later any lesbian or homosexual teenager might go into any bookstore or library and get a ebook about his or her personal form. Our dream has come true!”
