Art history- Felice Picano
Author Felice Picano
Like many in the Arts lives were touched by Fire Island and inspired. Felice Picano is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, memoirs, nonfiction, and plays. His work has been translated into many languages and several of his titles have been national and international bestsellers. He is considered a founder of modern gay literature along with the other members of the Violet Quill. Picano also began and operated the SeaHorse Press and Gay Presses of New York for fifteen years. His first novel was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Since then he’s been nominated for and/or won dozens of literary awards. Picano teaches at Antioch College, Los Angeles.
Felice Picano
graduated cum laude from Queens College in 1964 with English department honors. He founded SeaHorse Press in 1977, and The Gay Presses of New York in 1981 with Terry Helbing and Larry Mitchell; he was Editor-in-Chief there. He was an editor and writer for The Advocate, Blueboy, Mandate, Gaysweek, and Christopher Street. He was the Books Editor of The New York Native. At The Los Angeles Examiner, San Francisco Examiner, New York Native, Harvard Lesbian & Gay Review and the Lambda Book Report, he was a culture reviewer. He has also written for OUT and OUT Traveller. With Andrew Holleran, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Edmund White, Christopher Cox, and George Whitmore, he founded the literary group The Violet Quill, considered to be the path breaking gay male literary nucleus of the 20th Century.
In his memoir Men Who Loved Me, he described his close friendship with the poet W. H. Auden. In his later memoir/history, Art & Sex in Greenwich Village, he wrote about contacts with Gore Vidal, James Purdy, Charles Henri Ford, Edward Gorey, Robert Mapplethorpe and many contemporary and younger authors. In True Stories, Picano wrote about other people including Bette Midler, Diana Vreeland, as well as friends and acquaintances from his childhood and early adulthood. In his newest book, Nights at Rizzoli, Picano writes about being a book clerk and bookstore manager in the early 1970s with Salvador Dalí, Jerome Robbins, Jackie Onassis, Gregory Peck, Mick Jagger and S.J. Perelman.
Timing was crucial to Picano’s career. He began publishing mainstream novels in the mid-1970s and was earning a wide readership with them when he decided to write gay fiction instead. That decision led him to pen literate works with “well-constructed characters and settings,” to quote Library Journalcontributor Theodore R. Salvadori, while it also brought him friendships with other intellectual gay authors such as Edmund White and Andrew Holleran. Reflecting on his diverse career in an interview released by a recent publisher of his work, Picano said: “I’ve been accused of committing literary suicide several times over the years, because I keep on doing what I’m not supposed to do in my writing. I was enjoying a very successful mainstream career when I became one of the first openly gay writers. By the mid-eighties, I was writing gay literary novels and, after I had gathered a little bit of a reputation in gay literature, people told me I was making a mistake when I co-authored The New Joy of Gay Sex. I always seem to be doing something wrong. But I’m following a trajectory that I more or less understand.” The New Joy of Gay Sex was an updated version of the work that psychologist Charles Silverstein had originally created with Edmund White. The original version had not covered safety issues, as when it was first released, many of the safety issues related to sex had not yet been realized. The work that Silverstein and Picano put into the updated version made sure that safe-sex practices were included, as well as information reflecting the AIDS crisis and gay rights activism, making it a resource far more useful to a modern audience.
Picano has authored several memoirs, beginning with Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children and continuing on in Men Who Loved Me: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel. The first volume tells the story of his childhood and the second continues on with his early adulthood, as he develops a better understanding of his identity, traveling through the United States and Europe over the course of his story. The volumes, originally published in the mid and late eighties, were republished in 2003.
In 1997, Picano released A House on the Ocean, A House on the Bay, in which he recalls the years of the 1960s and 1970s when he lived in Manhattan and partook of the pleasures of Fire Island, New York. “Picano is definitely gifted enough to ensure this book’s popularity with lesbian and gay readers everywhere,” declared Charles Harmon in Booklist. In the Library Journal, Richard Violette called Picano “a leading light in the gay literary world,” adding that in A House on the Ocean, a House on the Bay, “his glints of flashing wit and subtle hints of dark decadence transcend cliches.” In Advocate, Malcom Boyd wrote that the memoir “is exquisitely etched in finely honed detail.”
Picano’s novels have brought him at least as much critical success as his memoirs. In Like People in History, Picano wrote what he called a gay American epic. Set in 1991 with flashbacks to six periods of shared history going back to the fifties, Like People In History tells the story of cousins Roger Sansarc and Alistair Dodge. For Alistair’s forty-fifth birthday, Roger brings him the present he had requested—pills that will end Alistair’s life and stop his suffering from AIDS. Roger is a fairly untrustworthy narrator, telling his rememberances of events with definite evaluation of the situation; he does not tell it how it was, he tells it with commentary. According to Michael Bronski, writing in Lambda Book Report, “Roger is preening, self-involved, self-promoting, and self-indulgent.… The amazing thing about Picano’s decision to portray Roger in this light—a daring decision that could easily have been the downfall of the book—is that it actually makes the novel work better. With Roger as the narrator, all the events, the trends, the cultural fads … take on a new beauty.” Bronski continued that Roger’s commentary “creates a context for actually evaluating the gay male culture that Picano describes in such detail.… Picano has provided a built-in bullshit detector.” Even with the serious subject matter, reviewers referred to the title as less an epic than a beach book, but even those reviewers, including Charles Harmon of Booklist, felt that Like People In History “succeeds as a story that doesn’t take itself too seriously.” Though reviewers did not initially expect Like People in History to be a critical success, the epic won sevgeral awards in 1996, including a Lambda Literary Award nomination, the Ferro-Grumley Award, Le Figaro Litteraire Citation for the top five foreign language books of the year, and the Gay Times of England Award, earning it not only popular but also critical praise.
Looking Glass Lives
Published in 1998, Looking Glass Lives is a gothic romance dealing with reincarnation. The story takes place in two different times, during the Civil War Era as well as modern day. Narrator Roger Lynch and his wife, Karen, purchase a house that had belonged to spinster Amity Pritchard during the Civil War. As Roger and Karen work to restore the house, Roger’s cousin and childhood lover Chas invites himself to come and stay with them. When Roger finds the diaries of Amity, he “discovers that the lives of Amity, her sister Constance, and Capt. Eugene Calder bear a strange parallel to Karen’s, Chas’s, and his own,” according to Phillip Oliver in Library Journal. The story of the first love triangle is tragic and ends in murder; while Roger studies it, he sees that the events may be destined to happen again. Jaime Manrique wrote that Picano “succeeds in creating a smart, sexy page-turner full of thrills.”
The Book of lies
New York Times Book Review contributor David Lipsky called Picano “a word machine” who “approaches the page with a newcomer’s joy.” In his review of Picano’s The Book of Lies—a roman a clef loosely about the Violet Quill Club (in the book, Picano renames the group the Purple Circle)—Lipsky noted that the characters are “outsize and the novel is written in a dishy, larger-than-life style.…The results are surprisingly entertaining.” A Publishers Weekly correspondent, assessing the same work, concluded: “Picano is successful in his gossipy recreation of the group of gay literary innovators. In depicting the near future, his amusing assumptions demonstrate a keen tab on trends and the possible new technologies ahead. The surprises at the end keep the reader’s head spinning.” The Book of Lies is told by Ross Ohrenstedt; Picano commented about his narrator, “I’ve jokingly, but perhaps accurately, said that Ross Ohrenstedt in this book is the single most unreliable narrator in fiction since the governess in The Turn of the Screw.” With such an unreliable teller of the tale, the reality inside the novel is dubious. Ross is, depending on which time he tells it, a grad student, an assistant professor, and competing for tenure at UCLA. His research causes him to delve into the works and lives of the Purple Circle. When Ross discovers a mysterious manuscript, he latches onto it, determined that solving the mystery will be the key to his academic success. His investigation takes him across the country, meeting all the surviving members of the Purple Circle, who seem surprisingly tight lipped about the evidence he brings with him. He suspects consipracy, and this only urges him on to solve the mystery. Karl Woelz wrote in Lambda Book Report, “Book of Lies has something guaranteed to please just about everyone.” Talking about why he wrote Book of Lies to Greg Herren of Lambda Book Report, Picano explained, “I know I did want to write what no one else had done, i.e. a ‘post modern’ gay novel—composed of the apparatus of contemporary literature.…And the Violet Quill—which has been glorified and attacked in equal measure—was just waiting for its fictional deconstruction. It was too obvious a target for me to ignore.”
With Onyx, which was released in 2001, Picano returned to a more traditional narrative, but took a chance in another direction; Onyx is an AIDS novel, published in an age when the common thought is that AIDS novels “don’t sell anymore,” wrote Greg Herren in a review for Lambda Book Report. But this did not seem to bother Picano; as Herren noted, “Taking chances is something that Felice Picano, in his long and varied career, has never shied away from.” Ray Henriques and Jesse Moody, a long term New York couple and the main characters of Onyx, are facing the end of Jesse’s life as he loses the battle against AIDS. Ray is HIV-negative, and Jesse encourages Ray to continue living his life. Ray finds himself in the middle of a new sexual awakening; while he is there to support Jesse, he begins a relationship with Mike, a married man confused about his own sexual desires. Jesse and Ray face the reality of love and loss, of life continuing even after the death of a loved one. Roger Durbin, writing a review for Library Journal, praised, “Picano is honest and excruciatingly descriptive.” Drew Limsky, in a review for Advocate,called the book “an especially sensual work as well as a perceptive one.” And Herren concluded, “The ultimate strength in Onyx lies in Ray’s character, an ordinary gay man called upon to deal with incredible amounts of tragedy; a modern day Job.”
Several of Picano’s works have been translated into French, Japanese, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, German, Hebrew, Polish, and Portuguese. He described his writing in CA: “In my poetry I am keeping a sort of notebook of fragmentary experiences and understandings. In the past, this meant a polarization of subject matter: poems dealing either with perceptions gathered from the world of nature as revealed in Big Sur or Fire Island; or poems dealing with contemporary aspects of urban life and characters—portraits of epileptics, deformity lovers, obscene phone callers, etc. Of late, however, my poetry has become more autobiographical—though not at all confessional—integrating interior and exterior worlds. And forms have changed from lyric and monologic to more experimental structures such as self-interviews, imaginary dialogues, and letters to unknown persons.
“In fiction I write about the possible rather than the actual, and so, I suppose, ‘Romances’ in Hawthorne’s sense of the word, even with ‘realistic’ settings, characters, and actions. My novels, novellas, and short stories deal with ordinary individuals who are suddenly thrust into extraordinary situations and relationships which test their very existence. Unusual perceptions and abilities, extrasensory powers, and psychological aberrations become tools and weapons in conflicts of mental and emotional control. Previous behavioral patterns are inadequate for such situations and must be changed to enable evolved awareness and survival, or they destroy their possessor. Thus, perspective is of the utmost importance in my fiction, both for structure and meaning. I am dedicated to experimenting with new and old points of view, which seem to have progressed very little since the pioneering work of Henry James and James Joyce.”
Picano added that he also works in film and theater, starting with adaptations of previously written works: “These intensely collaborative efforts—apparently so very different than other solitary writing—have proven to be fascinating not only because I’ve learned the strengths and weaknesses in collaboration, but also because through experienced theater and film director’s views of what the public requires, I’ve learned how completely idiosyncratic I and my perspective has been, is, and will probably continue to be. Few writing experiences can equal the intensity of theater rehearsals leading to opening night, and nothing can equal the simultaneous frustration and elation of having others speak the works you’ve written.”
Now, decades later, I’ve realized how those daily examples of my mother’s storytelling and her sense of the importance of those stories have influenced me, perhaps decided me, to become a writer. Equally, unconsciously, influential for me in terms of what I’d write were my attempts to solve those mysteries in and between our parents’ families—and our physical distance, even exile, from the rest of them.
