Felice Picano | |
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 Picano c. 2008 | |
| Born | February 22, 1944 New York City, U.S. |
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| Alma mater | Queens College, City University of New York |
Felice Picano (born February 22, 1944) is an American writer, publisher, and critic who has encouraged the development of gay literature in the United States. His work is documented in many sources. [1]
 | This section needs additional citations for verification .(September 2024) |
Felice Picano graduated cum laude from Queens College in 1964 with English department honors. He founded SeaHorse Press in 1977, [2] 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 pathbreaking gay male literary nucleus of the 20th Century. [3]
In a 2024 letter to the London Review of Books , Picano objected to the "apotheosis" reserved by Vivian Gornick for the Village Voice in her review of Tricia Romano's book, titled The Freaks Came Out to Write, [4] about the New York periodical. He claimed that "anyone reading only the Voice would have been unaware of any LGB contribution to culture in the 1970s and 1980s," adding that, in the periodical, there was "no popular music department" and "so disco's worldwide explosion went unremarked." [5]
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.
Among those who Picano introduced to the public via his publishing companies were Dennis Cooper, Harvey Fierstein, Jane Chambers, Brad Gooch, Doric Wilson, and Gavin Dillard. Several of his novels have been national and international best-sellers, and they have been translated into fifteen languages.
A longtime resident of Manhattan and Fire Island Pines, Picano has resided for periods of time in Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, England, and Berlin, Germany. He now lives in West Hollywood, CA.
He has received the Ferro-Grumley Award and Gay Times of England Award for best gay novel and the Syndicated Fiction/PEN Award for best short story, as well as the Jane Chambers Play Award in 1985. He was a finalist for the first Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was nominated for five Lambda Literary Awards. He received the Lambda Literary Foundation's Pioneer Award in 2010, and the City of West Hollywood's Rainbow Award and Citation in 2013. [6]
Aaron Krach is an American artist, writer, and journalist currently living in New York City.
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Lesléa Newman is an American author, editor, and feminist best known for the children's book Heather Has Two Mommies. Four of her young adult novels have been finalists for the Lambda Literary Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature, making her one of the most celebrated authors in the category.
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Diane Anderson-Minshall is an American journalist and author best known for writing about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender subjects. She is the first female CEO of Pride Media. She is also the editorial director of The Advocate and Chill magazines, the editor-in-chief of HIV Plus magazine, while still contributing editor to OutTraveler. Diane co-authored the 2014 memoir Queerly Beloved about her relationship with her husband Jacob Anderson-Minshall throughout his gender transition.
Elana Dykewomon was an American lesbian activist, author, editor, and teacher. She was a recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.
Lee Lynch is an American author writing primarily on lesbian themes, specifically noted for authentic characterizing of butch and femme characters in fiction. She is the recipient of a Golden Crown Literary Society Trail Blazer award for lifetime achievement, as well as being the namesake for the Golden Crown Literary Society's Lee Lynch Classics Award.
The Violet Quill was a group of seven gay male writers that met in 1980 and 1981 in New York City to read from their writings to each other and to critique them. This group and the writers epitomize the years between the Stonewall Riots and the beginning of the AIDS pandemic.
Terry Wolverton is an American novelist, memoirist, poet, and editor. Her book Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman's Building, a memoir published in 2002 by City Lights Books, was named one of the "Best Books of 2002" by the Los Angeles Times, and was the winner of the 2003 Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her novel-in-poems Embers was a finalist for the PEN USA Litfest Poetry Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
Sasha Alyson is an American writer and businessman who started Alyson Publications in 1979. He later founded the Boston gay and lesbian newspaper Bay Windows (1983), the travel company Alyson Adventures (1995) and Big Brother Mouse, a literacy project in Laos.
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Jeanne Córdova was an American writer and supporter of the lesbian and gay rights movement, founder of The Lesbian Tide, and a founder of the West Coast LGBT movement. A former Catholic nun, Córdova was a second-wave feminist lesbian activist and self-described butch.
Larry Mitchell was an American author and publisher. He was the founder of Calamus Books - an early small press devoted to gay male literature - and the author of fiction dealing with the gay male experience in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s.
Jameson Currier is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, critic, journalist, editor, and publisher.
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Stuart Timmons was an American journalist, activist, historian, and award-winning author specializing in LGBT history based in Los Angeles, California. He was the author of The Trouble With Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement and the co-author of Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians with Lillian Faderman.
Bonnie J. Morris is an American scholar of women's studies. She completed a PhD in women's history at Binghamton University in 1989 and has taught at various universities including Georgetown University, George Washington University, and University of California, Berkeley.
Jess Wells is an American author of modern realism, historical fiction and magical realism. She blogs on under-represented women in history. Wells participated in the foundational years of lesbian and feminist publishing during the time of second-wave feminism in the 1980s and 1990s.
