The Violet Quill (or the Violet Quill Club) was a group of seven gay male writers that met in 1980 and 1981 [1] in New York City to read from their writings to each other and to critique them. [2] This group and the writers epitomize the years between the Stonewall Riots and the beginning of the AIDS pandemic. [3] [4]
What made this group important was that several of its members became some of the most important Post-Stonewall gay writers in America, and the group includes writers and works that have been linked to gay writing as a literary movement. Edmund White and Andrew Holleran in particular stand out. [4] [5]
The seven writers are:
Between 1988 and 1990, AIDS claimed the lives of four of these men. [3] [4]
Felice Picano recalls that the group started because straight editors, agents, and fellow writers weren't being helpful with advice on gay themed writing. [3]
Gay fiction before the Violet Quill was of four classes. The first two were primarily or ostensibly for straight audiences where the gay characters are either minor to the main theme, or in which they live tragic lives and then died. The third was those of high literary values and were therefore valued by critics. The fourth was gay pornography. [3]
Edmund Valentine White III is an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer and an essayist on literary and social topics.
Andrew Holleran is the pseudonym of Eric Garber, an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer, born on the island of Aruba. Most of his adult life has been spent in New York City, Washington, D.C., and a small town in Florida. He was a member of The Violet Quill with Christopher Cox, a gay writer's group that met in 1980 and 1981 and also included Robert Ferro, Edmund White and Felice Picano. Following the critical and financial success of his first novel Dancer from the Dance in 1978, he became a prominent author of post-Stonewall gay literature. Historically protective of his privacy, the author continues to use the pseudonym Andrew Holleran as a writer and public speaker.
David Bergman is an American writer and English professor at Towson University, in Towson, Maryland part of the University System of Maryland. He was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, grew up in Laurelton, New York, and graduated from Kenyon College (1972) and earned a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University (1978).
Essex Hemphill was an openly gay American poet and activist. He is known for his contributions to the Washington, D.C. art scene in the 1980s, and for openly discussing the topics pertinent to the African-American gay community.
Felice Picano 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.
Christopher Street was an American gay-oriented magazine published in New York City, New York, by Charles Ortleb. It was founded in 1976 by Ortleb and Michael Denneny, an openly gay editor in book publishing. Two years later, the magazine had a circulation of 20,000 and annual revenues of $250,000. Known both for its serious discussion of issues within the gay community and its satire of anti-gay criticism, it was one of the two most widely read gay-issues publications in the United States. Christopher Street covered politics and culture and its aim was to become a gay equivalent of The New Yorker.
Trebor Healey is an American poet and novelist. He was born in San Francisco, raised in Seattle, and studied English and American Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He spent his twenties in San Francisco, where he was active in the spoken word scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s, publishing five chapbooks of poetry as well as numerous poems and short stories in various reviews, journals, anthologies and zines.
Martin Hyatt is an American contemporary writer. Born in Louisiana, he later attended Goddard College, Eugene Lang College, and received an MFA in creative writing from The New School. Hyatt's fiction is usually set in the working-class American South. His work is characterized by its lyricism and realism. He has taught writing at a number of colleges and universities, including Hofstra University and Parsons School of Design. He has taught Creative Writing at School of Visual Arts, St. Francis College, and Southern New Hampshire University.
Robert Ferro was an American novelist whose semi-autobiographical fiction explored the uneasy integration of homosexuality and traditional American upper middle class values.
George Davis Whitmore was an American playwright, novelist, and poet. He also wrote non-fiction accounts about homosexuality and AIDS.
Michael Grumley was an American writer and artist.
Christopher Cox, born Ray Cox Jr., was an American writer.
The Joy of Gay Sex is a sex manual for men who have sex with men by Charles Silverstein and Edmund White. The book was first published in 1977 and was inspired by the bestselling 1972 book The Joy of Sex. The original print run was for 75,000 copies. The book has been translated into French, German, Italian, Swedish, and Japanese.
Allen Young is an American journalist, author, editor and publisher who is also a social, political and environmental activist.
The Publishing Triangle, founded in 1988 by Robin Hardy, is an American association of gay men and lesbians in the publishing industry. They sponsor an annual National Lesbian and Gay Book Month, and have sponsored the annual Triangle Awards program of literary awards for LGBT literature since 1989.
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.
The Ferro-Grumley Award is an annual literary award, presented by Publishing Triangle and the Ferro-Grumley Foundation to a book deemed the year's best work of LGBT fiction. The award is presented in memory of writers Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley. It was co-founded in 1988 by Stephen Greco, who continues to direct it as of 2022.
Jameson Currier is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, critic, journalist, editor, and publisher.
William Bory was an American poet and gay activist.
Nebraska is a 1987 gay novel by American author George Whitmore. It is a coming of age story about Craig McMullen, a boy in Nebraska who lost his leg in a car accident, and the development of his sexual identity. It received positive reviews in the gay press for its discomforting plot, and he died two years after it was written.