Writer Felice Picano Is Remembered for Flashback Friday

March 21, 2025
HANK ORSO

Out author and publisher Felice Picano has died, as reported by The New York Times and Edge Network. He died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in LA of complications from lymphoma, said a friend, Jenifer Levin. He was 81.

Mr. Picano leaves behind a legacy of writing and publishing which helped to usher in gay literature into the mainstream starting back in the 1970's. As a member of the Violet Quill, a group of seven notable queer writers, he championed gay voices at a time when he said “nobody was writing about gay life.” Of that illustrious group, he is survived only by Edmund White (A Boy's Own Story) and Andrew Holleran (Dancer From the Dance.)

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As expressed in an email to his Violet Quill members recently, he shared the purpose of the group:

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!

Picano wrote 17 novels and 8 volumes of memoirs, including The Joy of Gay Sex with Mr. White in 1977, as noted in the Times. But it was his publishing of others' works that cemented his establishment and purpose to elevate and extend the reach of gay voices. Some notable writers he advanced through his publishing were Brad Gooch, Dennis Cooper, and Harvey Fierstein's Torchsong Trilogy. He started Seahorse Publishing in 1977, then later joining with two other publishers to form Gay Presses of New York. That organisation would go on for 18 years to publish 78 works.

Picano grew up in Queens in "a middle-class Italian American family." He would eventually get a job at the high-end bookstore Rizzoli's in Manhattan where his customers included "Salvador Dalí, Jerome Robbins, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Gregory Peck, Elton John, Mick Jagger and S.J. Perelman," the Times said.

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His provocative name dropping extended to his memoires, through which he mentions encounters with the likes of Gore Vidal and Edward Gorey, the poet W.H. Auden, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and the actor Anthony Perkins. After all, The Violet Quill often met on Fire Island, and one can only wonder at the fuel such an environment led to the fire of his writing.

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As reported in The Times about his writing:

His first three books, including the thriller “Eyes” (1975), had no gay themes or characters. Then he had an idea for a story about a straight man who has to go undercover in the gay world to help solve a murder. That became “The Lure,” published in 1979. Writing about it in The New York Times Book Review, 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 book made several best-seller lists. “So much for bad reviews,” Mr. Picano remarked in an interview in 2019.

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At the time of his 1995 "mostly autobiographical" epic novel Like People In History which follows two cousins from childhood to middle age, he said “Nobody was writing about gay life. I thought I had to get this down in print, or else it was going to vanish.”

Writer Catherine Texier describes Mr. Picano in a Times Book Review in 2007, that he was both “prominent and prescient...Promoting those new gay voices, at the time, was nothing short of revolutionary.”