Felice Picano, who in the 1970s and ’80s helped usher in a golden age of gay literature as the author of groundbreaking novels and memoirs and as the publisher of dozens of books by gay writers, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 81.
The cause of his death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, was complications of lymphoma, said Jenifer Levin, a close friend.
Mr. Picano, who published 17 novels and eight volumes of memoirs, was a member of the Violet Quill, a group of seven gay male writers who met regularly in Manhattan and on Fire Island in the early 1980s to discuss their work in progress, at a time when gay literature was just entering the mainstream.
Two Violet Quill members, both best-selling authors, survive him: Andrew Holleran (“Dancer From the Dance”) and Edmund White (“A Boy’s Own Story”). If the other participants — Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley and George Whitmore — aren’t as well known, it may be because all four had died of AIDS by 1990.
Source link
