Memory lane

Franz Kafka once wrote, "It is hard to tell the truth, for although there 'is' one, it is alive and constantly changes its face." Telling truths is something that popular, prolific author and memoirist Felice Picano does extremely well. This is most evident in True Stories: Portraits from My Past, his latest collection of expanded personal essays and life reflections. While some are new, many of these pieces have enjoyed publication in other anthologies, but Picano presents them in their unedited form, free from the shackles of word counts and the red editing pencil.

In the introduction, Picano bows to the "strange, wondrous, or simply nutty" people who have passed through his life, since they're the ones who helped him become the writer that he is today. By extension, his writings are a grand gesture to "those I related to, over the years."

As far as celebrity encounters are concerned, Picano boasts a lion's share of personal interactions with divas, doyennes, and a few gayer-than-gay scribes along the way. The "British Auntie" in the opening story is none other than poet W.H. Auden, who accidentally (and quite flamboyantly) dropped a geranium flowerpot down onto St. Mark's Place where a youthful Picano and "working" actor-pal George Sampson happened to be strolling. While "his costume was curious and his apartment a horror," Auden remained magnificently "something to behold."

by Richard LaBonte
Q Syndicate's Bookmarks
March 4, 2011

True Stories: Portraits from My Past
by Felice Picano
Chelsea Station Editions, $16

If you’ve read all of Picano’s nonfiction, and there’s a lot, portions of these “portraits from my past” will seem familiar – some essays are expanded from shorter versions that appeared in previous books, restoring text excised, most likely, by page-count restrictions or editorial decisions. No matter. Picano is such a vibrant memoirist that every extra word is welcome. As a lithe youth he charmed “British auntie” W.H. Auden and an intimidating Diana Vreeland, was physically aroused at the Continental Baths by Bette Midler crooning for near-naked boys at the dawn of her career, and later crossed paths with Tennessee Williams and revived the literary career of Charles Henri Ford – appealing anecdotes all. But the best essays reveal a less celebrity-centered side: Picano besting a boyhood bully; Picano reconnecting with his curmudgeonly father; Picano explicating with wrenching honesty his complex relationship with publishing partner Terry Helbing; and, most poignantly, Picano remembering men he played with, partied with, and forged friendships with, men who died in the early days of AIDS, when it was a death sentence, and whose shortened lives Picano honors.   

Getting Queer Straight
By: MICHAEL EHRHARDT
07/26/2007
GayCityNews.com

ART AND SEX IN GREENWICH VILLAGE
By Felice Picano
Carroll & Graf
$15.95; 272 pages

Prolific gay literary icon Felice Picano ("Like People in History") wrote his captivating new memoir, "Art and Sex in Greenwich Village," to set the record "straight" about the glorious rise of a brave new literary movement on the cooling heels of the 1969 Stonewall uprising. His aim, he said, is to correct "wildly erroneous views on what our life was like a mere 20 or 30 years ago. Errors do tend to creep in and, through the Internet, errors are instantly perpetuated unchanged forever and all over the e-verse. So this is a real problem."

Now, in his early 60s, Picano gives an insider's account of the creatively charged atmosphere that resulted in the spontaneous formation of the renowned Violet Quill Club, a sort of Lavender Bloomsbury group that included Andrew Holleran, Edmund White, and Robert Ferro and promoted what the author calls its "beneficent conspiracy" on behalf of gay literature.

Gay Lit’s Golden Age
By CATHERINE TEXIER
The New York Times
Published: September 2, 2007

Reading Felice Picano’s new memoir, “Art and Sex in Greenwich Village,” took me back to the 1980s, when Joel Rose and I would load cartons of our magazine, Between C & D, hot off our dot-matrix printers, onto the back seat of our old Chevette and drive around Manhattan to deliver them to bookstores. One of us would stay in the car to avoid getting a ticket, while the other would hurry to drop off the new issue.

Those felt like heroic days for small presses and literary magazines, and Felice Picano, the founder of SeaHorse Press and one of the founders of Gay Presses of New York, was one of the most prominent and prescient of these publishers, giving a forum to the new gay literature and art. As he puts it in his exhaustive memoir, he had discerned “quite clearly ... that there was a great big gay and lesbian community out there and it was not remotely being served by publishers.” Promoting those new gay voices, at the time, was nothing short of revolutionary.

When SeaHorse Press began in 1977, it was the “second gay publishing company in the world,” Picano writes, after Gay Sunshine Press in San Francisco. Two years later, Picano founded Gay Presses of New York with Larry Mitchell and Terry Helbing. SeaHorse and G.P.N.Y. published some of the most important gay poetry, plays and fiction of the post-Stonewall era, that golden period when the newly liberated and outed “gays” replaced the old closeted homosexuals — until AIDS brutally put an end to it. Among the now-classics issued by SeaHorse and G.P.N.Y.: Harvey Fierstein’s plays in his “Torch Song Trilogy”; Dennis Cooper’s books “Safe” and “Closer”; Brad Gooch’s collection “Jailbait and Other Stories”; books based on the Rev. Boyd McDonald’s smutty “Straight to Hell” magazines; Picano’s anthology of gay fiction, “A True Likeness: Lesbian and Gay Writing Today,” which helped start the gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender literary movement; Alan Bowne’s novel “Forty-Deuce”; Robert Glück’s novel “Jack the Modernist”; and Picano’s own novel “The Lure” and memoir “Ambidextrous.” These publishers also reissued older works, like Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s “Young and Evil” (1933), and Renée Vivien’s famous turn-of-the-century Sapphic collection, “Woman of the Wolf and Other Stories.”

Review Continues at --> The New York Times Sunday Book Review