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.
However, lavender literature of the more vaunted variety didn't immediately spring into being like Topsy; it took Picano's vision, acumen, and sweat equity to get those gay presses rolling. And roll they did, as Picano launched SeaHorse Press in 1977, devoted to gay writing of a higher order than the pulp fiction then pervading the scene. By 1981 he had joined forces with two other gay publishers of note, writer Larry Mitchell's Calamus Books and dramaturge Terry Helbing's JH Press to form the landmark Gay Presses of New York (GPNy).
Arguably, the "Gay& Lesbian" or "Alternative Lifestyle" sections at Barnes and Nobles and Borders that are taken for granted today would not have been available so soon without the arrival of GPNy, and the editorial zeal behind it. After all, major chains like B&N don't give up valuable shelf space unless they feel books will move.
It was not so many years prior to the majors relinquishing that expensive space to queer titles that gays could only find esoteric books like "Teleny," a novel reputedly written by Oscar Wilde, or pulps like "Song of the Loon" stashed among other oddities and occult remainders in downtown hippie bookshops and only later in the fledging gay book stores. Picano relates how he "used to tease my arty friends by telling them that I'd written a pulp and sold it for payment of $500 dollars and a blow job - the supposed going rate in the late 1960s-under the name Irving Feydreit titled 'Elevator Boys in Bondage.'"
Picano passionately pursued and contracted quality queer authors, then published and promulgated them - even art directing the provocative covers by George Stavrinos and Robert Mapplethorpe - to keep them flying off the shelves.
Passion was the operative word at SeaHorse Press, and was a required virtue, considering the hard knocks and pricks Picano came up against, even in venues where you'd expect smooth cruising.
In one revealing chapter, he approaches poet Charles Ortleb, then publisher of Christopher Street magazine and the New York Native, with the hopes of getting a review placed for ex-porno star Gavin Dillard's "Notes from a Marriage: Love Poems."
Picano writes: "Ortleb stepped out of his office, took a look at the slender little volume and read a few pages. From the expression on his face, he clearly considered it to be the merest gay piffle. 'What you should do,' Ortleb suggested, 'is publish porno. It's the only way you'll make money'... I tried to point out to Ortleb that it was more interesting and exciting to publish something that wasn't porno, something literary even, and then to break even financially. But he wasn't interested in hearing that."
Although Christopher Street published fiction, its "editors never explicated their all but incomprehensible criteria..." Picano writes. "This meant that many of us writing gay short stories had to look afield more often than not if we wanted to see our work in print. There were few enough other magazines at the time that would even consider publishing a gay story or poem (certainly none of the literary quarterlies, and not the New Yorker)."
It's even more bizarre to read that when Picano brought the 1981 hot-off-the-press new titles by Dennis Cooper (as a poet) and Brad Gooch ("Jailbait") to Craig Rodwell, the founder and then-owner of Greenwich Village's landmark Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, the first openly gay locale in the United States, the books were returned, on the ground that "Jailbait" wasn't "gay enough!"
"Later on," Picano explains, "...through some other people who knew Craig, I discovered that he seldom, if ever, actually read the books on his shelves... But he'd been fighting a (losing) war with the 'dark forces' of Gay Leatherdom and S/M, typified for him by the work of Robert Mapplethorpe.
Now the sweet and innocent (and fully clothed) youth on the cover of Gooch's first book had been shot by Robert, and in fact, was Raymond Mapplethorpe - his younger brother - who was indeed still jailbait at the time."
Eventually, Picano and GPNy would publish Harvey Fierstein's "Torchsong Trilogy" before it became a Tony-winning Broadway hit, as well as Robert Gluck, Jane Chambers, and Martin Duberman. There is also an hilarious walk-on by the "Reverend" Boyd MacDonald, whose legendary "Straight to Hell" anthologies included loopy Rabelaisian tales and articles with wild titles like "Marine Takes It Up the Ass - And Likes It!," "Prep School Boy Sniffs His 'Nauseating' Underpants," and "Do Her Hemorrhoids Rule the Oval Office?" - that last concerning Nancy Reagan.
Picano also informs us of cock-crazy Robert Mapplethorpe's sadly interrupted project of photographing a monster compendium of the engorged male genitalia of his countless tricks for a show to be titled "One Thousand and One Nights," and hints that after his death, the great photographer's foundation attempted to rehabilitate his hell-bent roaring boy reputation by suppressing them.
"I think Robert made it to Germany and Brazil, if not to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, but I have no idea if he reached the magic number of photos he was aiming for," Picano writes. "After he died, a foundation quickly and tightly formed to exploit his work, which they have done very methodically, extremely professionally, and for great profit. But there isn't a single 'Robert Mapplethorpe dicks' among them. I even wonder if [they] would admit to the existence of those many hundreds of tongue-licked-to-a-bright-shine penis photo in the collection. Hypocritical and sanitized as it's all become, I somehow doubt it."
Be that as it may, there's nothing of that sort in Picano's razor-sharp, brainy, enlightening, and sexy "Art and Sex in Greenwich Village: Gay Literary Life After Stonewall." It should even convince readers that another Stonewall Rebellion is long overdue.
Felice Picano spoke with Gay City News from his current home base in Los Angeles.
MICHAEL EHRHARDT: Felice, do you think the mainstreaming of gay culture is a mixed blessing? That is, in terms of losing our unique queer perspective and identity in the general morass of crass, even manipulative media consumerism? I'm thinking of programs like "Will and Grace" and "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," which could be viewed as a form of gay minstrelsy.
FELICE PICANO: You must remember Michael, that in that Glam Era Before AIDS, straight boys and men regularly had sex in droves with gay men. Despite having a brilliant, knockout partner, I also had a regular married guy with two kids from the suburbs that I saw every other Wednesday afternoon. Then they were scared off by the disease. So! If all these shows un-demonize us enough to bring straight men back into having sex with gay men again, I say it's worth all the trashy TV you have to sit through.
Now, before you jump to the conclusion that this is homophobic, let's put it the way the gorgeous movie star Errol Flynn put it in an interview in a European magazine. Asked if he were bisexual, he replied, "Who would be stupid enough to eliminate half the population as potential sex partners?" And that's how I feel about men. Let's have all of them available, the way it used to be.
ME: Do you believe that gay assimilation into the wider culture is a positive trend?
FP: When heteros assimilate, it's good. Because they seldom have any inborn taste or breeding. When homos assimilate, it's bad. Because they do.
ME: When you travel around the country on book appearances, do you find your audiences are hip - and multi-generational - as opposed to war-fatigued pre-Stonewallers?
FP: My audience ranges from multi-pierced, tattooed-to-the earlobes Girlz n'Boyz, to women with purple-rinsed hair who drive spotless Camrys. The latter invariably say to me when I sign their books: "You're a lovely storyteller; why aren't you better known?" The younger owns say: "far out!" referring to my cult-classic sci fi book "Dryland's End."
Who'da thought of killer dolphins fighting Lesbo Amazons! So reading me, almost everyone can be happy.
Still, it is the AIDS and gay politics survivors I feel closest to. On the other hand, it's always moving when I meet someone younger who tells me that he or she came out because of, or using one of my books. It's a strange and awe-filled responsibility, especially since I was never dreaming of any such thing.
ME: You don't mention the gay conservative Andrew Sullivan in your book - who's lately morphed into a bear. Is that intentional. And what about Michael Signorile?
FP: I like and admire Signorile and think he's cool. By the time he began publishing books, our presses - SeaHorse and GPNy - were history, otherwise I would have been proud to publish him. I never mentioned Sullivan or Larry Kramer, nor for that matter any number of people in [my book] because I never did any business with them.
Well... there was one piece of business I had later on in which the Bear revealed what a snit and snob he was, despite his working class British origins. When my novel "Like People in History" came out in the U.S., the same photographer who shot me, shot him for, I think, his first book. But, the wrong photos were sent to each of us; and I courteously phoned the New York City number on the cover letter to Sullivan, being amused by it all - saying I'd send his, if he'd send mine. No response.
A few days later the photographer called in great distress; Sullivan was threatening to sue him over the mix-up. I thought his was beyond tacky even for a KCQ, or Known Catholic Queen, and I said so. And said further that I would hold the ugly photos hostage until my own polite phone call was returned. The irony is my book was at the top of the British bestseller list for months, and was nominated for and won most of the gay awards. While he had to settle for the New York Times.
ME: Do you have any idea about the New York Times' arcane method for choosing which gay-themed books they'll choose to review? Even James Purdy wasn't reviewed for years in that gray lady of note. Meanwhile, they constantly give front-page Book Review space to the moldering heteros, Mailer, uppity Updike, and that famous literary masturbator, Phillip Roth. What the deal?
FP: You have to understand that after living for 13 years on the West Coast, I don't read the New York Times much, if ever. In El Lay, it's considered a good local newspaper with a great crossword puzzle. That said, someone who worked there for years told me that new books had to be "newsworthy" to be reviewed there. Some of my own books evidently were and so have been reviewed there, albeit never intelligently, nor without obvious bias.
But, please recall that until very recently, gay and lesbian books that were reviewed there were always done so in twos, as though it took two gay books to equal one straight one.
And as recently as a decade ago, the magazine section's one article on gay literature was surrounded by art representing dead pansies! So what really can you expect?
ME: The Christian conservatives who voted Bush to the throne believe we're at the End of Times. I know I'd rather go straight to Hell then spend any time in a Paradise imagined by the likes of Pat Robertson. What comments would you make on the End of Times?
FP: I'd rather go to Disneyland... on Gay Night... with Carson Kressley.
©GayCityNews 2007