Customer Reviews

Art and Sex in Greenwich Village: A Memoir of Gay Literary Life After Stonewall

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A memoir of the heady days of gay writing and publishing, the 70's and 80's in New York City, which is alternating fascinating and frustrating. Fascinating in the stories Picano has to tell in his fluent, readable prose style: the development of "Torch Song Trilogy" and Harvey Fierstein's early career, the personalities behind Three Lives Bookstore and Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore (Greenwich Village institutions), the Violet Quill writers circle, the trials and tribulations of getting gay and lesbian literature written at all when societal prejudice continued to create obstacle upon obstacle, the devastations of the AIDS epidemic upon multiple budding careers.

Frustrating in the narcissism with regard to the author's contribution to gay literature, the myopia that conflates historic significance with literary worth, the overvaluation of minor writers (his friends) and the undervaluation of major ones (not his friends):

"I'd begun writing what would end up being the first part of my first memoir and I was intensely aware that I believed I'd accomplished a kind of breakthrough in the form". (page 166)

"Today the criticism my book received then seems silly when it isn't hypocritical". (p.171)

A little of this goes a long way - and there is alot of this.

Picano is out to dish the dish, settle some scores and make perfectly clear how heroic his (and some others)efforts were. It isn't so much as I disagree with his assessment of some of his accomplishments as his manner of seeing them all in the same rosy glow.

While I frequently found this book compulsively readable, I episodically had to slow down to step around the little piles of egocentricity.

I am a big fan of Felice Picano, having read almost everything he's written, back to Slashed to Ribbons in Defense of Love. So I am sorry to say that this book was a huge disappointment. I know the history of gay publishing and was hoping for some insight into its overlooked history. Alas, this book is mostly about Felice. And Felice. And Felice.

It's also not really about Art and Sex. It's a history of Picano's publishing ventures in New York. There's almost nothing about art, and there are passing references to sex, but the book is completely mistitled. It should be, "A Brief History of Gay Publishing in New York."

Felice Picano is the man who was there and who did the work. He devised SeaHorse Press and built it up into a larger agglomeration called GPNy, with a pair of other likeminded publishers and dreamers. SeaHorse was responsible for some of the very best books of the 1980s, some authentic landmarks like Dennis Cooper's IDOLS and SAFE, Bob Gluck's JACK THE MODERNIST, Brad Gooch's JAILBAIT AND OTHER STORIES. And plays like FORTY DEUCE by Alan Bowne and the book that put SeaHorse on the map, TORCH SONG TRILOGY. Along the way, as Picano describes it, he encountered everyone from Robert Mapplethorpe to Nico and he lived to tell the tale.

The subtext of the book is survival, one man's survival through the worst of the AIDS crisis in Manhattan. No sooner do we come to know a writer, an artist, a lover, a friend, than he is carried off by the disease and that which he left behind becomes more precious. This terse threnody runs all along the underside of this delicately written book like the runner of a carpet; just when it seems to be all about publishing trivia and how many printings had this or that forgotten volume, Picano's novelistic sense surges forward and real human interest takes its place on center stage.

And the book has its own humor too! Gore Vidal averts Picano's overtures towards the republishing of MYRA BRECKINRIDGE with his own King Charles' head, the alarming spread, even in youth, of American men's backsides, and how the Germans do these things so much better. Boyd McDonald, the notorious editor of STH, perplexed by a royalty statement; James Purdy, genius among plebes, equally baffled by niceties of copyright. SeaHorse and GPNy didn't last very long--not nearly long enough in my view--but the very compression of the period provides Picano with exactly the right amount of material for his project, a book which brings back all the glory days, and much of the terror, of a certain era in literary and artistic history.

I had a great editorial experience with him even though, in the end, SeaHorse passed on my book of memoirs, and the press was running down when I sent it in. He took the trouble to read the entire thing and made one enormously sweeping editorial suggestion which actually saved the whole thing and made it hang together, rather than the ragbag of halfassed New Narrative experiments it had previously been. I'm sure there are hundreds of younger writers who can attest also to Picano's generosity and, what would you call it, in Scotland it would be that he is a canny man. In the USA, he's a mensch.

Felice Picano's Art and Sex in Greenwich Village is an informative and entertaining history on the emergence of gay literature in the 1970's and `80's from someone who was not only there, but helped pioneer it.

With his own SeaHorse Press and later Gay Presses of New York, Picano published the works of then- unknown gay writers such as Harvey Fierstein, Brad Gooch and Dennis Cooper.

With his no-holds-barred candor, razor-sharp memory and quick wit, Picano recollections (from visiting Fierstein's tiny Brooklyn apartment to an after-hours private photo session with Robert Mapplethorpe) are, at times, dishy and gossipy, yet always incredibly fascinating to read. Picano also settles some scores and puts a few rumors to rest along the way, too. I also enjoyed the many photos of book covers, artists and writers of the era.

But I was mainly touched by Picano's stories on lesser-known writers, many who died too young to establish great literary legacies. Although never becoming big names, these writers' contributions were no less important, and Picano's book reverently honors their place in gay literary history.

Salvatore Sapienza, author of Seventy Times Seven

As a writer and poet in the 21st century, I owe my success to people like Felice Picano, who opened doors for all of us in the business. His newest effort, Art and Sex in Greenwich Village: A Memoir of Gay Literary Life After Stonewall, a non fiction recount of the creatively rich, landmark period during the 1970s and '80s when the first dedicated gay presses arose in New York City. Focusing primarily on SeaHorse Press and the seven writers that formed the Violet Quill: Andrew Holleran, Christopher Cox, Edmund White, George Whitmore, Michael Grumley, Robert Ferro, and, of course, Felice. He covers the two decades following the 1969 Stonewall riots, outlining how he (and others) fostered a GLBT literary tradition that continues today, with writers such as Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Larry Kramer and, of course, Picano.

As an HIV survivor, I am aware that we have lost two generations of GLBT history; one to HIV/AIDS, and the other to The Vietnam War. We have kids under thirty years old that have no idea how the GLBT movement, much less our literature, came into existence. Most of them take them for granted. For me, personally, Art and Sex in Greenwich Village: A Memoir of Gay Literary Life After Stonewall is a reminder that we should continue the struggle, and, at the same time, we need to be thankful to those who led the way, when most of us were too afraid and closeted to do what needed to be done.