Ages ago, a friend who taught college told me with some wonder that his attentive students didn’t know who Marilyn Monroe was. We sighed, because, naturally, we couldn’t assume that they would have any idea what or who we knew — or, gasp, the other way around.
But later, an alarming thought came to me: Can I assume that I know what I know? Marilyn … Marilyn who? Manson, McCoo? At the ever-ripening age of 77, my lacy, Swiss cheese memory still strives to fill its own holes.
As we queers and a globe of targeted others watch illegal Brownshirt erasers try to rub out our footprints, faces, and true selves, I’m grateful for the slightest confirmation of a gay-writer past — mine and everyone’s. I felt that way even when I was a callow “flaming faggot,” more than half a century ago, and published whatever I could about my inspiring forebears. It’s a vital circle.
Do you know about the Violet Quill? Attentive, under-40 writers and editors I recently asked said no, though they wanted to know what it was. The name refers to seven gay, white, cis-male fiction and nonfiction New York scribes: Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White, and George Whitmore. Some of them had premiere “big” books, such as Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, White’s A Boy’s Own Story, and Whitmore’s The Confessions of Danny Slocum. They met just eight times, in the early 1980s, when AIDS was named. Cox, Ferro, Grumley, and Whitmore fell to the HIV/AIDS pandemic between 1988 and ’90.
This post-Stonewall queer salon was a splinter compared to, say, the critics, actors, and wisecrackers of the Round Table, or “Vicious Circle,” who gathered at Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel for high-rent drunken luncheons almost every day from 1919 till the 1929 Crash. Literary tourists are still fascinated with Dorothy “If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me” Parker and her martini buddy, theater scourge Robert Benchley. So, in unfair comparison, was the Violet Quill small stuff, even smaller as queer years rolled on?
No. Our past is large. Btw, the formidable Algonquin table seated a closeted queer or two. Or three. The Violet Quill seven were out.
That’s why I’m praising a new collection of interviews and published pieces, Passionate Outlier: Gay Writers and Allies on Their Work, by intrepid queer-rights reporter, HIV expert, and prevention advocate Frank Pizzoli. It’s a welcome mirror to a narrow but courageous writing world (including articles and interviews Pizzoli has written for the Village Voice since it was relaunched, in 2021).
“Of course, there’s a gay sensibility.… And it’s a good ‘sensibility’ — we are shaped by exile, born into the ‘heterosexual camp’ with all that implies.”
In Outlier, Pizzoli reprints his 2013 interview with surviving Quill members Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, and Edmund White: “Corralling the three required a trail of emails,” Pizzoli writes, with Holleran finally conceding, “I won’t be the spoiler if Ed and Felice want to, but my gut feeling is that this is a turkey that has been eaten, deboned, and already used for soup!”
As I was writing this, queer art historian James Saslow told me that Picano had just died, aged 82. Holleran and White are left.
I must get a few things out of the way. Pizzoli’s book, as a book, is something of a mess. You might expect all interviews, because of the title, but some less-incisive book reviews are larded in, probably to fatten the volume. There’s no index, so helpful to hidden histories. (They’re expensive, but new software could have brought down the cost.) Also — and this is incomprehensible — readers won’t know when and where these pieces were first published unless they turn to the small-type notes near the Contents section. Each article becomes a back-and-forth puzzle, because dates and context are crucial.
Happily, Pizzoli is no novice. He’s a smart interviewer with an instinct for drawing out gay men and others he so obviously respects, inviting them to interrogate themselves and dish about “friends” thriving, wizened, or dead. Pizzoli rarely challenges but drops informed bait, and his subjects, including historian Martin Duberman and lesbian drum-beater Anne-christine d’Adesky, often took the hook. Duberman’s arm-chair consideration of race, class, and politics, queer and otherwise, is a trenchant read, especially now.
I was intrigued to see a 2017 Gay & Lesbian Review phone interview with assertively ungay novelist Salman Rushdie about his 11th novel, The Golden House. Pizzoli asks setups about the main character, a zillionaire named Nero Golden who moves to Greenwich Village with three sons, one of whom, Pizzoli writes, “struggles with his gender identity.”
Then the interview shifts:
Gay & Lesbian Review: Regarding the LGBT community in majority-Muslim countries, do gay people represent the “decadent West” who are to be thrown from buildings, stoned, or “honor killed” by family?
Rushdie: There is quite a substantial gay population in the Islamic world. I think there’s a lot of prejudice. People in the gay community, and certainly in the transgender community, face real obstacles. Not only in Islamic countries but even here.
I grew up in Bombay, which has always been home to quite a substantial transgender community, the Hijra. I’ve spent time in that community listening to their stories and hearing the convictions of their lives. That was for me one of the starting points in writing about an increasingly central subject of gender identity these days. Here in New York, I’ve had a couple of friends who have transitioned. One in each direction, male to female and female to male. Yes, these are people I care about who’ve gone through this process.
With more probing, Rushdie summarizes the Indian struggle for gay legalization in a somewhat Wikipedian manner. Pizzoli happens not to ask about young folks and gender dysphoria, a diagnostic term adopted in 2013. Writer Joseph McCormick, at PinkNews, attended a Golden House press event around the same time, and quoted Rushdie’s skepticism of childhood’s “I’m not this, I’m that” reality. The novelist never mentions dysphoria’s documented, possibly serious consequences:
If there’s a boy who likes playing with dolls and wearing pink shirts it shouldn’t necessarily mean that he has to have gender reassignment surgery. Until quite recently that would never have occurred to anyone, so I think we maybe need to just back off a little bit.
I fasten on this because the lionized Mr. Rushdie should have done his suicide homework. In the past few months, threats and danger to trans U.S. citizens have skyrocketed. Fake-lib California governor Gavin Newsom has attacked trans athletes, and a trans adult who, like Rushdie, “I care about” very much is leaving his country, his job, his friends because he isn’t safe here. Everything old is news again.
A longer, 2014 interview gives immediate presence to the canny, campy, and aggravated voice of Mexican-American writer John Rechy, now 94. His 1963 novel City of Night was devoured by prequeer teen readers like me, and properly lauded by avant-garde critics for its noirish depiction of the author’s lick-my-boots hustling life in Los Angeles. We learn that Rechy wrote, taught, and turned tricks for years after. In their discussion, Pizzoli is wide-ranging and fully prepared to be generous, in spite of the subject’s “I should be famous” tics. Here’s Rechy about gay sensibility, a topic that refuses to disappear:
“Of course, there’s a gay sensibility.… And it’s a good ‘sensibility’ — we are shaped by exile, born into the ‘heterosexual camp’ with all that implies. Very early, we deal with ‘camouflage’ in various ways, and that shapes a unique ‘sensibility.’ I uphold our differences and resent them being ‘erased.’”
Not everyone agrees. Let me personally digress, a segue to the Violet Quillers. In 1982, Manhattan’s newish New Museum mounted a tantalizing show called Extended Sensibilities: Homosexual Presence in Contemporary Art. It was accompanied by two speaker panels; I was on one because I reviewed the show for this publication. The panel comprised, among others, feminist Kate Millett, queer film historian and activist Vito Russo (who died of AIDS complications in 1990), and my charming acquaintance, Quill member Edmund White. Our topic: “What Is the Impact of Homosexual Sensibility on Contemporary Culture?”
In the greenroom, Ed sidled over and asked me what I was going to say. Ever the innocent, I read him my index-card opening: “No, there is no such thing as a gay sensibility, and yes, it has an enormous impact on our culture” — a Wilde paradox, to be sure. Early speaker White used my line verbatim as his lede, which became the evening’s theme. When my turn came I was flummoxed, totally at sea. He thus illustrated his own shaky thesis, that gay sensibility hides, borrows, and steals to survive.
Still, the same question stands: Are “our” books important because they’re queer (or feminist, or Black, dot dot dot), or just magnetic New Yorker writing? You’d think, at this or any stage of the game, that dualistic choices would be scorned, but Pizzoli, in his interview, got the three seniors to stew in the same canned broth.
Some excerpts, to give a sense of voice:
“White: We’re not very written about. It’s actually been a scandalously neglected movement, I think. At Princeton where I teach the talks are mostly about Milton or Spencer, but almost nothing on gay literature of the late 20th century and forward. Even gay academics are really only interested up until about 1910.
Picano: Being alive is definitely a disadvantage.”
…
“Picano: Nobody else that we knew, like [poets] Richard Howard or Jimmy Merrill, nobody, would discuss gay literature. They said gay literature is all porn. Isn’t that what they told you, Edmund? That’s what they told me. What do you want to write something gay for? Do something literary.
White: Yes, that’s right. I remember.
Holleran: Edmund, who’s the figure in City Boy [White’s 2010 memoir] that does that to you?
White: Richard Poirier [gay critic, editor]. He blew up at me at a party.
Holleran: So, Poirier tells you that you’re a fool for wanting to write about gay life, for wanting to be considered a gay writer …
White: … He started screaming at me for talking about a gay sensibility or gay literature. He felt that literature had to be universalist. And so does every person in France think it has to be universal. There is no gay fiction in France. There is no Black fiction. There’s no Jewish fiction. It’s all universal…. And no French person has ever said Yes to the question, Are you a gay writer? Not one.”
And so it went among them, a quiet juggle of anger, nerve, ambition, and occasional disappointment. I’ve read a bunch of the Violet Quill members’ books and didn’t always like them, but they were key pebbles tossed into my queer-writer pool, Fire Island’s or not. They still ripple.
Farewell, too, to sweet, wry Christopher Cox, who was sometimes treated as secondary because he “wrote very little,” as novelist Christopher Bram (interviewed at length in Passionate Outlier) said with an almost visible sneer.
Young Cox was composer Virgil Thomson’s assistant and the subject of one of his 1989 orchestral portraits. Chris became an actor, theater director, book editor, and effervescent writer about travel and art. He changed the people around him. It’s petty and bluntly wrong to measure achievement by fame or the number and size of one’s books. For many of the writers Pizzoli interviews, these concerns seem present, and also like inheritances from the ungay world. Our queer survival and joy depends on so much more.
I best recall Chris Cox dancing at Chelsea’s old, glowing Limelight, leaping and laughing, soon before AIDS took him away. ❖
Jeff Weinstein is a writer, editor, and teacher based in New York. A former restaurant critic at the Village Voice, he’s contributed articles about art, style, books, and queer politics and health to the Voice, the New Yorker, Artforum, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Baffler, and many other publications.
