Thread by @MatthewWolfff

🏳️‍🌈#LGBTVoices Celebrates Pride🏳️‍🌈
LGBT+ REPRESENTATION IN MEDIA

Felice Picano’s memoirs: Ambidextrous and Men Who Loved Me.

Groundbreaking memoirs chronicle growing up gay pre-stonewall, through gay liberation and into the AIDS plague crisis. A genesis of gay literature.

#Pride

Born in 1944, Felice (pronounced “feliz”) Picano grew up around NYC. He was an extremely gifted student, graduating Cum Laude from Queens College in 1964, at the age of 20, with English Dept Honors.

He had some notion of becoming an author, but wouldn’t begin writing for 10 yrs.

Felice became a published author in the mid 70s. His first novel “Smart as the Devil,” met with acclaim and was a PEN/Ernest Hemmingway Award nomination.

By 1980, Picano’s career was transitioning from main stream popular literature to pioneering the genre of gay literature.

In 1980, Picano was a founding member of The Violet Quill Society, along with Edmund White, Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, and George Whitmore.

The all gay group sought to support each other’s endevours to publish literary works with gay themes.

In 1980, mainstream critics didn’t take gay lit seriously, offering little constructive criticism, a resource the group provided for each other.

The next 2 years saw a flourishing of all of their carears, leading to punlishing of some of the most seminal works of queer lit.

The Violet Quil epitomized the years between Stonewall and AIDS. The are considered the fathers of modern gay literature, and fostered a genre critical in examining LGBT+ lives.

By 1990, all but 3, Picano, White, and Holleran, had died of AIDS.

Picano founded the Seahorse Press in 1977, and the Gay Presses of New York in 1981 with Terry Helbing and Larry Mitchell, where he served as editor in chief.

Both presses sought to publish and distribute queer authors, at first in gay bookshops, and later in the main stream.

Ambidextrous: The Secret Lived of Children is a semi-autobiograohical novel that chronicles Picano’s early adolescents in the 1950s.

Picano learned to read and write at age 4, and was naturally ambidextrous. In 4th grade, he suffered his first experience of irrational prejudice

Although an out of date practice by the 1950s, teachers had previously tried to force students into right handed writing, as left handedness was considered “abnormal.”

His 4th grade teacher took a strong dislike to him, & began to harass Picano into writing with his right hand.

Felice suffered through most of a year of harassment over his writing, making increasingly defiant protests. A final violent altercation nearly got him expelled.

Picano used this story to highlight a theme of queer islolation theough prejudice.

Though the word gay wasn’t yet common, Felice knew he was different. He begins to live a double life, an experience common for LGBT+ people.

Felice appears at times a normal 1950s kid, playing with friends, getting into trouble, doing better in school under better teachers.

In a narrative that scandalized 1980’s readers (the first printing was burned by the British Gov on arrival in UK ports), Felice tells of his second life, and burgeoning sexuality.

Felice chronicles his first sexual experiences with neighborhood girls, and then a boy.

The story of Ricky is gutting. Felice falls in love with Ricky through a series of sexual encounters. Ricky is more experienced than Felice. After his father died in Korea, his father’s war buddy relays that they had had a sexual relationship there.

Ricky rebuffs Felice’s love. He doesn’t want to belong to anyone. He’s having sex with other boys and doesn’t want love. He plans on entering the military like his father, and there’s no room for love with men in that life.

A few years later, Ricky would die in Vietnam.

Felice’s dissilusion completes when he enters a city wide HS writing competition.

He tells a true story of a relationship he had with a girl classmate. She lured him into sex in her home on behalf of her dissabled war vet father so he could secretly watch.

The story was rejected by the contest on the grounds that it was unbelievable and obscene. Faculty member who encouraged him to enter refuse to support him.

In a conversation with his principle, he details the true events of the story.

The Principle replies that nothing can be done about the abuse, as noone would beleive it. Felice’s story will never be read, and the abuse would continue. 1950’s America.

Felice ends the memoir dissilusioned with adults, and feeling further isolated in his double life.

To many, Picano would seem to be a burgeoning bisexual, but Picano’s follow up to Ambidextrous would chronicle his steps into life as a gay man.

“Men Who Loved Me” would see Picano start feeling aimless as a social worker in NYC, and see him through Stonewall and liberation.

Picano wants to change. He decides to travel to Europe to fall in love for the first time, and finally define himself as a gay man.

His first long term love affair is with a Italian director of B cinema in Rome. Picano has his first work as a writer collaborating on scripts.

The affair ends badly when the director falls into depression and emotionally and physically abuses Picano.

Picano returns to a changed NYC, the underground gay scene is flourishing as more people live openly gay, and liberation is building to an approaching explosive event.

Picano dives headlong into the counter culture, becoming sexually liberated and experimenting with drugs.

Younger people want more. They want to feel safe in their neighborhoods. They want an end to the police harassment in gay bars, and their ghetto existance.

Picano isn’t there for the first Stonewall riot, but he’s in the streets in the coming days protesting and cementing his status as an activist.

His increased liberation leads him to his life as a published author, championing gay visibility and causes.

The final pages jump a few years and chronicle the coming of the AIDS plague. Picano would lose 90% of his friends, including former lovers and his own partner.

Picano became a founding member of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and wrote several novels about men facing AIDS.

With Dr. Charles Silverstein, Picano rewrote the seminal “Joy of Gay Sex,” an out of date text of the 70s, updating it with vital information about safe sex practices.

Picano wrote more memoirs, and came to see himself as a chronicler of gay life before and during AIDS.

#LGBTVoices is celebrating the end of #Pride with threads on LGBT+ visibility and impact in media every day this week.

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BTW, the photo I used for the cover tweet comes from Don Herron’s series photographing down town NY icons in their tubs, from the 70s through the 90s.

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