February Books: The Roots and Fruits of Gay Culture

Best Gay Romance 2008, edited by Richard Labonté; The Cleis Press, 240 pages; $14.95.

February is the month of romance, and what better way to celebrate this month than with Best Gay Romance 2008, the Cleis Press’s new collection of gay love stories. Richard Labonté, editor of Cleis’s Best Gay Erotica series, knows that getting a guy in bed is easy. Getting him to stay for the long haul is much harder.

Thus the stories in Best Gay Romance 2008 go beyond the bedroom to deal with issues of passion, seduction, commitment, jealousy, nostalgia and regret. Seasoned authors like Victor J. Banis, Jamison Currier and Max Pierce join talented newcomers like Dale Chase and Rob Rosen in creating stories and characters that we can all relate to, for who hasn’t fallen in love.

Those readers who can’t get too much gay romance should check out last year’s edition, edited by Tom Graham (also $14.95).

Art and Sex in Greenwich Village: A Memoir of Gay Literary Life After Stonewall by Felice Picano; Carroll & Graf; 266 pages; $15.95.

During the years before and after Stonewall, gay men and lesbian women created an openly gay and lesbian culture. Gay publications, publishing companies, bookstores, art galleries, theaters and concert halls were organized to reveal, unite, entertain, organize and celebrate the gay community.

One of the early producers of gay culture was Felice Picano. In 1977, at the start of his own prolific career as an author, Picano founded the SeaHorse Press. In Art and Sex in Greenwich Village, his memoir of gay literary life after Stonewall, Picano described SeaHorse as

...the first East Coast gay publishing company, the first consciously-begun gay male literary press, and the second gay publishing company in the world. [Gay Sunshine Press was the first.]

By the time I began it, in the spring of 1977, no one else had the concept of a company like SeaHorse, which would put out nothing but gay-themed poetry, short stories, plays, fiction, and nonfiction: work that was, in the words of SeaHorse’s premiere announcement, both ‘fine and accessible literature.’

The SeaHorse Press’s first publication was The Deformity Lover, a collection of Picano’s own poetry. During the next decades SeaHorse would expand its outreach to include books by Dennis Cooper, Pete Fisher, Robert Gluck, Clark Henley, George Stambolian and Doric Wilson. In 1981 SeaHorse Press joined forces with Larry Mitchell’s Calamus Books and Terry Helbing’s JH Press to create the Gay Presses of New York (GPNy), though each publisher would continue to put out its own products.

Today GPNy is best remembered as the publisher of Torch Song Trilogy, Harvey Fierstein’s Tony-Award winning play trilogy (later a movie). GPNy also published books by the likes of Charles Henri Ford, Boyd McDonald and Robert Scott.

Felice Picano wrote Art and Sex in Greenwich Village: A Memoir of Gay Literary Life After Stonewall as a follow-up to an exhibition, “Early Gay Presses of New York,” that Picano displayed at ONE National Gay Archives and other venues. He wrote this book to answer questions people posed to him at the time, “to set the record straight, and to tell what my long and generally excellent memory holds.”

There is not much sex in this book, since Picano wrote about that in his memoir A House on the Ocean, A House on the Bay. Picano’s emphasis here is on the art, and on the men and women who created it.

Picano also uses this opportunity to settle some scores, with nemeses as diverse as radical feminists to the late Craig Rodwell of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop. On the other hand, Picano has warm memories about the Violet Quill Club, a now-famous circle of gay literary friends that included Andrew Holleran and Edmund White, and the pioneer gay magazine Christopher Street.

Writing about art and sex in New York City, Picano put himself in the role of a “survivor, not just of AIDS, but of the sixties and seventies drug and dance scene, the Vietnam War era, of poverty, and of depression.”

It is fortunate that someone as talented as Picano survived to tell the story, to remind us of the glorious decade between Stonewall and AIDS, and of the gifted men and women who made that decade so memorable.