“Nobody was writing about gay life”: How literary icon Felice Picano carved a path for queer stories

Felice Picano. Photo by Michel Boutefeu/Getty Images

This spring alone, dozens of new LGBTQ+ titles are hitting bookshelves, from Prabal Gurung’s memoir Walk Like a Girl to Shakespeare’s Greatest Love (spoiler—according to author David Medina, it was the Earl of Southampton). But access to queer narratives has been decades in the making, and few had such an impact as Felice Picano.

Picano, who passed away on March 13 at age 81, wrote 17 novels and eight memoirs, and published works by Harvey Fierstein and Dennis Cooper, among others. His unrelenting honesty ushered in a new era of gay prose, supported in part by his participation in the Violet Quill, a group of seven gay writers, including Edmund White and Andrew Holleran, who gathered in the ’80s

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