Felice Picano, who in the 1970s and ’80s helped usher in a golden age of gay literature as the author of groundbreaking novels and memoirs and as the publisher of dozens of books by gay writers, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 81.
The cause of his death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, was complications of lymphoma, said Jenifer Levin, a close friend.
Mr. Picano, who published 17 novels and eight volumes of memoirs, was a member of the Violet Quill, a group of seven gay male writers who met regularly in Manhattan and on Fire Island in the early 1980s to discuss their work in progress, at a time when gay literature was just entering the mainstream.
Two Violet Quill members, both best-selling authors, survive him: Andrew Holleran (“Dancer From the Dance”) and Edmund White (“A Boy’s Own Story”). If the other participants — Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley and George Whitmore — aren’t as well known, it may be because all four had died of AIDS by 1990.
Mr. Picano often wrote about difficult subjects, including his own early life. His 1985 memoir, “Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children,” described a teacher who brutalized him for writing with both hands. It also described Mr. Picano’s sexual encounters with both boys and girls, starting at age 11. When the young Mr. Picano wrote a story about his experiences, having concealed identities and removed the most lurid details, his teachers insisted he had made it up.
When he published “Ambidextrous” almost 30 years later, some reviewers had the same reaction: that children don’t have sex. Mr. Picano referred them to the definition of “memoir.”
He was the author with Charles Silverstein of “The New Joy of Gay Sex” (1992) and “The Joy of Gay Sex: Fully Revised and Expanded Third Edition” (2003). Dr. Silverstein, who had written the original “The Joy of Gay Sex” with Edmund White in 1977, asked Mr. Picano to help produce a second edition that might convince gay men to have sex safely. Less than a decade later, the advent of effective AIDS treatments, and societal changes including the rise of internet dating and hookup sites, led to the third edition, which includes entries on having children, growing old, bisexuality and homophobia. Like the other two volumes, it was arranged alphabetically. The B section, for example, began with barebacking, bars, baths and bears.
But mostly he was a novelist. His first three books, including the thriller “Eyes” (1975), had no gay themes or characters. Then he had an idea for a story about a straight man who has to go undercover in the gay world to help solve a murder. That became “The Lure,” published in 1979. Writing about it in The New York Times Book Review, the crime novelist Evan Hunter observed, “The suspense here is as threadbare as a male hustler’s jeans, and the psychology is five‐and‐dime‐store stuff.” The book made several best-seller lists. “So much for bad reviews,” Mr. Picano remarked in an interview in 2019.
Encouraged by the success of “The Lure,” he began an epic novel that follows two cousins, one gay and one bisexual, from early childhood through middle age. It was published in 1995 with the title “Like People in History.” He said in the 2019 interview that the book, though categorized as fiction, was “100 percent true and 90 percent autobiographical.”
At the time, he said, “Nobody was writing about gay life. I thought I had to get this down in print, or else it was going to vanish.” It helped that Mr. Picano had kept a journal every day since 1968. He also had, he said, an eidetic memory, by which he meant that he had total recall not only of what he saw but also of what he heard, tasted or touched. “Like People in History” became his second best seller and perhaps his best-known novel.
He established Sea Horse Press in 1977 to publish the work of other gay writers. In 1981, he teamed up with two other publishers to form Gay Presses of New York. Together, he said, the presses lasted 18 years and published 78 books (including three of his own). Those that have stood the test of time include Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy,” Dennis Cooper’s books “Safe” and “Closer,” Brad Gooch’s collection “Jailbait and Other Stories” and books based on the Rev. Boyd McDonald’s Straight to Hell magazines. The companies also reissued important older works. As a publisher, the novelist Catherine Texier wrote in The Times Book Review in 2007, Mr. Picano was both “prominent and prescient.” She added, “Promoting those new gay voices, at the time, was nothing short of revolutionary.”
“He was a life changer for many of us,” Mr. Gooch recalled. More than just a publisher, “he was a literary matchmaker who helped create an audience for our work.”
Felice Anthony Picano was born on Feb. 22, 1944, in Queens, the third of four children in what he described as “a middle-class Italian American family.” His father, Philip Picano, ran a wholesale produce business, and his mother, Anne (DelSanto) Picano, was a department store manager. Precocious, he astonished his teachers with an erudite essay on the “Iliad” when he was 11.
After graduating from Queens College in 1964, he earned money as a social worker, a magazine editor and an astrologer. He marched on Washington to protest the Vietnam War and publicly burned his draft card. He lived on several communes and, he wrote in the memoir “Nights at Rizzoli,” “My personal mantra became: If it feels good let’s do it. If it feels good and it’s illegal and it makes old people wince, let’s do it twice — and in public if possible.” He also wrote that he “consumed recreational drugs — including LSD-25 — the way most people pop in breath mints.”
He eventually took a job at Rizzoli, the high-class bookstore on Fifth Avenue and 56th Street, where his customers included Salvador Dalí, Jerome Robbins, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Gregory Peck, Elton John, Mick Jagger and S.J. Perelman. After leaving work, he would often write all night. In addition to his books, he produced articles and reviews for The Advocate, Blueboy, Mandate, Gaysweek, Christopher Street, New York Native, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review and Lambda Book Report. His criticism also appeared in many general interest publications.
In various memoirs, he described encounters with the authors Gore Vidal and Edward Gorey, the poet W.H. Auden, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and the actor Anthony Perkins. His partner for 15 years, Robert Allen Lowe, a lawyer, succumbed to AIDS-related illnesses in 1991.
Though Mr. Picano spent extended periods of time overseas, he lived in New York City and on Fire Island before moving to Los Angeles in 1995.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Of his fellow Violet Quill members, Mr. Picano wrote in an email last month: “We shared the hope that one day any lesbian or gay teenager could go into any bookstore or library and get a book about his or her own kind. Our dream has come true!”