GLR September-October 2025

Writers of a Generation Speak (Out) Kernan’s career includes considerable experience in the vi sual arts, and this shows throughout the book, adding a refine ment to our knowledge of Schuyler that a more academic biographer might not have shown. Schuyler was an artist, par ticularly in collage, as well as a poet, and participated in some joint projects with artists. He doesn’t seem to have communi cated with gay poet Robert Duncan and his collagist partner Jess Collins, but the New York and San Francisco artistic scenes were not very well connected. Schuyler was all but glued to the New York group, not just through constant availability of friendly beds—he was quite the cutie as a sailor before drug-in duced bloat in late life—but because he was rarely self-sup porting and relied on friends to keep him housed and fed. Kernan knew Schuyler late in the poet’s life and was the ed itor of his diaries, which no doubt helped make this biography so rich. This book has clearly been a labor of personal delight and passion. The quality of his research is beyond excellent— it is standard-setting. Facts are blended into a smooth, natural narrative that reads like a novel of mid-century gay life. Kernan offers a rich and rewarding biography of a poet and a man who earned the love of so many and died at age 67 after a long pe riod of mental and physical decline.

B ETWEEN 2007 AND 2019, Frank Pizzoli conducted inter views with a dozen LGBT writ ers of the past half-century, among them Edmund White, Christopher Bram, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Martin Duberman, John Rechy, and Anne christine d’Adesky. Brought together in Passionate Outlier: Gay Writers and Allies on Their Work , they provide intelligent, sometimes surprising insights into their own and other writers’ works and relationships.

White was part of the storied Violet Quill, a group that met only briefly around 1980 but, according to Pizzoli, “set into motion a literary movement.” In 2013, Pizzoli sat with White, Picano, and Holleran—at the time, the three remaining members, the others having succumbed to AIDS—for a freewheeling discussion of their early work, Queer Theory, Susan Sontag, diver sity, Grindr, and AIDS. While Holleran ex presses the view that the Violet Quill “is a

H ANK T ROUT

PASSIONATE OUTLIER Gay Writers and Allies

on Their Work by Frank Pizzoli Rebel Satori Press 246 pages, $18.95

turkey that has been eaten, deboned, and already used for soup,” this discussion is one of the delights of this collection. Of the Violet Quill, White says: “We were enabled by the in vention of new gay publications such as Christopher Street and about 70 new gay bookstores across the country. ... We were suddenly writing fiction that addressed the gay reader, not the straight one.” There is a conversation recorded two years later with only Picano, who died in March, discussing everything from his “im peccable” memory, which he attributes to “a physiological fault in the brain that inhibits forgetting ” to his friendship with Vito Russo, author of The Celluloid Closet , to his critique of the early Gay Liberation movement as “a 98% white, male, college-ed ucated, middle-class movement.” Along the way, he reflects on the first wave of the AIDS pandemic: “a period of fourteen years. I’d buried a partner and, as many of us did, asked, ‘Who’s next?’ and moved through life caring for and burying friends until there was no one left.” Two of the writers interviewed issue a call for compiling a true, warts-and-all history of the gay community. Sean Strub— the founder of POZ magazine and the Sero Project, author of Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival , mayor of Milford, PA, from 2016 to ’24—argues for coming to terms with the mistruths, half-truths, and wishful thinking: “In the earlier years of the epidemic, many of us were not entirely honest with ourselves let alone the public about the degree to which the sexual behaviors of many gay men, myself included, facilitated the spread of disease.” He also says that we in the community were often deceived. “Many of us bought into the hype of AZT as a miracle drug … only later to learn how many of us were harmed by AZT monotherapy.” He is skeptical of the

As an interviewer, Pizzoli has certainly paid his dues. “I have spent my professional life in journalism and human serv ices,” he says, referencing decades of interviewing people and writing for Pennsylvania’s The Central Voice , an award-win ning bimonthly LGBT newspaper that he founded in 2001; The Village Voice ; POZ ; and other magazines. He also spent many years interviewing clients and others as part of his work in HIV organizations. Of the interviews collected here, Pizzoli says: “I wanted to ask the writers who interpreted my generation’s ex perience through their work what they thought about, well, everything—their own and others’ work as well as their reflec tions on past and current events.” To find out what happened for these writers, Pizzoli turns first to the late Edmund White, the éminence grise of contem porary queer literature, who died in June. There are two solo in terviews with White, who muses that before 1969, the general population regarded homosexuality as a crime, a sin, or a men tal illness. That, he says, explains why “there really aren’t that many books [pre-1969] that show homosexuality in a positive light. City of Night , no. Jean Genet, no. ... [Y]ou have to wait until you get to [Christopher] Isherwood in A Single Man before a reader can find a picture of a [gay] guy who is just a guy.” Unlike other writers interviewed here, White rejects the notion of a “gay sensibility”: “I don’t think there is a gay sensibility any more than there is a single Black or Jewish sensibility.” Along with Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grum ley, Andrew Holleran, George Whitmore, and Felice Picano, Hank Trout has served as editor at a number of publications, most re cently as senior editor for A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine. September–October 2025

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