Prolific author, editor and publisher Felice Picano died March 12, at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81. The accolades and remembrances from people in the publishing industry we have poured in and are all across social media.
It's amazing how many lives Felice touched with his generosity by promoting and helping out other fledgling authors, including myself. My first ever blurb was from Felice for my 1999 debut novel PINS, which he called "a presently written novel of athletics and small town America."
He even helped me get my first agent who, despite failing to land me a publishing deal, spurred me on to continue and publish PINS myself.
Dozens of other authors, editors and poets have shared remembrances of his generosity and friendship. He was always interested, adventurous, and willing to help out others. He could also tell a story in person like few others (Warren Beatty at a gay circuit party?).
The late Ron Williams with Felice
Several of his books became major best sellers, including Like People in History, The Lure and many other books, as well as short stories, plays, and screenplays (He shared a few funny tales of script-doctoring gladiator movies).
When is best-selling books went out of print, he industriously found alternatives to republish them and gain back the rights of his books. Two of his books will soon be published posthumously as well.
As a founding member of the Violet Quill, Picano, Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Robert Ferro and several other gay male authors formed writing circle in the 1970s and helped each other establish gay fiction as a valid genre of literature, mostly from a New York setting and perspective.
I first met Felice in New York City around 1989. We eventually shared an odd reading night at the now-closed Crowbar in the East Village. Felice read a short story and I read an overly long roman a clef story about working on a pumpkin farm.
2012 Philadelphia author gathering
Almost 30 years later, that story was woven into my novel Now I'm Here. By the time I finished my reading, however, Felice was the only person still awake. A lesson learned, and one of many that he taught; be brief and get to the point.
In the past decade or so, he would visit San Francisco from his new home in Los Angeles. I had the honor of sharing readings with him, introducing him at literary events, and generally just hanging out.
One particularly joyful gathering was in Philadelphia in advance of the 2012 Lambda Literary Awards in New York City. I was in town to attend the awards (my fourth novel, Every Time I Think of You would win a Lammy), and do research for my mostly Philly-set sequel, Message of Love.
After Felice is reading at Giovanni's Room, friends gathered for dinner in Philly's Little Italy, and it was perfect late afternoon of dining, sipping wine, talking shop and spending time with much more accomplished writers, including Tom Mendicino, the late Mark Merlis, and poet Jim Cory, who died last year.
Felice and me at The Broad Museum
When I booked a reading at Book Soup in West Hollywood for Now I'm Here in 2018, I was thrilled to have musician Dudley Saunders collaborate with me on that event. Not only did Felice show up, he also brought a few of his writing students from a class he was teaching at the nearby public library.
In 2019, when I visited my brother in Los Angeles for Christmas, we toured the Broad Museum and Chinatown with Felice, who also taught me that one could get around LA on the train system, which was a fun adventure.
Felice with author Wayne Hoffman 2012
Even up to his last years, although ailing, he was still cooking dinners for his friends and visitors in Los Angeles. I'm assuming that he has an executor who will keep his books alive and in print for as long as possible, at least as ebooks. I don't know what kind of memorials are going to be planned, but with so many friends and fans in multiple cities, it'll have to be more than one event.
In the meantime, below is my 2020 online chat with Felice about our two Hollywood-theme novels Finding Tulsa and Justify My Sins, hosted by the Bureau of General Services Queer Division in New York City. Felice also blurbed that novel, my seventh:
"Finding Tulsa" is sexy, romantic, witty, engaging both cleverly current yet sweetly retrospective. It's Jim Provenzano's most complex and accomplished novel. He gets so much right and so evocatively about show business, from those school plays we all remember to Hollywood made-for-television movies, with delicious stops at boyhood Super8 movies and out-of-town gay porn shoots."
You can find other talks with Felice on YouTube as well. And check out his 2019 chat with Wayne Goodman on the Queer Words blog.
But of course, the best thing you can do is read his books. If you haven't already, there are some classics with intense human interaction, and no two books are alike because he was quite a masterful genre-hopper from memoir fiction to essays.
Farewell, Felice, you will be missed.
(Official website: www.felicepicano.net)
