Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture

The Violet Quill was the name that seven writers—Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White, and George Whitmore—gave to a group they formed in the early 1980s to read works-in-progress to each other. The group was not unlike many informal circles across the country in which writers come together to try out new material, hear suggestions, gain support, encounter inspiration, and disrupt the solitude that is an inevitable part of serious writing. What distinguishes the Violet Quill is that some of its members became among the most important gay writers who emerged after Stonewall, writers whose names and works have been linked to gay writing as a literary movement. Two of the writers—Edmund White and Andrew Holleran—are simply among the best writers in the United States; their names would be better known today were American publishing less homophobic.

The actual formal meetings of the Violet Quill were relatively unimportant, except perhaps for the participants. The first meeting was held on March 31, 1980, in Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley’s apartment; the last occurred less than a year later, March 3, 1981, at Felice Picano’s apartment. The only member never to host a meeting was Andrew Holleran, whose fifth-floor walk-up apartment, all agreed, was too small and too messy for a meeting. Holleran himself jokingly referred to it as “the Tomb of Ligeia.” Just three doors past the Saint Mark’s Baths (in New York City’s East Village), it was in a particularly grim location.

In all, there were eight formal meetings. But even before these started, several of the participants began to think of themselves as a group, and after the last meeting of March 3, members got together more casually for dinner or tea, to read to one another, discuss their work, and gossip. In an article he published in the New York Times Magazine, Edmund White writes that he “left the group in 1983, when I moved to Paris” (BL:276). For White, then, the Violet Quill was still going on when he left New York and that was two years after its last formal meeting. Clearly, for White, the formal meetings were not the group’s defining feature. In a letter to Robert Ferro written as the formal meetings were drawing to a close, Andrew Holleran voices the same sense of continuity: “It doesn’t even seem necessary to me to declare the Club finished—since it is something that by nature goes dormant, then called up, then fades—because that is how it’s useful to us. The VQ has no QUORUM” (Holleran’s emphasis, February 27, 1981). Today, the surviving members—Holleran, Felice Picano, and White—keep close track of one another. I rarely speak to one without his mentioning just getting off the phone with another. They stay at each other’s homes, follow each other’s careers (not without a certain rivalry), and maintain a concern for each other’s well-being. Sometimes they find themselves in the same place—reunions have occurred in Key West and New Orleans for literary festivals—but it’s rare that the three are together since they now live thousands of miles apart. Recently, when Holleran and White encountered one another at a New York bathhouse, the meeting brought surprise, embarrassment, and not a little humor. But the breakup of the group also resulted in some bitterness. In his diary, three years after the group’s dissolution, George Whitmore bristled at the idea that he had brought the group to an end: “I was the symptom and the scapegoat,” he angrily recalls. Felice Picano, however, writes proudly and with unaccustomed self-depreciation about the meetings.

The Violet Quill itself fell roughly into two smaller alliances: on one side stood Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, and Andrew Holleran, and on the other side, Edmund White, Christopher Cox, and George Whitmore. Felice Picano tried to balance himself between the two. This divide was not ideological or artistic—the Violet Quill never developed any coherent doctrine; rather, these divisions grew out of bonds of friendship and sex: when and how the participants had met each other, with whom and how long they had slept together. In yet another letter about the breakup of the formal meetings, which he called “a textbook example of WHEN QUEENS COLLIDE,” Holleran discusses the parts members took in disputes, particularly White’s siding with George Whitmore. “I see nothing wrong in Ed’s siding with [Whitmore],” he wrote Ferro. “I’d be the same in his case. Friendships are to a degree based on seniority.” And many of the friendships go back at least a decade before the founding of the Violet Quill.

First, there was the Iowa contingent—Ferro, Grumley, and Holleran. All three met at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, the foremost writing program in their day, which they attended from September 1965 through June 1967. The Violet Quill probably started out as the Ferro-Grumleys’ attempt to re-create the atmosphere of Iowa. Ferro and Holleran had both been students of José Donoso, the acclaimed Latin American novelist, who ran one of the fiction workshops. Ferro and Grumley had studied with Kurt Vonnegut in another workshop. Holleran knew Grumley then, but only in passing. But Ferro and Holleran were sufficiently good friends that they started a correspondence immediately after leaving Iowa, which, with the exception of the 1970s when they were both living in New York and in regular contact, they maintained until Ferro’s death. Holleran and White don’t remember exactly from whom or where the idea for the club originated, but they agree that it was probably with Ferro and Grumley. Picano, however, is certain that the idea arose when he first met the Ferro-Grumleys. Such a club was their sort of idea, and there is a vague recollection that Ferro and Grumley had violet plumes made for the members as a token of membership. (No one seems to have kept his, and the vagueness with which the recollection is recalled indicates that such a gesture was met with indifference or embarrassment.) The Ferro-Grumleys liked to have people over for high tea, and even after the formal meetings of the Violet Quill had ended, various members took tea with them.

Ferro and Grumley were a couple—more than a couple, really: theirs was the one life-partnership among the Violet Quill, a union carefully preserved. After meeting at Iowa, they lived together for the rest of their lives. In the minds of the other members of the Violet Quill (and to others who knew them) they were a hyphenate—the Ferro-Grumleys—and publicly they presented a united front. They wrote only one book together—their first, Atlantis—but they were each other’s most trusted reader. They shared an obsession with interior decorating, transforming their West 95th Street apartment into a strange but arresting environment, lit theatrically in a warm light, every lamp aglow. (The apartment needed to be carefully lit, according to Holleran, because, situated on the second floor, it didn’t get much natural light.) They viewed themselves as a couple particularly singled out by fate. They were convinced, for example, that they had been destined to realize Edgar Cayce’s prophecy of the discovery of Atlantis, and they maintained a shared fascination in New Age spiritualism.

Money was always a problem for them—they made little from their writing and survived on small catering jobs and an allowance provided by Ferro’s father—yet they lived a rather luxurious life together, spending three months a year in Italy (until they became too ill to travel), having their clothes privately tailored, purchasing the finest china, and rebinding their books for their private collections. Michael Ferro, Robert’s father, told me that soon after Robert’s graduation from Iowa, he had a meeting with José Donoso. Donoso told the senior Ferro that Robert could do great things if he devoted himself exclusively to writing and remained undistracted by the crass necessity of making a living. The conversation led Michael Ferro or his wife to subsidize their son. But the allowance was never enough to provide the comforts Ferro and Grumley felt they both deserved, and conflicts over money find their way into Ferro’s highly autobiographical novels—particularly his last, Second Son.

Although Ferro and Grumley maintained this unified front, it was well known that they were not monogamous. They shared a passion for men of color, and their sexual pursuits created a good deal of tension at times. They developed separate and somewhat secret relationships, which needed to be carefully kept in the background. But their commitment to one another was so great and what united them so strong, that the relationship was never seriously threatened. Certainly to the other members of the Violet Quill—and with Holleran and Picano they developed very intimate relations—they maintained an imperturbable solidarity.

They were a very attractive couple. Edmund White found Grumley especially sexy with his thick, muscular, wrestler’s build. And it was as a wrestler that he posed for the legendary AMG studios as a teenager. “I’d played football,” he recalled in a column he wrote for the New York Native (June 6, 1983: 63), “and lifted weights, and had the requisite flattop haircut of the day; I was judged acceptable.” He posed with another boy before Greek columns and satin draperies, wearing a skimpy loincloth. This classical setting suited him, and he appeared later in a number of Italian films, both westerns and gladiatorial features. There is a picture of Grumley in silhouette on a beach. He makes a heroic figure: the shoulders broadly muscled, the torso narrowing to an hourglass waist, the legs two massive columns. Ferro was no less handsome if more slightly built. Dark, intense, Italian, he broods in the pictures I have of him, his smoldering eyes surrounded by long, shiny hair and a full, neatly trimmed beard.

Holleran came to Iowa straight out of Harvard, putting off law school for two years. After Iowa, he went on to the University of Pennsylvania Law School—not because he wanted to be a lawyer, but because he thought it was what his parents wanted him to do. A dutiful son, he could have screamed when years later his mother told him that they never had such intentions for him. “Now you tell me!” he had wanted to shriek. Sex was not what brought Holleran and Ferro together—they were both highly closeted, or rather, Ferro was highly closeted and Holleran still a virgin—but they shared a theatrical (even campy) humor that they surely understood set them apart from the others. It would take many years before they would reveal their sexual proclivities to one another. And yet—if their letters to one another give some sense of the tone of their friendship—there was a strong homosexual element to it. In one letter from law school, Holleran writes that he’s reading Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest: “so good—would give anything to write another one even close” (VQR:11). To which Ferro responded that he’d been reading De Profundis. “It is a shock to me,” Ferro replies, “to find him without, for once, his sense of humor. I think it was his real disgrace—not the trial and prison, etc.—but that treatise on gloom and sadness. He should never have admitted to us that he was wrong. Because, of course, he wasn’t. What will life do to us, if it did that to him?” (VQR:13). It is almost unbelievable that at that moment neither was out to the other, and yet Holleran has assured me that, during this period, he, still a virgin, had no idea that Ferro was gay. In 1968—a year before the Stonewall Riots—it took some bravery on Ferro’s part to insist that Wilde wasn’t wrong to be gay. Clearly, the discovery that they were both gay only solidified a closeness that had already been established. In fact, the origins of the Violet Quill may be read in this letter written a decade before the club was formed, for Ferro is already concerned about what life will do to “us” because of sexuality. Only by forming a group for mutual protection could they hope to retain in a homophobic society the humor and the honesty that they needed to continue as gay writers and gay men. That’s not to say there wasn’t a great deal of contention within the group, but they were united by a belief in gay literature.

Edmund White formed the center of the other contingent. White was the best-known writer of the group because of his success with The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), a bestseller that brought gay life even into the mall bookstores. He was also the oldest although, with his big baleful eyes and dimpled cheeks, he has maintained a boyishness that persists even now. Of course, White wasn’t always so boyish. The pictures taken around the publication of Forgetting Elena (1973) show a somewhat dangerous-looking guy. A mustache gives his face a particularly sinister air, and it accentuates the devilish cleft in his chin. His hair is long in the style of the day, unruly as if he had just gotten off a motorcycle. But by the eighties the mustache is gone, the hair is shortened and parted. In a photograph taken by Chris Cox that appears on the inside flap to States of Desire, White is resting his head on the palm of his hand and his eyes are turned upward like a schoolboy listening to a favorite teacher. He had yet to put on the weight that he has carried like a banker through the 1980s and ’90s, and yet he could look pudgy. Robert Mapplethorpe took a picture of White interviewing Truman Capote—an account of their awkward, uncomfortable meeting is given in The Burning Library—in which White looks like a Midwestern insurance salesman, a smile frozen on his face, his body stiffly erect, his suit disturbingly shiny while Capote lounges T-shirted and barefoot below a tapestry of a dense school of fish.

Because of White, Chris Cox—his lover at the time—joined the Violet Quill, and although it was not a cause of the immediate dissolution of the group, White’s breakup with Cox corresponds roughly to the Violet Quill’s demise as a formal society. In a brutal sketch written after their breakup and intended for a book to be titled The Gay Sappho—in which White is accused of intrigue and “character assassination”—Cox recalls how, after their first night together, he purchased a copy of Forgetting Elena. When he got home he read it straight through to discover that White had used the same lines on him that the nameless protagonist uses in a love scene with Elena. “From the beginning to the very end, our affair did not inspire art. Art inspired our affair.” For Cox, each of White’s moves seemed scripted to put White at an advantage.

But the inspiration of art worked both ways. Without his connection to White, Cox would never have been invited into the Violet Quill Club. Before meeting White, Cox had been involved more with the theater than with literature, although at the time of the VQ meetings, Cox described himself in his resumé as a “free-lance writer” working for the Soho Weekly News. He had appeared in The Fantastics playing the mute, the only part he could play “because I had a strong southern accent.” He later joined the New York Shakespeare Festival and appeared on Broadway in its rock version of Two Gentlemen of Verona. But the experience taught him he wasn’t cut out for performing the same part night after night. In 1975 he started working for Virgil Thomson, the extraordinary composer and writer who, with Gertrude Stein, created Four Saints in Three Acts, one of the most important operas in American musical history. His job was to organize Thomson’s papers for Yale’s Beinecke Library. Since he was not a librarian, he credits his employment to the friendship that immediately sprang up between him and Thomson, based in part on the fact that they were both Southerners. Through Thomson, he was introduced to some of the most important literary, musical, and artistic figures of the twentieth century, and Thomson gave Cox a window into the historical connections of what they were doing. As White says in The Farewell Symphony (in which Cox is called Fox, a name that indicates both his slyness and his sleek good-looks): “He was aware that we were making history of some sort. He saw the links with an older generation (Ned Rorem’s, Frank O’Hara’s) and even [Thomson’s] much older generation, but he could also glimpse how the present was preparing a new youth of wild, loud, totally freaky anarchic kids” (341).

Throughout this period, White and Cox fought. Relationships have always been easier for White when he, to use W. H. Auden’s phrase, was “the more loving one.” But in the case with Cox, White was the pursued. Of all his long-term relations—with Stanley Redfern, Keith McDermott, John Purcell, Hubert Sorin, and Michael Carroll—White has been the one who has been the aggressor (or been allowed to think of himself as the aggressor) even as he has entertained sex with other men. For as much as he needs to be loved, he is made uncomfortable when that love is returned too forcefully. Cox made that mistake. Richard Howard tells the story of opening the door to a weeping Cox, who had made a jealous scene in a restaurant which ended with him throwing wine in White’s face and storming out. “He’ll never speak to me again,” Cox wailed and would not be convinced that it was just such rejection that would keep White coming back.

Keith Fleming, White’s nephew, who lived with White or under White’s auspices during the 1970s, speaks about White’s difficulties with maintaining intimacy for long periods. Fleming notes that White has only a limited capacity for heart-to-heart chats. “When a dinner guest at the apartment made the mistake of … unburdening himself too extensively, the guest was sure to be criticized as ‘juvenile’ afterwards,” Fleming notes (176). Indeed, White would “after a few minutes chatting with any one person … feel trapped and want to move on” (135). Yet, Fleming speculates, “maybe part of the reason he felt so trapped with any one person was that he was able to put himself so artfully at your disposal that you would never get enough of it and you’d exhaust him.” White’s remarkable gifts at empathy, his extraordinary acts of generosity, his need to be helpful could leave him with nothing if he didn’t put strict and seemingly arbitrary limits to his contacts with others. Perhaps he chooses lovers who distance themselves from him precisely because his capacity for intimacy is so great that those who demanded it would soon leave him empty. His remoteness is, it would seem, a form of self-preservation.

George Whitmore had been a boyfriend of White’s sometime before he met Cox. It’s clear from a letter that Cox wrote White that Whitmore saw the three of them as connected. At a dinner given by the novelist Coleman Dowell, who knew them all, Whitmore declared, “Of course, Chris and I both worship Ed.” Such declarations irritated Cox, who was extremely jealous of White and wanted their relationship to be carried on alone in private. Cox complained of “this intimacy George believes he has with me simply because he was involved with you.” Yet there may have been another reason Cox was so upset. Whitmore was, no doubt, the most boyishly handsome member of the Violet Quill. Small, delicately featured, he is cute, in the way none of the other members of the VQ could be said to be cute, even the impishly dimpled White. More than their shared interest in Ed White united Cox and Whitmore; they were both theater people who started out as actors. But whereas Cox seems to have abandoned the theater, Whitmore kept working as a playwright through the seventies and early eighties.

Actually, all the members of the Violet Quill had theatrical aspirations of one sort or another although Felice Picano “was dragged kicking and screaming into the theater,” as he wrote me. Soon after he came to New York, White had his play Blue Boy in Black produced Off-Broadway, and he has continued to work off and on as a playwright. In the 1990s his play Trios was given several productions in England. Whitmore and Cox both worked as actors in New York. In addition, Whitmore wrote a number of plays; The Rights and The Caseworker both were produced Off-Broadway. Michael Grumley appeared in a number of films in Italy and, with Robert Ferro, worked for many years on a musical version of Dodsworth. Felice Picano has also written plays, including an adaptation of his novella An Asian Minor called Immortal, a one-acter (One O’Clock Jump), produced at the Tennessee Williams Festival in New Orleans, and The Bombay Trunk, staged at the New Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. During his twenties, Picano worked briefly in Cinecittá, the great Italian movie studio, as a translator and script developer.

Felice Picano, as I said, had neither gone to Iowa nor had sex with White. He did, however, date Whitmore during the period of the Violet Quill, a romance that ended disappointingly for both of them, and he remained closer friends with the Ferro-Grumleys after the group’s formal meetings ended. Like Ferro, he is Italian, but his face is rounder, softer. He lacks Ferro’s vulpine handsomeness. But with his slightly hooded, bedroom eyes, Picano has not lacked sex partners or lovers. Strong, forceful, unintimidated, he projects a self-confidence and energy that make him appear larger than he actually is. As he saw it, the Violet Quill was divided into three contingents: the two couples (White and Cox, Ferro and Grumley) and the unattached (Whitmore, Holleran, and himself). He was one of the most enthusiastic members of the group. Like Chris Cox, Picano had a sense that they were engaged in something at once unprecedented, and yet not detached from earlier writers and artists. In an entry to his journal that records first meeting White, Picano writes portentously: “Somehow we will look back at this time as the coalescing of some acme in literature—I really think so, and I’m trying to make others feel so too.” Whether the Violet Quill was an “acme in literature,” remains to be seen, but it was an important chapter in the history of gay writing.

If the eight formal meetings of the Violet Quill did not change any of the participants as writers (although novelist Dennis Cooper believes they may have harmed Edmund White), it may be because most of them had already established themselves as authors before the Violet Quill was formed. Although White had worked for Time/Life Books during the sixties and had a play performed Off-Broadway as early as 1964, the first VQ members to publish a book were the Ferro-Grumleys. In 1970 they published Atlantis: The Autobiography of a Search, their account of discovering what they believed to be the lost continent of Atlantis off the Florida coast, a book that caused enough of a stir that they were guests on The Dick Cavett Show, a nationally televised talk/discussion program. Although it claims to be an autobiography, Atlantis is not very explicit about Ferro and Grumley’s relationship, presenting them as nothing more than two single men traveling around the world together; and yet, in itself, that was enough to give away the subtext to any discerning reader of the day. With the exception of Holleran and Whitmore, the Ferro-Grumleys, like the rest of the Violet Quill, started out as closeted authors whose books, if they did not contain explicit heterosexual content, nevertheless are fairly discrete about gay subject matter. Perhaps oddly, after Atlantis Ferro and Grumley never wrote another book together, although they helped each other out with their books, particularly Grumley’s posthumously published novel Life Drawing.

I have said that the Violet Quill had little effect because the men were already working authors. In the case of Grumley, this statement obscures the harsher reality that by the time the Violet Quill had its meetings, Grumley’s career as a book author was virtually over. Although he published four books in the seven years between 1970 and 1977—in addition to Atlantis, there was After Midnight (1977), portraits of people who work night shifts; There Are Giants in the Earth, a book about legendary “hominoid giants,” such as Bigfoot; and Hard Corps: Studies in Leather and Sadomasochism (1977)—he never saw another volume into print after After Midnight. That is not to say that he gave up writing. For several years he penned a column (“Uptown”) for the New York Native, a gay weekly, and his papers are full of book proposals, including one on the great beaches of the world. But he never signed another book contract. His diary, which he maintained until he became too ill to write, is filled in his last year with the frustration over his failure to publish Life Drawing. It was only after his death and after Ferro extensively revised the manuscript that it finally found a publisher. So if the meetings of the Violet Quill had an effect on Grumley, it was probably to make him even more blocked than he already was.

The books that Grumley published in the seventies divide themselves into two groups. Atlantis and There Are Giants in the Earth are books about the mythic—creatures and places whose actual existence remains in doubt. After Midnight and Hard Corps are about people outside the mainstream because of their jobs or their sexual desires. But in fact all four titles are about the life that is all around us that we either deny or ignore, and so if they are not gay books, they are most certainly queer books. One of the important aspects of these volumes is the way that Grumley never isolates gay people from the larger social continuum. In Hard Corps, for example, gay men “into” leather and S/M are not split off from heterosexual couples. Indeed everyone is viewed as engaging in the same activity, and because sadomasochism is less about genital relations and more about power relations, it is a field in which the gender of the participants is quite reasonably viewed as secondary.

After Midnight is actually a better and more interesting book in its handling of sexuality. Still, much of the book has nothing to do with sex: it contains chapters on a hospital’s night staff and a community of night fishermen. One chapter is about the employees of an all-night radio show that serves as a dating service. Another is about a struggling actress in New York; yet another about cocktail waitresses in Las Vegas. These last two chapters discuss the ways that sex is thrust upon women who don’t want it, women whom men regard as virtually sex workers. Grumley deals with same-sex relations twice in the book. The first time occurs in a chapter devoted to a man ministering at night to the people of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Reverend Don meets his share of hustlers and transsexual prostitutes. Jonelle is a stereotypical “chick with dick,” whose johns want her affection more than her body. Yet Grumley tries to complicate matters a bit. One hustler, Bobby, a heroin addict who “is now technically clean,” worries about his wife, also an addict. “She knows he is turning tricks on the street, and sometimes it gets her down” (81). The more interesting and sustained presentation of same-sex relations is a chapter on factory workers in Milwaukee. Ben is the night foreman in a plant that packages food and cosmetics, especially baby powder. “Ben is a big cartoon figure of a man,” Grumley says. “The men on the line call him Bluto,” because he is six two and sports tattoos, “a small blue and red dragon” and his two initials (155). Gradually, Grumley reveals not only that Ben is gay but also that he has lived for seven years with Patrick, a painter. If, as narrator, Grumley is reticent about his sexual orientation, Ben is not. Ben has learned “that it was impossible to run away from the facts of life” and knows that being a homosexual “is the best thing that ever happened to him” and “meeting Patrick is the second best” (160). Today such a portrait is television fare, but in 1978 the image of a blue-collar factory worker in Milwaukee who is out and proud broke many stereotypes.

Through Ben and Patrick, Grumley is able to express his love for Robert Ferro, to whom the book is dedicated. “Ben and Patrick’s union rests on string,” he writes. “They have never stood in a church and said, Till death us do part. They never would. Nothing legal or familial holds them together; they have simply chosen to spend their lives together. The string slackens or grows taut, and they do what they can to keep their balance” (170). But it is more than this unsacramentalized marriage that makes Ben and Patrick’s relationship mirror the Ferro-Grumley ménage; it’s also the fact that Patrick is an artist, and discussing Patrick gives Grumley a chance to expound on the importance of such relations for the artist:

This passage tells us a lot about how the Ferro-Grumleys saw themselves—not only as a couple but as artists. They are “rarefied spirits” always under siege from a hostile materialistic world that mistakes the artist’s self-involvement with the cruder forms of egotism. The artist needs protection and reinforcement—protection from self-doubt and reinforcement so he may devote himself entirely to his art. Obviously, the role of protector isn’t limited to gay partners, but the gay artist has more need of protection. (Significantly, Ben works in the factory to allow Patrick to paint full time, just as José Donoso told Michael Ferro that Robert would only become a great writer if he weren’t troubled by having to earn a living in Ferro’s cosmetics company.) Lovers are armor, shields against the vulgar world which, even when it does not directly attack the artist, fails to appreciate him or her and their purer, more precious spirit. The Violet Quill was additional protection, added reinforcement.

The person who seemed most to benefit from the Violet Quill was Robert Ferro. After Atlantis, Ferro had published only one other book, a strange novella, The Others in 1977, the very year Grumley’s book career ends. The Others is a mysterious allegory set on a ship of fools, Ferro’s homage to Isak Dinesen. Like Atlantis, The Others is not overtly gay, but its hero, Peter Conrad, is the kind of sickly, sensitive young man one finds in Henry James, his delicacy a sign—if one cared to read it—of his lack of virility. The Others was a dead end for Ferro, although throughout his career he incorporated dreamlike allegories into his novels. His real bent, as he was to find at the time of the VQ meetings, was with a more realistic novel. Ferro found his way to his mature style during the period of the Violet Quill, where he read the opening chapters to what would become his breakthrough work, The Family of Max Desir. The meetings seemed to give him more confidence in writing a novel that was more autobiographical and direct.

As for Andrew Holleran, it is hard to know how the Violet Quill meetings affected him. He had already published Dancer from the Dance, the work that brought him fame. Insofar as Holleran’s work has altered over the years—and he is disappointed that it hasn’t changed more—it is not because of the few formal meetings of the group. Yet Holleran is the person who most needed the sense of a circle of friends even as he remained detached from it. The letters that frame the main narrative of Dancer are part of his strategy to locate that story in the give-and-take of private communications. Indeed the model for those letters is the correspondence that Ferro and Holleran conducted between the time they left Iowa to the time they both settled in New York. It was a correspondence they both cherished, each preserving all the letters. In fact, Ferro kept Holleran’s letters in a small wooden box especially reserved for them, a practice he followed for no other correspondent, and Holleran was equally careful, if not as ritualistic, in preserving Ferro’s letters. Such a correspondence—and Holleran keeps up quite a large number of them—suggests at least two things: first, the need for readers he knows and with whom he can identify, and, second, the need to distance himself from them. A shy man who exaggerates in his own mind his social awkwardness, Holleran finds in letter writing a way of maintaining contact even as he preserves his distance. Holleran writes best when he can think of his readers as his friends, a close group who need not have the references glossed. Yet like Edmund White, with whom he maintains a friendship so solicitous and diplomatic that it does not completely hide their mutual sense of rivalry, Holleran is a man who fears the very intimacy that he craves. The personal letter becomes the perfect solution to this conflict. Years after the Violet Quill stopped meeting, Holleran would refer to it in his letters to Ferro as though it were still going on, and—of course—for him it was. It was the bond of friendship that Holleran needed, not the face-to-face contact. W. H. Auden says that the end of art is “an attempt to entertain our friends,” and the Auden group of Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and Louis MacNeice is a circle of readers Auden tried to amuse. The Violet Quill functioned in the same way for Holleran.

It probably had a similar function for White. Actually, White moved in several literary circles. On the one hand, he was befriended by a circle of poets and critics. Some of these writers were older mentors like Richard Howard, David Kalstone, James Merrill, and Howard Moss, and some, like Alfred Corn, were close contemporaries. But except for Richard Howard, these men did not directly involve themselves with his writing. In an incident fictionalized in The Farewell Symphony, White tells us how he came to meet James Merrill, the son of the founder of Merrill Lynch and considered by many the finest American poet of his day. David Kalstone, the scholar and critic, had arranged the occasion because Merrill was not only one of White’s literary idols but also in a position to advance White’s career. Part of Kalstone’s strategy was to have White read a chapter from his then-unpublished novel Forgetting Elena in the hope that Merrill would champion it to a publisher. But the meeting was a disaster. In his fictional account, White writes, “When I’d finished the chapter [Merrill] didn’t say anything. He just lowered his head at an enigmatic angle with a soft smile but no eye contact.” White was “devastated.” “Just at the moment I’d imagined I was about to win a word of praise from the greatest writer of the day he’d refused to make even a single assuaging remark” (211). Later, Merrill and White became friends, but as this scene dramatizes, White never allowed himself or never was allowed to be an equal.

Here he is with equals, other young writers with whom he could sit and eat order-in pizza. (Actually the food at the formal meetings was more elaborate—the meetings were famous for their delicious desserts.) Nor did he worry about getting assuaging remarks from them. His renaming of the Violet Quill into the All-Praise Club, besides making it sound slightly evangelical, emphasizes that the work would be met with acceptance and not the grim silence he had received from the éminence grise. The Violet Quill gave him unquestioned approval, approval given freely and lavishly—perhaps more freely and lavishly than White would have wanted since, as someone haunted by being an arriviste, he distrusts easily given praise. Nevertheless, by the time the Violet Quill formed, White was one of the more prominent figures in gay writing: he had published two novels—Forgetting Elena, his variation of a Japanese pillow-book which, like Ferro’s novel, was not explicitly gay (in fact the only sex scene is between the narrator and his sister), but hardly normatively heterosexual, and Nocturnes for the King of Naples, a remarkably accomplished, explicitly and exclusively gay romance. More important, he had turned himself into the Virgil and Dante of gay society by coauthoring (with Charles Silverstein) The Joy of Gay Sex and then going solo for States of Desire, his journey through the various hells, heavens, and purgatories—not to mention purgatives—of gay America. He had published as many books as Michael Grumley—more if you count the ones he had ghost written—and they had received far more attention.

In fact, the only writer of the group who had produced more than White or Grumley at the time the Violet Quill formed was Felice Picano, who continues to be an enormously productive author. In the 1970s he published four novels and a book of poetry. He had founded the Sea Horse Press, which was dedicated to publishing gay and lesbian books, and in the years that the Violet Quill met (1980–81) he edited A True Likeness, an anthology of lesbian and gay writing—which contained work by most of the Violet Quill writers—as well as writing the novella An Asian Minor and the short novel Late in the Season, begun at the Ferro family house, Sea Girt, on the New Jersey coast. At the formal meetings of the Violet Quill he read from stories that would eventually be collected in Slashed to Ribbons in Defense of Love. These were years when Picano was in especially high gear.

Picano hadn’t gone to the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop like Holleran, Grumley, and Ferro. Nor had he socialized with the cream of New York intellectuals and artists as had White and Cox. Now he was partying with people he “never hoped to meet”—and with Holleran by his side, introducing him to everyone he wanted to know. Although he had majored in English at Queens College, a branch of the City University of New York known for its notably high standards at the time, he had worked as a social worker and bookstore manager while creating himself as a writer. As proud as he is of being largely self-taught, he can become self-conscious in the company of highly educated intellectuals. When White asked him to lecture for his class at Johns Hopkins, he understood that he “had been invited specifically as a commercially successful novelist” in contrast to “the ‘artsy/literary’ business” to which the students were generally exposed. But when he met a pride of literary lions at a publication party for White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples, he felt ignored.

Picano’s success with psychological thrillers had not necessarily placed him in a literary crowd or gained him friendship with other writers. Thus, his association with the authors of the Violet Quill provided him with his first real taste of being part of a literary movement. No longer would he be working in isolation, without allies and accomplices.

This sense of not working alone was particularly important to Picano in the second half of the 1970s when he turned his attention to explicitly gay subjects. Edmund White and he were the only two members of the Violet Quill whose careers were at risk as they came out. Ferro, Grumley, and Cox had no reputations to lose. Holleran and Whitmore were, from the very first, identified as gay writers. But White and Picano had established themselves with other than gay readers, although, as Picano notes in his diary, with very different audiences. “I am impressed,” Picano writes, “by the entire academic/literary set that Ed aspires to conquer.” Picano prefers “to build a basic audience.” For Picano, introducing overtly gay characters and situations was particularly risky since his work was marketed to a popular audience and because, unlike White, he was living off the sales of his books. Thus, he was very worried that The Lure, a murder mystery about a serial killer of gay men, would cause him to lose the readership he had so carefully cultivated during the seventies. And the truth is that his career did suffer. Until he came out with Like People in History in 1995, none of the books he published after The Lure in 1979 sold as well as those he had published before.

And they did come through for him. George Whitmore—with whom he was having a short-lived affair—wrote a blurb for the book and tried to convince his own editor, Michael Denneny, a founder of Christopher Street, the most important gay cultural journal at that time, to publish excerpts from the novel. Edmund White offered to review The Lure for the New York Times Book Review, but he couldn’t get an editor there to assign it to him. With the relative success of gay publishing recently, it is easy to forget how risky it was for writers to publish works with explicitly gay content. Edmund White reminds us of the consequences of coming out as a gay writer and of the arguments put forth by well-meaning friends against coming out.

Perhaps for all writers, but certainly for us lesbian and gay writers in the 1970s, every artistic decision we made had its political aspect. Should we write gay fiction at all? At that time there was no known market for our work, few bookstores that would carry it, precious few editors who would even read our manuscripts. Literary friends told us that we were betraying our high calling by ghettoizing ourselves. After all, the argument ran, many great writers had been lesbian and gay, but Willa Cather and Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bishop wrote for all humanity and would have found any minority label demeaning. (Burning Library, 369)

Given the monetary and aesthetic arguments against writing gay fiction, one could understand the need for gay writers who wished to write explicitly about gay experience to join together for mutual support and encouragement.

The only writer to have published fewer books than George Whitmore was Christopher Cox, who was struggling with his one and only volume, A Key West Companion, during the time the group met. But Cox would eventually give up writing—as he had given up acting and photography—to develop as an editor, a job for which he had enormous skill. Unlike Cox, Whitmore had at least published The Confession of Danny Slocum, which first appeared in a more condensed version in Christopher Street. Nevertheless, Whitmore was still struggling to make a career for himself as a writer, and it was taking him longer to find his voice. Did he ever find his stride? It’s hard to say. Of all the authors of the Violet Quill, it seems to me that he is the one whose potential never had the chance to develop fully. The two books he wrote at the end of his life—the haunting novel Nebraska, and his study of the human side of the AIDS epidemic, Someone Was Here—are the strongest work he did. Yet, as good as they are, they suggest that even better work might have been forthcoming had he lived.

In any event, the Violet Quill began meeting just as The Confessions of Danny Slocum, his first novel, was published, and during the meetings he read the short stories he hoped would appear in “Out Here: Tales of Fire Island,” a collection that has yet to be published (although Picano had contracted to publish it through Sea Horse Press). For Whitmore, these meetings often proved a bitter experience. He had hoped to get support and understanding—a kind of legitimacy as a writer—but instead he got rather open hostility from Ferro. It is significant that, with the exception of Cox, the two writers who were farthest behind in establishing their writing careers should have locked horns. Insecurity may well have played a part in the clashes between Ferro and Whitmore, but we shall never know what was behind their antagonism. Whatever the cause, Whitmore came to feel he had been badly used in the affair. And yet toward the end of his life the breach between Ferro and Whitmore was closed. Sick and terribly weak from AIDS, Whitmore nevertheless attended Michael Grumley’s funeral, where Ferro and Whitmore embraced. Whitmore had discovered that Grumley was ill when they met in a doctor’s waiting room. Unlike Whitmore, who was an AIDS activist, Grumley and Ferro each worked hard to keep their illness a secret. Whitmore’s respect for Grumley’s privacy and anonymity gave Ferro reason to reevaluate his attitude toward Whitmore and come to an appreciation that he had earlier withheld.

It is of course impossible to know what would have happened to the writers who made up the Violet Quill had they never formed the association. But, clearly, the group’s formal meetings had little impact on their development. What was important was the sense that they were not working alone. It was crucial for all of them to have a sense that they could rely on the backing of other writers as they wrote explicitly about gay experience. This was probably more important to the two whose careers were most advanced—Edmund White and Felice Picano. The older generation of gay writers with whom White associated—Ashbery, Thomson, Sontag—were deeply closeted writers. To be sure, Richard Howard and James Merrill had in the 1970s written explicitly about their sexuality, but as poets in a language so elevated and arcane that it insulated them from attack. For White, this feeling of camaraderie was important. For Picano, it was vital. He understood that he was facing a major shift in his career and his audience, and he hoped to gain a more literary reputation. For him, making such friends was personally satisfying, professionally comforting, and intellectually stimulating.

So if the formal meetings themselves had little or no impact on the writers, why study something called the Violet Quill?

First, as a group, these writers represent the aspirations and achievements of “gay writing” in the first generation that passed through gay liberation. If we look not through the small aperture of the formal meetings themselves but rather through the wider lens of the writers’ entire careers, we can see that they created a vivid and arresting picture of gay life. Naturally, the Violet Quill did not represent how all gay men lived, or even how most gay men lived, but they did make visible a certain image of gay life that spoke to a large number of gay men and formed the fantasies of even more. In short, the writers of the Violet Quill used their own concerns to articulate many of the most important stories gay men told themselves.

Although the Violet Quill never developed a formal statement of principles—indeed, they would have laughed at such a programmatic approach to writing—they had many things in common. Virtually all of them had been involved with journalism, particularly gay journalism. White began in the Time magazine organization and, for a while, edited the Saturday Review and Horizon. Whitmore was a busy freelance writer, producing articles for the Village Voice, Travel and Leisure, Vogue, GQ (Gentleman’s Quarterly), the Washington Post, and the New York Times on such topics as tweed fabrics, German industrial design, Irish tea, S/M, and the great houses of Annapolis. Cox worked for the Soho Weekly News as a photographer and reviewer. Michael Grumley wrote a column for the New York Native, and Holleran penned one for Christopher Street. Picano was a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and the Advocate, and reviewed film, theater, and books for the New York Native, where he also edited the literary supplement. Only Ferro remained relatively unengaged in journalism. The result of all this journalistic activity is not that the books produced by the Violet Quill’s members became necessarily more like documentaries (on the contrary, for the most part they tried to avoid the dominant realism of American fiction), but that the journalistic background heightened their intense concern for the audience they hoped to reach and also elicited a keen awareness of how the pressures of society impinged on their stories. Perhaps precisely because they were so closely involved with journalism, they wanted—in their fiction—to escape the tyranny of the merely documented. But there was a deeper motive behind this resistance to realism. They wanted to create a gay fiction that shunned the inherent or explicit apologetics of most of the gay-themed novels that preceded them. They didn’t intend to defend homosexuality so much as to capture the essence to be derived from their gay experience. In Ferro’s Second Son, for instance, the protagonist’s plan to travel to a distant planet (where there is a cure for “the Plague”) gives the poignant and desperate real-life desire for escape from AIDS more immediate resonance and moving expression than would a more documentary, realistic approach. In Whitmore’s novel Nebraska, the entire subtext is the Red Scare, which develops the sense that subversive and inverted forces are creeping into American society, hidden beneath the most innocent guises. Yet the world of politics is almost entirely erased from the novel’s elegiac surface.

Second, they all were working on materials that were to some extent autobiographical, and the problem of writing autobiographical novels—for gay writers—was of particular interest to them. Whitmore had faced it first with The Confessions of Danny Slocum, which began as an account of his sex therapy with Charles Silverstein and only later emerged as a work of fiction. But all the authors (except Cox) came eventually to write at least one highly autobiographical work—Grumley in Life Drawing; Ferro in The Family of Max Desir, The Blue Star, and Second Son; White in his trilogy of novels A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony; Holleran in all his work but most strikingly in The Beauty of Men, for which he considered dropping the dramatic mask and writing it as direct autobiography; and, finally, Picano in his multivolume “memoirs in the form of a novel,” Ambidextrous, Men Who Loved Me, and A House on the Ocean, A House on the Bay. Because so much of their work was autobiographical, the Violet Quill encompasses an unusually complex series of positions on the relationship between art and life.

Indeed many of the technical subjects that the Violet Quill tackled have to do with the portrayal of gay social customs within a narrative context. For example, they wanted to reproduce the campy gay practice of referring to other gay men as she. How could a novelist imply that she was a male without having to spell it out, thereby suggesting that the book was written for a heterosexual readership who needed the explanation? (They never solved this one.) Similarly, they debated whether one should use brand names and other references to popular and commercial culture. (They tended to avoid such references.)

But the need to address such technical problems points up just why gay writers had to group together. Most of these questions simply did not concern straight writers, who in any case were even more unlikely to work out solutions to these particular issues of narrative style. More important, gay writers turned to one another because their straight counterparts often had so much trouble getting past the gay subject matter that they couldn’t concentrate on topics of technique and style. As I will discuss at greater length in the next chapter, most straight critics were still put off by explicitly gay characters and situations, which lacked, they claimed, “the universality” of heterosexual characters. Since members of the VQ assumed the legitimacy of writing as candidly as they could about gay life, advice from such quarters was useless. What they really needed was help in figuring out how best to write about being gay—and for that they needed to turn to other gay writers. The various styles and approaches that the VQ experimented with offer a good indication of just how unsettled the problem of gay representation was.

Moreover, because most of the work of the Violet Quill appeared in the late 1970s through the late 1980s, we get a unique sense of the attitudes and ideas at work in that short time frame between Stonewall and AIDS. To a large extent, the criticism leveled at the Violet Quill is really criticism directed at the culture of gay liberation, whose values, principles, and prejudices the books successfully reflect, reinforce, and critique. In short, one reason to read the Violet Quill is that their works present the most articulate and passionate expression of the ethos of a certain aspect of New York gay culture during that period. To ignore the Violet Quill is to construct a history of twentieth-century American culture with a floor missing.

One definite sign of the Violet Quill’s significance is shown by how often and viciously the group and its members have been attacked. The VQ and its constituents have become lightning rods for criticism from both the right and left of the gay literary spectrum. Indeed, the group suggested danger even before it was formed. When they were still merely friends who hung around together, critic Dennis Altman called them “the Fag-Lit Mafia” in his article “The Moveable Brunch,” whose title parodies Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast, about the Gertrude Stein–Alice B. Toklas circle. Altman was having some fun (“tweaking” them, to use Felice Picano’s term), but “in a few years, [the] joking title—Fag-Lit Mafia—would be used,” according to Picano, “in a more sinister fashion by those whose works had been rejected by the publishers that featured our writing. These writers convinced themselves that our group must be controlling gay publishing” (“Edmund White,” 84). The Violet Quill got blamed every time a book was rejected. They were hogging the publishers for themselves. Some of the criticism may well have been the result of jealousy, the illusion that a small cabal had a lock on who and what got published.

But over time the Violet Quill has been targeted by writers whose motives could not be said to be failure to thrive in the book world. David Leavitt, in his introduction to The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, spends several pages criticizing Andrew Holleran and Robert Ferro. According to Leavitt, Ferro and Holleran propose that “only the most exceptionally beautiful among gay men were entitled to erotic fulfillment,” leaving the unattractive, like Leavitt, “no choice but to salivate in the wings” (xviii). In a letter to me he wrote: “My reaction to reading Dancer from the Dance, as a young man, was one of sheer horror: the world it described seemed so alienated, so artificial; worst of all, it seemed to be a world in which boys like me were doomed to spend our lives pining after physically beautiful men who would ignore and reject us. I needed to read, at that point in my life, something more along the lines of The Folded Leaf or Sanford Friedman’s Totempole or even A Boy’s Own Story, which for all its nastiness is both gorgeously written and aggressively honest” (letter to author, October 14, 1992). Leavitt admits that “there is irony in Holleran’s vision, of course, but I wasn’t wise to it then.” Again, in his introduction to the Penguin book, Leavitt relates the story of telling a friend that he plans “to take on some sacred cows” in the volume, especially Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, to which the friend remarks unhesitatingly: “Thank God someone’s doing it … it’s the first gay book most young American gay men read, and I can’t think of another that’s done as much damage” (xix). The very word damage sets Leavitt off on a jeremiad against the “voyeuristic fixation with beauty” that, he claims, powers the novels of the Violet Quill.

Three aspects of Leavitt’s criticism deserve comment, and they are all connected. Central to Leavitt’s criticism is that the purpose of gay fiction is to provide a form of inexpensive therapy to teenage readers or people coming out. In that sense, Leavitt’s criticism assumes that the work of the VQ was like earlier gay fiction—a defense of gay life for readers who are uninformed about the true nature of what it means to be gay. The Violet Quill rejected this position in several ways. For starters, it saw its readers as already out and gay—as people who didn’t need the terms of gay life spelled out to them even if the possibilities of such a life were still in need of being imagined. It saw its work not only as producing art free from the requirements of social and psychological explanation but also free from any need to help readers “improve” their lives. And, finally, the VQ writers didn’t see the world portrayed in their novels as representing the whole of gay life but only as one aspect of how some gay people lived or how they might live. It is precisely this “social work” function of writing from which the Violet Quill wished to distance itself. It’s aspirations were literary, not therapeutic or political. Although they participated to varying degrees in the political activities of the community, these were extraliterary functions. If the group could be said to have a political doctrine, it is that writing well is the best social activism.

Second, Leavitt knows now that Holleran’s and Ferro’s works are ironic and that he misread the books, but he doesn’t criticize himself for that or for his lack of sophistication. Rather he criticizes the books for not satisfying his own adolescent needs. Although such egocentrism, such blatant narcissism, may be excusable in a teenager, it hardly seems appropriate for an adult. Criticizing Dancer from the Dance as unsuitable for those coming out is like damning James Joyce’s Ulysses as a terrible guidebook for the Dublin tourist. Michael Schwartz has taken on Leavitt’s criticism in his astute article, “David Leavitt’s Inner Child.” Schwartz’s point is that because David Leavitt was frightened as a young man by these books, he “demands non-frightening books” even as an adult. For Leavitt, Schwartz concludes, “Gay literature … must be suitable for David Leavitt’s inner child.” It does not matter to Leavitt that these novels were written by adults for adults. Indeed, by Leavitt’s reasoning virtually all the “classics” of Western literature would be considered bad. Not only are most of them frightening—think of Oedipus Rex, King Lear, or Moby-Dick—but many are just as obsessed with beauty. By Leavitt’s standards we would need to ban Romeo and Juliet, all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and Plato’s Republic, which equates the Beautiful with the Good, as terrible works. What Leavitt sees as the fault of the Violet Quill (with White excepted) is that they wrote books that were “more terrifying than edifying,” books that lack social usefulness, moral explicitness, and psychological uplift. Leavitt prefers Larry Kramer’s Faggots, a book that is much more sexually explicit and far more horrifying about gay life, but one whose moral is so clearly presented that even a nervous teenager can get the point that Kramer thinks gay life is immoral. In that sense, the Violet Quill returns to that Wildean dictum that there are no moral and immoral books, merely well and poorly written ones. But it should be remembered that the beauty celebrated in the novels of the Violet Quill is not the steroid-induced, body-sculpted perfection of popular gay culture in the 1990s. It is rather the grace of the cockeyed smile of the farm boy come to the city or the lithe body of the Puerto Rican honed on the handball courts of the city’s high schools. As Edmund White told me, his way of making a beautiful character believable was always to give him a human flaw—a chipped tooth, a mangled ear. Indeed, Felice Picano titled one of his books of poetry The Deformity Lover.

Finally, if we are to rely on Leavitt’s more recent work (the novellas collected in Arkansas and the later Martin Bauman), the source of Leavitt’s criticism is that the works hit too close to home. Ashamed of his own obsession with beauty and sex and unsuccessful in his attempts to control these obsessions, Leavitt strikes out at the works that he believes mirror his own condition. Needing to preserve his sense of himself as a “good” boy, he must attack the “bad boys” of gay writing. In this way, Leavitt’s example provides a window on the possible origins for a great deal of the criticism aimed at the Violet Quill—that it derives from the tumultuous and unresolved feelings that some readers may have about their own sexuality.

But Leavitt seems to be trying to make up for his earlier criticism—not directly by recanting his earlier position, but through his own art. “The Term Paper Artist,” one of the novellas in Arkansas, exactly fits the kind of story that Leavitt rejects in his attack on Ferro and Holleran. Leavitt’s story can be read ironically, as a kind of cautionary tale. In fact, astute readers will immediately detect the irony in the title, which is an allusion to Franz Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist,” in which a man turns starvation into an art form. Of course, these are ironies that even a well-educated teenager might be forgiven for failing to recognize. The protagonist of Leavitt’s story preys on college students, demanding sex with them in exchange for writing their term paper. The story turns tragic when a Mormon, brought up under a strict and rigid moral system, first agrees to this bargain with the Devil and then commits suicide out of guilt. The protagonist of “The Term Paper Artist” is as obsessed with beauty as anyone in Dancer from the Dance but, unlike Malone (that novel’s protagonist), he is coercive, luring his victims with the promise of higher grades rather than with the candy bar of the more traditional child abuser. More damning perhaps, the narrator is so self-loathing that he goes back to the pre–gay-liberation belief that only straight boys are masculine enough to count as beautiful.

But Leavitt is not alone in attacking Holleran and Ferro and, by extension, much of the work of the Violet Quill. Bruce Bawer in A Place at the Table complains that Holleran’s major defect is his inability, “when he looks at non-subculture gays, to see anything more than a lot of dull people leading conventional lives.” And Bawer continues: “To most homosexuals, I’m sure, there could be few lives less appealing than Malone’s” (206). On the surface, Bawer is saying the opposite of Leavitt; for if Leavitt found Dancer from the Dance horrifying because it is so fascinating, Bawer just finds it boring. If Leavitt feels excluded by Malone and his obsessive pursuit of beauty, Bawer recoils from him as something unappealing. Yet the responses are virtually the same. Both feel that they are more conventional than Holleran (Bawer is, however, more confident in his conventionality than Leavitt), and they are peeved that Dancer doesn’t mirror or respect their more conventional attitudes. They both see Holleran as describing events in which, to use Yeats’s expression, “a terrible beauty is born.” Both are repelled by it because it casts their lives momentarily in an unflattering light as ugly and banal. Moreover, both are determined to protect the young from the corrosive effects of the pursuit of beauty. Bawer’s A Place at the Table opens at a newsstand with a portrait of a boy who might be an incarnation of David Leavitt—a boy who “radiated wholesomeness and sensitivity … his neat dress and good posture suggest[ing] that he was well taken care of. This was, clearly, the much-loved son of a decent family.” To Bawer’s chagrin, the boy picks from the magazine rack before him not the latest issue of Motor Trend or Sports Illustrated—healthy, wholesome magazines (and ostensibly, even ostentatiously, heterosexual)—but the New York Native, the now defunct weekly. Bawer is “irked” by the fact that the Native represents “the narrow, sex-obsessed image of gay life” that Leavitt finds so terrifying in Holleran’s and Ferro’s novels. Like all trustees of public morality, they wish to ban those urges they cannot control.

The most vicious recent attack, however, has not come from Leavitt and Bawer—writers too young to be part of the Violet Quill—but from Larry Kramer, a friend and contemporary of at least two of its members. This attack became all the more important because it was published in the influential national gay magazine the Advocate, which, though usually very miserly about word length, devoted more than five full pages to Kramer’s commentary. To be sure, Kramer’s polemic is against all gay literature, and not specifically the Violet Quill, but he singles out Edmund White as a prime example of the kind of literature he finds offensive.

The essence of Kramer’s diatribe—and because it lacks all subtlety, one just gets bare bones—is that writers like White do not properly serve the gay community, particularly in the wake of the AIDS pandemic. Like a Russian commissar, Kramer insists that the first duty of all gay writers is to provide the right message to the people, to exhort them to good behavior and to shame them out of their self-indulgent and self-destructive slough. Since, for Kramer, “Nature always extracts a price for sexual promiscuity” (a sentence that disturbingly echoes conservative evangelist Pat Robertson’s remark that “the homosexual has made war with nature”), the most important service gay writers can do for the gay community is to “create a new culture that is not confined and centered so tragically on our obsession with our penises and what we do with them.” Unfortunately, argues Kramer, “our ‘artists’ just continue to perpetuate what got us into this trouble and death in the first place.”

Kramer targets Edmund White because “he’s considered our most distinguished gay writer” and because in The Farewell Symphony, according to Kramer, “he parades before the reader what seems to be every trick he’s ever sucked, fucked, rimmed, tied up.” For Kramer, describing so much sexual activity is not only harmful to the public health but unrealistic. In one of his characteristic vulgar descents, Kramer states with assurance, “He did not spend 30 years with a nonstop erection and an asshole busier than his toilet.” I will later discuss White’s and the Violet Quill’s representations of sex, but here it is enough to comment that like most prudes obsessed with sex, Kramer is blind to anything else. To be sure, The Farewell Symphony contains a good deal of sex, but it is within a context that dramatizes how limited, if necessary, are its satisfactions. Not that White has rejected the importance of non-monogamy. In an interview in the Advocate with Sarah Schulman in response to Larry Kramer’s attack, White reaffirmed the value of multiple sex partners. “I have always seen gay life as an alternative to straight life. If gay life meant just reproducing straight life, I’d rather become a monk.” Moreover, White carefully places that sexual activity within the context of the 1970s. White tells Schulman that before Kramer published his article, he told White, “‘Ed, Ed, you didn’t have all that sex.” To which White replied, “But, Larry, I did.” I want to point out Kramer’s refusal to accept White’s statement because one of his damning sentences is: “Only crybabies, petulant children, and immature adults never admit when they’ve made a mistake.”

As White points out, Kramer has shown his own ignorance. Tolstoy and Flaubert were involved in notorious scandals, and Flaubert was subjected to an obscenity trial. Zola was especially excoriated for his sexual explicitness. His first novel—Nana—is a grim book about the unsuccessful attempts to reform a prostitute and was banned for many years. One critic argues that Zola’s “visionary exploration of human animality more than offset his occasional crudity.” Kramer’s ignorance of the authors he promotes—equaled only by his ignorance of the authors he denounces—also indicates his misogyny. It is startling in his list of nineteenth-century novelists that he fails to cite even one woman: cannot gay novelists learn from the likes of Jane Austen, George Eliot, or Charlotte Brontë? Of course, that would be admitting the importance of sex in their works. Interestingly, he omits all references to twentieth-century novelists—James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, or even D. H. Lawrence, whose Women in Love Kramer produced for the movies. Is that because, by expanding the list beyond his few French and Russian authors, Kramer cannot maintain even the illusion that they did not write about sex? Nor should we ignore his inadvertent racism. At one point he asks the rhetorical question (a redundancy since all questions are rhetorical in a Kramer essay), “Do we, as black writers do, write about the god-damn straight men who make us their slaves?” The question presupposes that there are no black writers who are also gay and that gay oppression under heteronormative standards makes gay people “slaves” in the way African Americans were slaves. Both of these presuppositions show at best an insensitivity; at worst, a denial of the realities of black experience. Kramer’s next rhetorical question shows his ignorance of the very authors he extols: “Do such great writers of color as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, August Wilson, Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, and Nelson Mandela write about sneaking around the bushes sucking dick or tit?” Well, the answer is yes. In Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room the narrator sneaks off to Giovanni’s squalid maid’s room, and in his last novel, Just Above My Head, there is incest and rape. Derek Walcott, a poet whose work is charged with enormous erotic forces, talks about looking at the women in Boucher and Fragonard, and being inspired not by the elegance of their art but by the sexuality of the bodies. He writes in one poem of raving for the “inlay of curls at cunt” of a “golden … fucked Eve” (Walcott:202; ellipses added), and in “Parang” of “a place in the bush” to make love. What is so disturbing about Kramer’s misstatements about black writers are both his disregard for the truth—the thing he says he holds most precious—and his ignorance of their real merits.

Perhaps the most general attack was Ethan Mordden’s put-down in his introduction to Waves: An Anthology of New Gay Fiction. (Introductions to anthologies seem to be the place for literary attacks, and it should be noted that White, Leavitt, and Mordden and I have all edited sometimes rival anthologies; Mordden was published only in the first Men on Men, a series which, under the editorship of George Stambolian, was closely aligned to the Violet Quill, and Leavitt never appeared in Men on Men.) After a summary of Edmund White’s first novel, Forgetting Elena, Mordden wrote: “This is, perhaps, fancy writing that gets a lot of respect. How else shall the straights be able to hail us than for our ambitious poetry? However, much of what came out of the Violet Quill was, like Forgetting Elena, more clever than wise and self-regarding rather than perceptive. At least now the books were openly gay” (xviii). He sums up the group’s achievement in this way: “There was something precious about Violet Quill in general. They would have been smarter to use Tolstoy, Dickens, or Joyce as their archons—not so exquisite but more vital. … In short, Violet Quill seemed more like the last era of Old Gay Lit rather than the beginning of New Gay Lit—all that faded European prestige” (xxi). As I will argue, Mordden is correct in suggesting that the Violet Quill was attracted to European models, and that their point of reference was not narrowly confined to the American realistic tradition. But Mordden’s jingoism is somehow undercut by his remark that the Violet Quill should have taken Tolstoy, Dickens, and Joyce as their guides and by his assertion that Joyce is not interested in the “precious” or “exquisite.” (Has Mordden never read Dubliners or perused Finnegan’s Wake?) Yet even as he criticizes the group for being “more clever than wise,” he also scolds it for not being clever enough. Holleran’s misdirected references, notably in his Christopher Street essays (later the basis for Ground Zero), are a particular annoyance to Mordden:

We read countless misstated references—to one of the most famous lines in King Lear, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport,” which in Holleran’s misquotation turns into a drivel about “wanton flies”; or to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Little Eva “alone on a small floe,” though it’s the runaway slave Eliza who crosses the ice—Little Eva never leaves the plantation; or to the “mounties in Rosalie,” though it’s Rose-Marie that has mounties—Rosalie has West Point cadets; and why cite a hopelessly obscure operetta in the first place? Holleran even offends one of the gang’s major gods, describing Henry James’s The Golden Bowl as being “about death: the untimely death of someone young and fortunate”—but no one dies in The Golden Bowl. Holleran might be thinking of The Wings of the Dove or Daisy Miller. (Waves, 11)

What importance hangs on these botched references? Or on a grammatical error in a Robert Ferro story? For Mordden, these errors “typif[y] a movement that was less about good writing than about vanity,” but one might counter that such errors typify a movement more concerned with the force of language than with precise citation or grammatical correctness. Keats, for example, in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” one of the great Romantic sonnets, refers to Cortez’s discovery of the Pacific, when Balboa was actually the first European to see the Pacific from the Americas; yet no one would argue that such a historical gaffe makes Keats a bad poet or the poem itself inferior. If such errors show the vanity of the writer, Mordden’s corrective quibbles show the vanity of the fact checker delighted in catching a mistake no matter how trivial, like an IRS auditor gloating over a wrongly calculated ledger sheet.

Attacks on the Violet Quill from gay and queer critics mostly come on three general fronts: moral, political, aesthetic. First, VQ writers are criticized on moral grounds—as corrupters of youth and for being a bad influence on the gay community. Second, they come under fire on political grounds. Those on the academic left see them as nonpolitical and, therefore, bourgeois writers whose works duplicate the racist, misogynistic, and consumerist society from which they derive. For those on the gay right, like Bawer, they foster an image of gay life that reinforces the worst fears of homophobes—namely, that gay people live not only different sexual lives from heterosexuals but also lives given over to hedonism, drugs, and promiscuity. Finally, members of the Violet Quill are attacked on literary grounds—for having been and continuing to be too powerful in the gay literary world; for dominating the structures of production and reception in mainstream publishing; and, somewhat amazingly, for producing work that is too artful (or not artful enough—Mordden has taken both positions!). In short, the very hallmarks of the Violet Quill—to eschew the conventions of the so-called problem novel (whose major aim is, after all, to make straight readers “sympathetic” to the plight of gay people), to utilize the vernacular actually employed by gay men of a certain time and class, and to aspire to the highest levels of artistic achievement—remain controversial within the gay community.

What some may find most striking—and stunning—about these criticisms is how remarkably familiar they sound. And, indeed, they repeat the very objections to Oscar Wilde made during his famous trial. The corruption of the young is a constant theme in objections to the Violet Quill. Leavitt, Bawer, and Kramer all set themselves up as the trustees of public morals, fomenting campaigns to protect unsuspecting young minds from exposure. Such a motive was in fact the official impetus in the trials against Wilde. John Douglas, the Marquis and Earl of Queensberry, told the court that he had to write the note that Wilde claimed was libelous because he was “unable to meet Mr. Wilde otherwise, and to save my son” (Ellman:440). Frank Harris, one of Wilde’s most loyal friends, told him, “No jury would convict a father for protecting his son, and the letters [of Wilde to Alfred Douglas] would show that Douglas needed protection” (442).

But Edward Carson, who defended the marquis in the libel case, assailed more than Wilde’s letters to Douglas; he brought up the twin publication of Wilde’s “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young” and “The Priest and the Acolyte” in the Oxford undergraduate magazine Chameleon. “The Priest and the Acolyte” is clearly a homosexual tale—and although it was claimed that Wilde wrote it (or was involved in its composition), Wilde denied it if for no other reason than because it is a very bad story. But Carson’s emphasis on joint publication in an undergraduate magazine was of course meant to insinuate Wilde’s dangerous influence on the young. Carson tried to imply guilt by association. Carson brought up Wilde’s aphorism, “Religions die when they are proved to be true”—not because it has anything relevant to say about the libel but to ask, “Do you think that was a safe axiom to put forward for the philosophy of the young?” The unconventional individual and writer is always suspect for the risk he poses to youth.

As in Wilde’s trial, critics of the Violet Quill seem less concerned with what the authors actually say than with how their works can be misinterpreted. Thus, while mature readers would recognize the irony in Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, understanding that the author is in fact critical of the gay life he depicts, this does not satisfy Leavitt. Holleran shouldn’t have written the book in the first place, Leavitt argues, because such ironies and subtleties are lost on the young. Likewise, Carson berated Wilde not on what he meant but on what he could be misunderstood to mean. When Carson asked whether Dorian Gray could be open to the interpretation of being a “perverted” book, Wilde is reported to have answered: “That could only be to brutes and illiterates. The views of Philistines on art are incalculably stupid. … The views of illiterates on art are unaccountable” (Artist as Critic:428). (As one who has read many student papers for over more than twenty years, I can attest that it is impossible to guess how students—and even critics—will misread a work. If writers only published what was not open to misunderstanding, surely nothing would ever be published.)

But Carson, in his cross-examination of Wilde, isn’t content just to hint to the jury that what Wilde had to say was dangerous; the very style of Dorian Gray is itself somehow suspect. “Ordinary people” would not understand its special sentiment or its style of beauty, Carson intimates with his questioning. They may regard such faith in the power of beauty to “have a certain tendency,” to use Carson’s euphemism. So, too, the Violet Quill’s critics malign the group for having the wrong kind of models (“Has no one read Tolstoy or Zola or Balzac or Chekhov or Dostoyevsky?”). And like Kramer’s list, Mordden’s too is exclusively male and places Tolstoy at the top. What is even clearer in Mordden’s canon, however, is the unquestioned heterosexuality of his authors. The Violet Quill should have taken as its models not such pansy authors as Henry James, whose writing is effetely “exquisite,” but those “vital” straight authors like Tolstoy, Dickens, and Joyce. Indeed, the Violet Quill’s major mistake was in adopting the “fancy writing” of James and Proust (“How else shall the straights be able to hail us than for our ambitious poetry?”). Mordden seems to think that the only way gay writers can get real respect from straight critics is to be as butch and as tough as they are. For Kramer and Mordden, the only way faggot writers can really kick literary ass is to become pseudo-straight writers. And not just any straight writer (Nabokov, who praised White’s Forgetting Elena, is much too “high-style” for Mordden); they have to be the guys who wrote those big books that showed the reader who was boss. None of this queer froufrou for them. Clearly this is one of the more subtle forms of internalized homophobia. It amounts to disregarding the history of other gay writers and scrubbing a whole tradition that goes back at least as far as Wilde, then up through Firbank, finding at last its strange pre-Stonewall incarnations in James Purdy and Tennessee Williams. For Mordden and Kramer, Wilde is as dangerous a model for the young (writer) as he was for Edward Carson. “Ordinary people” will understand the work as “perverted” or at least as exhibiting “a certain tendency.” What we see in the criticism of Kramer and Mordden, on the other hand, is more or less a new twist to a very old line of attack meant to appeal to populist sentiments tucked into the psyche of the ordinary gay (or straight) reader.

One of the objectives of this book will be to anchor the Violet Quill in its historical milieu. But wait—we’re speaking of such recent events! “How different could things be?” you might ask. I would argue that things are quite different and, moreover, that a shocking number of the people who would testify to that difference are no longer alive to describe the changes. If the Violet Quill itself can serve as a representative sample of what happened to the gay male community, then more than half of the men living during that cultural era out of which it grew are themselves now dead, just as four of the seven writers of the group are dead. Indeed, the reality behind the statistics is grimmer: the two men asked to visit the group to read—Vito Russo (The Celluloid Closet) and Paul Monette (Borrowed Time, Afterlife)—have also died. George Stambolian, the scholar and critic, who in many ways would have been the best chronicler of the Violet Quill, having known all the members of the group and lived near and through the heart of the changes, is also dead. In fact, one reason I accepted the challenge to write about the VQ was to do so before there were even more losses to the group and those around them. I have not worked fast enough—for while Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and Felice Picano remain in reasonably good health (White is HIV-positive), important people around them have died. As White has argued in his now classic essay “Esthetics and Loss,”

Any examination of the Violet Quill, therefore, cannot escape being informed at every level by AIDS, and the historical context of the group is obscured by how few of those who lived through that cultural period are alive at this writing.

The impact of AIDS is magnified by the very fact that the openly gay subculture of the late sixties and early seventies out of which the Violet Quill developed was itself extremely small. James Saslow, who was the Advocate correspondent during this period, has written about the way that recognizable gay culture was limited to small enclaves on the coasts. In an interview, he repeated the importance of the smallness of the gay cultural world. He had the feeling that if he did not know everyone who was doing important work, he would sooner or later meet them. This change in the scale of gay cultural life happened in stages. Edmund White records his impression of the first big bulge in gay visibility:

When I flew back from Europe in 1970 after my six months in Rome, a friend met me at the airport in New York, popped some speed laced with a hallucinogen into my mouth, and led me on a tour of the new gay discos that had sprung up like magic mushrooms since my departure. I was shocked by how much the city had changed. Where before there had been a few gay boys hanging out on a stoop along Christopher Street, now there were armies of men marching in every direction off Sheridan Square. Not just A-Trainers—the blacks and Puerto Ricans who would come from Harlem on the express subway, men who were already bold and streetwise—but even the previously timid white boys of lower Manhattan were now in sawed-off shorts and guinea T-shirts, shouting and waving and surging into the traffic. (The Farewell Symphony, 122)

By the end of the seventies and early eighties, the gay cultural community had, according to White, become so large that it had broken into very specific niches: “In New York and San Francisco there were now so many gay men living openly that not only the genus but even aberrant species thrived. One could socialize, if one chose, only with opera-loving sadists or with cat-owning bibliophiles into urine” (FS:340). Although the straight population still tended to lump all gays into what it conveniently preferred to call the “homosexual lifestyle,” gays now saw a range of people: “the doughy clarinetist scuttling from a lesson to lunch with a lesbian musicologist, or the doctor who, since he was busted for prescribing Quaaludes too often, never emerged from his apartment, or the Asian teenage woman holding hands with her Puerto Rican girlfriend in the park late at night” (340). As this catalog suggests, the urban gay world at the beginning of the 1980s began to see an ethnic diversity and a reconciliation between lesbians and gay men that was unprecedented. There was, simultaneously, a splintering of queer culture into smaller and smaller boutique sensibilities, but coupled with what seemed to be increased interaction between the more diverse elements of the various ethnic communities. Whether there actually was and is more interaction between gay people of different classes, races, and interests now than there once was remains a truly open question, but there does appear to be some evidence for it, at least in the major urban centers. In any event, White was and is sensitive to these enormous changes in the lesbian and gay communities even before AIDS: first the growth of an increasingly visible subculture that attracted people from various groups, and then, from this burgeoning population, the gradual fracturing into specialized interests.

The history of the Violet Quill is replete with what appears to be chance meetings—except the odds for such coincidences were greatly increased by the very smallness of the gay literary and cultural world. Edmund White’s first novel, Forgetting Elena, was published through the intercession of Richard Howard—poet, critic, translator, and general man of letters. Andrew Holleran has a similar story concerning Dancer from the Dance, which found its publisher through the intercession of Larry Kramer, whom Holleran met at the gym. These anecdotes highlight two aspects of gay cultural life in the first half of the 1970s: not only was it relatively small but, owing to its smallness, one could exert far more influence then than one can now. In 1979 the publication, in one year, of four overtly gay novels could cause people to sit up and take notice. Today, with hundreds of gay books published each year, four midlist gay novels are apt to make no impact at all.

The importance of recognizing these demographic shifts is made evident in books such as Daniel Harris’s very important study, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture. One of his finest chapters compares the early gay glossy magazines such as Mandate, Blueboy, and, especially, the pre-Stonewall After Dark (“The National Magazine of Entertainment”) with the more recent group of queer glossies such as Genre, 10 Percent, Men’s Style, and the seemingly most successful Out. After Dark’s great failing, according to Harris, was the “exasperating lack of candor with which it systematically refused to acknowledge its gay readership” (66). But as Harris sees it, such a coy omission is a small defect compared to the vulgarity, commercialism, and hypocrisy of the new glossies. “The reader of the new gay glossies,” writes Harris, “does not thumb through them looking for an accurate reflection of gay life but for a bowdlerized image, manufactured for easy, coffee-table consumption, of a make-believe gay world in every way safer and more glamorous than the risky and not always attractive one in which most of us live” (68).

Since the 1970s, there has been a dramatic shift in the coverage of the arts in gay magazines, which no longer focus on traditional forms of highbrow culture, such as ballet, opera, theater, and classical music, but concentrate instead on popular entertainment, on Hollywood blockbusters, prime-time TV, gansta rap and hip-hop. A distinct low-browing of the arts has occurred in gay journalism during the last two and a half decades that reflects a revolution within the gay sensibility itself, which was once inextricably linked to a kind of snobbish cultural elitism. (Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, 68)

A look at recent issues of Genre and Out confirms much of Harris’s attack on them as Teflon magazines whose “Middle American mediocrity is celebrated in article after article” (81). Although these issues do offer at least one piece on gay writing, they mainly feature several articles on the latest fashions and popular music. There is absolutely nothing on ballet, opera, serious music, painting, or sculpture.

Yet why should they? What Harris ignores in his comparison is that even though After Dark (which ceased publication in 1983) and Out are both glossies, they appeared in and appealed to very different markets. In its heyday, After Dark could, at its peak, sell to 350,000 readers because it was virtually the only game in town. But lesbians and gay men who are seriously interested in opera—opera queens of both sexes—don’t need to rely on Out for coverage. As for gay writing, serious readers could turn to the Gay and Lesbian Review, the Lambda Book Report, the James White Review, the Evergreen Chronicles, or several other gay literary journals, not to mention the various academic periodicals that have emerged in the last few years, including the Journal of Homosexuality, GLQ, differences, Genders, and the Journal of Lesbian and Gay Identities. There’s no dearth of highbrow material out there; it’s just not in the glossies anymore. The readership has fragmented because the market itself has fragmented—indeed, it has become too big for any single journal to cover. (Even gay people themselves cannot keep up with it!) With Harris, I regret the passing of this more unified but diverse cultural atmosphere where “naked pinups of leering body builders” could be juxtaposed against “lengthy reviews of … ballets by Balanchine and productions of plays pivotal to the Western canon, from Marlowe’s Edward II to Aeschylus’ Agamemnon” (68). Gay publications often used to play the gritty against the gorgeous, the slummy against the sublime, in effective ways. Now the market has segmented into efficient and homogeneous outlets. The Violet Quill makes sense only in a gay world that was less stratified, where there was more interplay between highbrow and lowbrow because gay culture itself was smaller and involved fewer people in a more concentrated geographic area.

To Ethan Mordden’s question (as to why Andrew Holleran would “cite a hopelessly obscure operetta in the first place?”), the answer may be that, when Holleran wrote, the operetta was not “hopelessly obscure” to the readers he expected to reach, and that such a wide range of cultural citation was part and parcel of a gay world that was not as segmented as the one we face today. Another explanation is that for some writer’s their job is not to render the world straightforwardly, but to tilt it slightly off balance so that it can reveal itself in new ways with different possibilities.

The gay writer remains in a precarious position. If gay writing is to be great writing—which is Larry Kramer’s expressed desire—it cannot be held to serve some preestablished social agenda the way Nazi art or the social realism of the Stalinist Soviet Union did. It must be set lose from serving the greater good so it can serve the greatest good—the expansion of human possibilities. Edmund White has often argued for what he provocatively calls the irresponsibility of the artist. In a recent article he clarifies what he means: “I wanted it to mean a fidelity to our experience as gay men, no matter how politically incorrect it may be,” for “a literary artist takes an unofficial pledge to bear witness to his or her vision, and that vision can take him very far away from traditional morality” (“Joy of Gay Lit”:197). Larry Kramer may curse writers who don’t bear witness to his version of the truth, but it is not his version of the truth they are sworn to express. As Oscar Wilde explains to Edward Carson, who during his libel trial had asked him to illuminate his aphoristic paradox that, “A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it”: “That would be my metaphysical definition of truth; something so personal that the same truth could never be appreciated by two minds.”

Yet as White is willing to admit: “Since there are still so few out gay actors or lesbian politicians, say, or queer pop stars, the burden for expressing our hopes and fears and evolving standards falls on the serious novelist (or so we like to imagine—a glance at our sales figures might argue otherwise)” (“Joy of Gay Lit”:197). If that is true today, it was far truer in the 1970s when the Violet Quill emerged. Then the only out figures who were expressing our “hopes and fears” were writers—and for better or worse, whether their message was understood or appropriated for other purposes, they came to articulate what an entire generation of gay men felt and thought, and how they experienced what it meant to be a gay man in America at that time. This is why it is so important to understand the Violet Quill.