We have the Lost Generation, the Mauve Decade, and even what the eminent scholar Hugh Kenner dubbed the Pound Era. I call the subject of this book “the Violet Hour” not only because I wish to avoid grandiosity but also because I want to emphasize the brevity, fragility, and transitory nature of this particular cultural episode. The title derives from the Violet Quill, the name a group of writers gave to their short-lived literary club. But by the Violet Hour, I mean something larger. I hope to evoke with the term that short period when a few gay men were creating their own culture in the wake of gay liberation. Edmund White has written, “To have been oppressed in the 1950s, freed in the 1960s, exalted in the 1970s, and wiped out in the 1980s is a quick itinerary for a whole culture to follow” (BL:215). It is this quick itinerary that I shall here examine. But White’s account, although it seems like one of those breathless packaged tours of Europe, really disguises the rapidity of the changes. Between the June 1969 Stonewall Riots—in which White took part—and the first gleanings of the disease that would come to be known as AIDS (and from which he suffers) is a mere dozen years. I have attempted to use the seven authors who made up the Violet Quill as a lens to view this period. Ironically, they came together just as the culture that they were a part of was on the verge of being wiped out. Indeed, of the seven writers who comprised the Violet Quill, only three are still alive.
All lenses produce distortions, and the Violet Quill distorts, no doubt, what we can observe of the cultural formation of gay men after Stonewall. The writers in the group speak of a relatively small society, but their works, taken together (which are among the best known of the time), have a clarity and scope that I find compelling and valuable in itself. Moreover, the life presented in their novels spoke to many gay men not directly involved in their specific milieu. I am only ten years younger than Edmund White, the oldest member of the group (see the chronology). I came out in 1972, at nearly the same time as Andrew Holleran. Like the Violet Quill, I experienced the heady days of gay liberation: the first march on Washington, the cloning of gay America, and the onset of AIDS. Unlike them I lived in Baltimore, going to graduate school, following a much safer (or at least less risky) course. I didn’t go to Fire Island. I didn’t party all night in clubs. I had a lover and lived a relatively domestic existence. Theirs was not my life exactly, but their work articulated much of what was happening to me both good and bad—and, perhaps more important, it presented to me an idea of what gay life could be.
Theirs was not my life, and yet they seemed to cast a shadow over me. The first book I was ever sent to review was Edmund White’s States of Desire. Several months later I received a note from White thanking me for the thoughtfulness of the review and inviting me to meet him should I come to New York. I did go to New York. We met. It was 1980 or ’81, and the formal meetings of the Violet Quill were in progress or just over. We formed a friendship, if not a particularly close one, and then he left for France and I didn’t see him for years. Meanwhile, Richard Howard pressed on me the novel of a young writer he was very excited about; it was Robert Ferro’s The Family of Max Desir. When I came to write “Alternative Service: Families in Recent American Gay Fiction,” my first attempt at writing about gay novels, I gave The Family of Max Desir a prominent place in the discussion, in which I also touched on White’s A Boy’s Own Story and wrote rather harshly about Holleran’s Nights in Aruba. I never met Ferro (or any of the other members of the group who died of AIDS in the eighties), but when I went through Ferro’s papers in the guest room of his father’s home, I found several photocopies of the article, which had appeared in the Kenyon Review, with one copy thoroughly underlined. So in retrospect, I feel that the dialogue I have had with the Violet Quill has gone on for some time, even as I remained in the provinces.
The perspective of this book is, thus, one of not-quite-an-outsider (although never an insider). Edmund White, Felice Picano, and Andrew Holleran have become friends in the last decade while I was writing the book, and they have shared with me their various memories of what they did, felt, and understood of the events around them. But the account in this book is not the account of the Violet Quill that any one of them would give. Indeed, Felice Picano has written me at great length about what he sees as the errors of my ways. His advice has been generous, and I am grateful for it, but I have not always revised the manuscript to accord with his views. I see the material differently because I am a different person with different investment in it and different interests. Luckily, I’m not afraid that my words will silence any of the surviving members. They are perfectly capable of writing their own accounts of the group, and each, in his own way, has already done so.
I have been at this book for over a decade instead of the three or four years I had planned. Some of the delay was caused by changes in my own life—taking on the Men on Men series, directing a new program in cultural studies at the university where I teach, suffering a bout of depression. But I do not think the book could have been written sooner. In 1991, when I began the first tentative work on it, gay men were still reeling from an epidemic that seemed to have no end. Indeed, I was urged to take on the project because the surviving members of the Violet Quill believed that since George Stambolian was too ill to continue his work, a replacement was needed before more people died and more connections were lost. The project began in apocalyptic urgency. The new treatments for AIDS, at least in the United States and for those who can afford it, have dulled the sense of apocalypse. Gaining some distance from that urgency was necessary in order to see more clearly other matters that were central to the Violet Quill, such as their belief in the value of art, a bohemianism that has faded with the rise of postmodernism. In 1991 the ethos of the Violet Hour was under attack for having abetted the freewheeling sex of the seventies that made AIDS so devastating to the gay community. Now, those issues seem less charged and more amenable to analysis and discussion. I don’t want to suggest that the Violet Quill has faded into history—Felice Picano, Andrew Holleran, and Edmund White continue writing and have produced some of their finest work since the eighties—but their recent work has had to deal with the rupture in their culture. In The Married Man, The Book of Lies, and In September, the Light Changes, they have had to deal with tectonic shifts of gay historical geography. That brings me to another reason the book has taken so long to write: Holleran, Picano, and White keep writing, and I kept revising chapters to take into account their new books. To finish this book, I finally had to draw an arbitrary end to the works I would discuss. As long as this book is, it is not meant to be exhaustive or definitive.
The writers who formed the Violet Quill were all individuals. They did not speak for a movement or for what they would have seen as a common aesthetic. Often they weren’t speaking to each other. And yet, one can see a subtle but importance difference in the work of not only the Violet Quill but other gay writers of their moment. In his important article “The Gay Novel Now,” published in the short-lived journal Gaysweek in 1978, George Whitmore wrote: “Gay writers are no longer burdened with the obligation to explain and apologize for the hard, cold truth, the dreary facts about gay life—matters better left to the prattlings of sociology. As the narrator says in [Paul Monette’s] Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll, there is a distinction to be made between what is true (realism in all its tedious manifestations) and what is real (what we know from our own experience, how we choose to view ourselves)” (11). The Violet Quill avoided the so-called problem novel, the pseudo-sociological work that would explain to straight readers what was “true” about homosexuality; they wished to present the “real” life gay men led, what they experienced from the inside. That shift had crucial implications. It signified that the lived experience of gay men was as valuable as anyone else’s experience, that homosexuals weren’t a problem that needed to be dealt with, but real people who have as much right to portray the world as straight people do. Gay writers determined that they would no longer engage in a form of what Mary Louise Pratt, the noted theorist, calls autoethnography and use the language and conventions of the dominant society to represent themselves. They declared their right to represent their world in their own terms, which were as legitimate as anyone else’s; indeed, they had their own particular beauty.
For me the Violet Hour represents a turning point in the way American culture has come to regard homosexuality, and insofar as American culture has a disproportionate impact on events throughout the world, it has meant changes in attitudes across the globe. To be sure, the rise of gay culture corresponded with and was inspired by other cultural identity movements—feminism, the Black Arts Movement, the Nuyorican poets—but it addressed a much deeper social taboo. It challenged concepts of gender, sexuality, and morality. The importance of various gay cultural movements—of which the Violet Quill was a small part—can be measured not just by their successes but also by their opposition, which remains vocal, determined, and uneasy.