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The Violet Quill

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The Violet Quill (or the Violet Quill Club) was a group of seven gay male writers that met in 1980 and 1981[1] in New York City to read from their writings to each other and to critique them.[2] This group and the writers epitomize the years between the Stonewall Riots and the beginning of the AIDS pandemic.[3][4]

Importance

What made this group important was that several of its members became some of the most important Post-Stonewall gay writers in America, and the group includes writers and works that have been linked to gay writing as a literary movement. Edmund White and Andrew Holleran in particular stand out.[4][5]

Members

The seven writers are:

Between 1988 and 1990, AIDS claimed the lives of four of these men.[3][4]

Discover more about Members related topics

Christopher Cox (writer)

Christopher Cox (writer)

Christopher Cox was an American writer. His birth name was Ray Cox Jr.

Robert Ferro

Robert Ferro

Robert Ferro was an American novelist whose semi-autobiographical fiction explored the uneasy integration of homosexuality and traditional American upper middle class values.

Michael Grumley

Michael Grumley

Michael Grumley was an American writer and artist.

Andrew Holleran

Andrew Holleran

Andrew Holleran is the pseudonym of Eric Garber, an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer, born on the island of Aruba. Most of his adult life has been spent in New York City, Washington, D.C., and a small town in Florida. He was a member of The Violet Quill, a gay writer's group that met in 1980 and 1981 and also included Robert Ferro, Edmund White and Felice Picano. Following the critical and financial success of his first novel Dancer from the Dance in 1978, he became a prominent author of post-Stonewall gay literature. Historically protective of his privacy, the author continues to use the pseudonym Andrew Holleran as a writer and public speaker.

Felice Picano

Felice Picano

Felice Picano is an American writer, publisher, and critic who has encouraged the development of gay literature in the United States. His work is documented in many sources.

Edmund White

Edmund White

Edmund Valentine White III is an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer and an essayist on literary and social topics. Since 1999 he has been a professor at Princeton University. France made him Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.

George Whitmore (writer)

George Whitmore (writer)

George Whitmore was an American playwright, novelist, and poet. He also wrote non-fiction accounts about homosexuality and AIDS.

History

Felice Picano recalls that the group started because straight editors, agents, and fellow writers weren't being helpful with advice on gay themed writing.[3]

Gay fiction before the Violet Quill was of four classes. The first two were primarily or ostensibly for straight audiences where the gay characters are either minor to the main theme, or in which they live tragic lives and then died. The third was those of high literary vales and were therefore valued by critics. The fourth was gay pornography.[3]

The AIDS sea change not only resulted in the death of many members of the gay community, but forever changed gay literature, including gay fiction.

Selected works by the members of The Violet Quill

  • Christopher Cox - A Key West Companion (1983)
  • Robert Ferro - The Family of Max Desir (1983)
  • Michael Grumley - After Midnight (1978)
  • Andrew Holleran - Dancer from the Dance (1978)
  • Felice Picano - An Asian Minor (1981)
  • Edmund White - A Boy's Own Story (1982)
  • George Whitmore - The Confessions of Danny Slocum (1980)

Source: "The Violet Quill", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, (2023, January 21st), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Violet_Quill.

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References
  1. ^ Edmund White remembers the group meeting from 1979 to 1983; see his essay "Out of the Closet, Onto the Bookshelf", The New York Times, June 16, 1991, Section 6, Page 22.
  2. ^ Picano, Felice (2007). Art and sex in Greenwich Village : gay literary life after Stonewall. New York: Carroll and Graf. ISBN 978-0-7867-1813-9.
  3. ^ a b c d Bergman, David, ed. (1994). The Violet Quill Reader: The Emergence of Gay Writing After Stonewall. New York: St. Martin's Press. p. ages xi-xiii. ISBN 978-0-312-11091-8.
  4. ^ a b c Summers, Claude J. "The Violet Quill". The GLBTQ encyclopedia. Archived from the original on September 26, 2007.
  5. ^ Bergman, David (2004). The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture. Columbia University Press. p. age 1. ISBN 978-0-231-13050-9.
  6. ^ Brozan, Nadine (1994). "CHRONICLE". The New York Times. Published:May 9, 1994. Short piece on Felice Picano reading and reference to The Violet Quill.

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