The Violet Quill's Influence on Gay Literature
The Gay Writers' group's Impact on Post Stonewall Gay Fiction
Jun 7, 2009
The members of The Violet Quill were: Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Michael Grumley, Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro and George Whitmore. They were all struggling gay writers in New York and formed the group in response to publishers' failiures to accept new gay fiction. This was not a school of thought, but an informal circle of friends and rivals who read, shared and discussed their work. They are now considered to be pioneers in forging a new queer aesthetic in the post Stonewall years.
Gay Literature before the Violet Quill
Up until the late 1970s gay fiction existed within a few, limiting categories. Gay characters were often peripheral to the main plot and were often presented as steroetypes for a heterosexual audience. Representations of gay men by heterosexual authors were usually negative and the token gay character was often the butt of anti-homosexual jokes or portrayed as a victim, sinner or criminal. An example of this trend is the figure of Joel Cairo in Dashiell Hammet's The Maltese Falcon who is first introduced with the words 'This guy is queer.'
When gay men did assume the role of a central character, homosexuality was described as an essentially tragic condition and the protagonist was almost always doomed. It is argued that this was a direct result of Oscar Wilde's incarceration for gross indecency in 1895, an event which led to homosexuals believing that their destiny was irrevocably tragic.
Due to censorship, few gay novels dared to deviate from this path. A notable exception is Gore Vidal's 1948 book The City and The Pillar which was one of the first texts in which the gay character was portrayed as being normal and not as an effeminate or lonely caricature. Nevertheless, Vidal's story ends bleakly with the main character Jim killing his lover. The book provoked scandal and criticism as it dared to present homosexuality as a natural behaviour.
A Revolution in Gay Writing
The members of the Violet Quill were determined to present gay lives in a more positive light. Their aim was to create fiction reflecting the true experiences of gay men growing up in America and their work was largely autobiographical in its content. Their primary concern was to write for a gay audience and address the key issues of the day. David Bergman has written the definitive study of the group in his book The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture and sums up the members' ethos when he states that they wanted to express themselves 'in a selection of the language really used by gay men.'
The Violet Quill's dominant themes were the hedonism of post liberation New York, the struggles of a gay man coming out and, laterly, the devastation wrought by the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. They were concerned with creating realistic accounts of disparate gay experiences and chronicled a unique period in gay history - the brief time of unrivalled freedom that existed between the Stonewall riots and the epidemic. Felice Picano encapsulated the circle of friends' achievements in a 1994 interview when he claimed that 'We created gay literature as a separate genre in a way that it hadn't existed before.'
An Enduring Legacy
The Violet Quill produced a body of notable work in a relatively short space of time. They were the first writers to, unapologetically, present homosexuality as a natural condition rather than a sickness. These writers broke the mold that had depicted the gay experience as overwhelming depressing and presented it as an exhilaring journey. Novels like Edmund White's A Boys Own Story and Robert Ferro's The Family of Max Desir focussed on the struggles of young gay men growing up in middle America and their conflicts with heteronormativity, while the lyricism of Andrew Holleran's Dancer from The Dance documented the drug and sex crazed 1970s.
The group played a pivotal role in addressing AIDS. The disease claimed the lives of Grumely, Ferro, Cox and Whitmore. Felice Picano wrote an epic novel on the crisis, Like People In History, while Holleran produced a groundbreaking collection of essays in Ground Zero. Michael Grumley's novel LifeDrawing was published posthumously and Edmund White went on to found Gay Men's Health Crisis. Before his death George Whitmore wrote a searing account of the era in his 1988 novel Someone Was Here.
The three living members of the Violet Quill, Edmund White, Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano have gone on to carve out illustrious writing careers. Edmund White's trilogy of novels A Boy's Own Story,TheBeautiful Room is Empty and The Farewell Symphony have become canonical works of gay literature and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Holleran wrote three further novels and his latest book Grief won the coveted 2007 Stonewall Award for Literature. Felice Picano remains the most prolific of the three, having written novels, essays, memoirs and poems. He made a significant impact on the future of gay fiction as early as 1977 when he founded Seahorse Press, the first gay publishing house in New York.
Sources
Bergman, David. The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and The Making of Gay Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
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