Men Who Loved Me

311 Pages·2003·16.891 MB·English

by  Felice Picano

men who loved me
volume two of the collected memoirs
felice picano
of
Gay Male Action and Literature
Southern Tier Editions is proud to return to print
this classic masterpiece of modern gay literature!
I
Felice Picano, a member of the Violet Quill group of writers who introduced gay
fiction to mainstream literary readers in the late 1970s-forever changing our
perception of Gay American lives-is a modern maestro.
Men Who Loved Me, the second installment of Felice Picano's memoirs, picks
up the thread of his life in the mid-1960s. Sexually unresolved and
unsuccessful in his relationships with women, unhappy in work and unfulfilled
in life, Picano flees to Europe and settles in Italy in the golden era of Ci~ecitta,
Rome's version of Hollywood. Even after he falls in with the questio.nable
glamour of the time, his adventure is not over. He returns to Manhattan and a
suddenly very gay world. This funny and sad remembrance of a Europe and
New York that has entirely changed in today's world confirmed Picano's place
among the most talked-about writers of his time.
"A DISTINGUISHED AND HUMOROUS portrait of a vanished time."
- Publishers Weefrly
"RICH, ENGAGING, ENGROSSING. A ravishingly exotic romance."
- New York Native
"A STUNNER ... captures the free-wheeling spirit of an entire era."
- The Advocate
"[Picano is] an elegant writer ..•. If the first half of the book recalled Henry
James, the second recalls the best of Truman Capote."
- San Francisco Herald-Examiner
Ibt Collected memoirs Qf Fellce Plcano
Part I: Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children
Part II: Men Who Loved Me
Part 111:A House on the Ocean, A House on the Bay
ISBN 1-Sb023-442-3
Southern Tier Editions
HARRINGTON PARK PRESS
An Imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.
10 Alice Street, Binghamton, NY 13904-1580
www.HaworthPress.com
Acclaim for Men Who Loved Me
"Rich, engaging, engrossing ... a ravishingly exotic romance."
-New York Native
"A distinguished and humorous portrait of a vanished time."
-Publishers Weekly
"A stunner ... captures the free-wheeling spirit of an entire era."
l
-The Advocate
"(Picano is} an elegant writer .... If the first half of the book recalled
Henry James, the second recalls the best of Truman Capote."
-San Francisco Herald-Examiner
NOTES FOR PROFESSIONAL LIBRARIANS
AND LIBRARY USERS
This book is published by Southern Tier Editions, Harrington Park Press®,
an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.
CONSERVATION AND PRESERVATION NOTES
All books published by The Haworth Press, Inc. and its imprints are
printed on certified pH neutral, acid free book grade paper. This paper
meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for In
formation Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Material, ANSI
239 .48-1984.
Men Who Loved Me
Felice Picano
Southern Tier Editions
Harrington Park Press®
An Imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.
New York • London • Oxford
Published by
Southern Tier Editions, Harrington Park Press®, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc., 10 Al
ice Street, Binghamton, NY 13904-1580.
© 2003 by Felice Picano. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.
First published in 1989 by Dutton.
Cover design by Marylouise E. Doyle.
Front cover painting: Deni Ponty, "Narcissus," oil on canvas.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Picano, Felice, 1944-
Men who loved me / Felice Picano.
p. cm.
ISBN l-56023-442-3 (soft cover: alk. paper)
l. Picano, Felice, 1944- 2. Authors, American-20th century-Biography. 3. Manhattan
(New York, N.Y.)-Social life and customs. 4. Rome (ltaly)-Social life and customs. 5. Gay
men-United States-Biography. 6. Americans-Italy-Biography. 7. Motion picture indus
try. I. Title.
PS3566.I25M4 2003
813'.54--dc21
2002151524
For George Stambolian,
who remembers Rome in the sixties
Introduction
"You bad boys all line up here," the woman photographer in
structed. The scene was the opening of the first display in a quarter
century of the works of artist Pavel Tchelichev in a smart Fifth Ave
nue art gallery in Manhattan. The year was 1990. And among the
"bad boys" so enjoined were Tchelichev's lover from the thirties and
forties, Charles Henri Ford, !'en/ant terrible, surrealist poet, film-maker
and co-author of the first (1934), truly gay novel, The Young anJ the
Evil. The second was Ned Rorem, composer and diarist whose New
York and Paris Diaries had scandalized many with details of who was
doing exactly what to whom else-most of them queer-in Paris in
the forties and fifties. The third "bad boy" ordered into ragged line by
a woman I'd never met, but who apparently knew me, was-myself.
How had I progressed from being a first-time gay novelist at the
end of the seventies to being a literary "bad boy" a mere decade later?
No one ever told me how I'd achieved it. But I believe it may have
something to do with the publication and reception of my first mem
oir, Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children. Abetted, I wish to
quickly point out, by the publication in 1989 of my second memoir,
Men Who Loved Me.
My handy little ledger of works, presciently (some would say
self-importantly) kept by me since 1968 or so when I finished my first
novel fragment, shows that I wrote the first long section of the second
memoir, "The Most Golden Bulgari," during the summer of 1985; in
other words, while I was still well within whatever glow I'd achieved
while writing the first memoir and a few months before its publica
tion. The second, short "interlude" section, published separately as a
short story under the title "A Most Imperfect Landing" in The James
White Review and later in an anthology, wasn't written until almost
two years later, in the spring of 1987. The third section, "The Jane
Street Girls," not until the spring and summer of 1988.
Vll
viii MEN WHO LOVED ME
Why the long gap? Clearly, the reception of volume one had some
thing to do with it. True, I was publishing Ambidextrous through a
small, gay press without a great deal of history and with only a medio
cre distribution. But while putting out the memoir I'd already low
ered my expectations from what I'd come to expect of my regular
publisher, Delacorte.
On the other hand, the resistance to the book from the straight
world for what I-and others-thought of as my best book to date
was pretty strong. Although it was reviewed in the gay media of the
time, The Advocate, The New York Native, San Francisco Sentinel, Christo
pher Street, Out, San Diego Outdate, and a few other places, it received
only two reviews in the mainstream, albeit excellent ones, from the
San Francisco Chronicle and from the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. Later
on, when I met the writer of the second review, it turned out he'd
grown up on Long Island and he'd thought I'd done an accurate por
trait of the time and place. I've since learned from two women fiction
writers that they were asked to and indeed both penned adulatory
reviews of my memoir for The New York Times and The Village
Voice-reviews that were never printed.
Why not? The problem, as I came to understand a long time after
ward, was twofold in nature. First, Ambidextrous presented my youth
as I recalled it, an unvarnished series of encounters with adults and
other children involving sex, drugs, pornography and other unsavory
subjects. In the book, I apologized for nothing we'd done and ex
plained only a little how we'd come to do it. The boys I wrote about
were a pretty amoral lot and the girls were equally refractory, treach
erous and sexual; sometimes more so. I presented the material as a fait
accompli from which I might eventually learn, from which the reader
might presumably learn, but which was simply there, take it or leave
it, this was what happened.
Evidently heterosexual literati (although not their readers) were
appalled by my material but more so by my attitude, and they refused
to address the issues raised--even if two women reviewers seemed to
have no problem. Meanwhile the many male homosexuals who, let's
face it, pretty much run the cultural institutions of this country, in
cluding literature, were appalled for yet another reason. The little boy
Felice Picano IX
I'd been and that I tried to characterize in Ambidextrous was not a sissy.
He didn't stay at home hours at a time hidden from bullies reading
Salinger and William Maxwell, dreaming of being a great ice dancer
or playing with a minature stage, planning how to outdo Tennessee
Williams.
Instead, the little boy I wrote about might have been one of the
kids who beat up the sissies. If, that is, he paid any attention to them
at all. He didn't. He bicycled-he lived for-on, around-his bicycle.
He had other male friends as pedestrian as he was. They did the usual
stupid things boys do, breaking up girls' street games, playing soft
ball, racing against and otherwise making trouble with other bpys,
blowing up things, and slaughtering small creatures with ~ything
ignitable at hand. They didn't endlessly discuss other classmates'
clothing, hairstyles, emotions, motives or answers in class. Although
they were good students, they were so relieved to be out of class, the
topic of school seldom came up, and then usually accompanied by a
universal introductory groan.
When the narrator of my memoir did read anything, it was gener
ally a Classic Comics version of the schoolbooks handed out; with an
occasional Edwin Altschuler novel about the French and Indian War
or a biography set in Outer Mongolia, deep in the ocean, or at the
South Pole. Homer had, of course, come as a revelation. But let's be
blunt, it's highly doubtful little Felice would have even picked up The
Iliad if it hadn't had Flaxman's illustrations, and if those hadn't shown
men in plumed helmets and shields riding chariots in battle against
each other, armed and using spears, axes, bows and arrows. There was
certainly nothing to be gained by those once-sissy-boys-now-cul
tural-nabobs in any way urging on their readers a book like Ambidex
trous in which the faggot-in-training had acted that way, or worse
ended up having his first gay sex directly because of a trunk of his
friend's father's army gear that the boys had come across.
No. No. No. Mustn't encourage that sort of thing.
But some gay men hadn't been sissies, instead had grown up on
farms, in forests, in deserts, or in suburbs like myself and they recog
nized themselves in the narrator and the other children in Ambidex
trous. In comparison to previous readerships of mine, they were far