Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight is a group of seven gay male writers, friends and rivals came together only 12 times between 1980 and 1981 to share, read and critique the work in progress of one another. But what this informal writer's union created was a snapshot of the years between Stonewall and beginning of the devastating AIDS pandemic and redefined modern day literature. Today's Out Spotlight is The Violet Quill.

At the time there were four classes of gay literature. Two were geared 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 literature that inspired for high literary value and received critical praise. And finally gay pornography. The Violent Quill while brief, was influential enough to create "the post-Stonewall renaissance of American gay male writing", and creating a new category of gay literature.

According to Felice Picano the group started because "straight editors, agents, and fellow writers weren't being helpful with advice on gay themed writing. In addition to Picano, the group included Edmund White and Andrew Holleran, Robert Ferro (1941-1988), George Whitmore (1946-1989), Michael Grumley (1942-1988), and Christopher Cox (1949-1990).

The members came from all different viewpoints did not constitute a "school of thought" but did "collectively and individually they placed homosexuality at the very center of their literary visions."

"They "shared several impulses: a desire to write works that reflected their gay experiences, and specifically, autobiographical fiction; a desire to write for gay readers without having to explain their point of view to shocked and unknowing heterosexual readers; and finally, a desire to write . . . in a selection of the language really used by gay men."

The works set out to reflect the social revolution of post Stonewall gay community, headiness of the time and the beginning of the AIDS pandemic in their writing. Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and Robert Ferro's work have had an enormous impact on the development of contemporary gay literature becoming some of the most important Post-Stonewall gay writers in America. Holleran's Dancer from the Dance (1978), Ferro's The Family of Max Desir (1983), and White's The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) "rank among the most influential accounts of American gay life yet written."

David Bergman's book, The Violet Quill Reader, is a collection of the writings of The Violet, and includes unpublished work such as some correspondence of Holleran and Ferro, excerpts from the journals of Picano and Grumley, stories by Cox and Picano, and a lecture on gay literature by Ferro.

The years of the Quill, were a crossroads between the heady days of early gay liberation and the coming AIDS pandemic. Unfortunately AIDS would not only devastate the gay community in losing so many of the community, it took more than half of the Quill, and forever changed gay literature. The Violet Quill help redefined gay literature, with gay writing becoming a literary movement. It continues to influence gay literature today.