“This is an important work” is not something you can say about many books these days. But I can and will say it about Frank Pizzoli’s Passionate Outlier: Gay Writers and Allies on Their Work.
A collection of interviews with the men who laid the groundwork for what was to become a gay sensibility, gay awareness and a worldwide gay community, it offers first-hand accounts from those who were there at the beginning of a revolution; now, sixty years on, our history.
The pioneers and present-day practitioners of gay writing are present.
We hear from Christopher Bram, who makes a case against the base accusations levelled against his work by critic, John Leland, who finger-wags Bram for not including more outlier writers in his seminal Eminent Outlaws. How sad is that decades later, we are still being asked to defend our choices. Bram does find excitement in the current inclusion of gay characters and gay culture subplots in modern day heterosexual fiction, Sure progress, states Bram, citing how straight writers of the past shied away from Gay Anything…
There are two, breezy, unfussy talks with Michael Carroll, whose short stories elevate economy of style to a finely-honed art, and whose work deserves more attention. Carroll knows well it’s what is left out of a story, what’s left unsaid, that is most important to a story. In this sense, his work reminds me of M.F.K. Fisher, Hemingway and one of his (and my) favorites, Richard Yates.
There are long, honest, involved and involving chats with John Rechy and Felice Picano that are so deliciously personal, you feel you are with Pizzoli and them in a cozy coffeeshop booth.
We’re treated to “We were there” accounts of the Liberation years, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, formed when no one else but gay men themselves would lift a finger to help a sick, plague-ridden community during the AIDS years, the emergence of such movements as Queer Theory, and The Violet Quill, a band of writers who decided to do something about the fact that the publishing world was ignoring them and their work. Imagine the balls it took for these men to take on as a subject matter what was at that time considered a crime.
Author Frank Pizzoli is, himself, no slouch in the accomplishments department. Impassioned from a young age to know what people are thinking, he developed a bottomless inquisitiveness and unquenchable thirst to delve into what others think and feel. This trait holds him in good stead in Passionate Outlier, as he digs deep into the minds and lives of some of the leading figures of gay history. His own backstory is as interesting as those he interviews: journalist, newspaper/magazine founder, theater producer/director, activist. Pizzoli’s life took, as its inspiration, the lives of those gay men who came before him whom he now honors. What a blessing that he spent the energy and the time to catalog them, and what a blessing that they were/are still with us to tell us their stories.
Best of all, Pizzoli gives us not one, but three, sit-downs, with Edmund White, the OG of Gay Literature. Delightful! White is our sturdy handrail, as we, those he wrote about, fought for, championed, climb now along with him the unsteady stairway of aging.
The gold of Pizzoli’s book is that it unearths the person as much as it does the person’s work, much the way the legendary Paris Review interviews did.
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Passionate Outlier: Gay Writers and Allies on Their Work
by Frank Pizzoli
Library of Homosexual Congress; 246 p.