The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture

By David Bergman

The members of the literary circle known as the Violet Quill -- Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White, Christopher Cox, Michael Grumley, Robert Ferro, and George Whitmore -- collectively represent the aspirations and the achievement of gay writing during and after the gay liberation movement. David Bergman's social history shows how the works of these authors reflected, advanced, and criticized the values, principles, and prejudices of the culture of gay liberation. In spinning many of the most important stories gay men told of themselves in the short period between the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s, the Violet Quill exerted an enormous influence on gay culture. The death toll of the AIDS epidemic, including four of the Violet Quill's seven members, has made putting such recent events into a historical context all the more important and difficult. The work of the Violet Quill expresses the joy, suffering, grief, hope, activism, and caregiving of their generation. The Violet Hour meets the urgent need for a history of the men who bore witness not only to the birth but also to the decimation of a culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jul 6, 2004
• ISBN: 9780231503839

David Bergman

David Bergman has been an artist and musician since childhood. He studied physics in college, eventually earning a PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Bergman now lives with his wife in New Jersey where he is actively involved in teaching and performing music and running a small science and engineering consulting company.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

THESE SHRIEKING VIOLETS

The Violet Quill was the name that seven writers—Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White, and George Whitmore—gave to a group they formed in the early 1980s to read works-in-progress to each other. The group was not unlike many informal circles across the country in which writers come together to try out new material, hear suggestions, gain support, encounter inspiration, and disrupt the solitude that is an inevitable part of serious writing. What distinguishes the Violet Quill is that some of its members became among the most important gay writers who emerged after Stonewall, writers whose names and works have been linked to gay writing as a literary movement. Two of the writers—Edmund White and Andrew Holleran—are simply among the best writers in the United States; their names would be better known today were American publishing less homophobic.

The actual formal meetings of the Violet Quill were relatively unimportant, except perhaps for the participants. The first meeting was held on March 31, 1980, in Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley’s apartment; the last occurred less than a year later, March 3, 1981, at Felice Picano’s apartment. The only member never to host a meeting was Andrew Holleran, whose fifth-floor walk-up apartment, all agreed, was too small and too messy for a meeting. Holleran himself jokingly referred to it as the Tomb of Ligeia. Just three doors past the Saint Mark’s Baths (in New York City’s East Village), it was in a particularly grim location.

In all, there were eight formal meetings. But even before these started, several of the participants began to think of themselves as a group, and after the last meeting of March 3, members got together more casually for dinner or tea, to read to one another, discuss their work, and gossip. In an article he published in the New York Times Magazine, Edmund White writes that he left the group in 1983, when I moved to Paris (BL:276). For White, then, the Violet Quill was still going on when he left New York and that was two years after its last formal meeting. Clearly, for White, the formal meetings were not the group’s defining feature. In a letter to Robert Ferro written as the formal meetings were drawing to a close, Andrew Holleran voices the same sense of continuity: It doesn’t even seem necessary to me to declare the Club finished—since it is something that by nature goes dormant, then called up, then fades—because that is how it’s useful to us. The VQ has no QUORUM (Holleran’s emphasis, February 27, 1981). Today, the surviving members—Holleran, Felice Picano, and White—keep close track of one another. I rarely speak to one without his mentioning just getting off the phone with another. They stay at each other’s homes, follow each other’s careers (not without a certain rivalry), and maintain a concern for each other’s well-being. Sometimes they find themselves in the same place—reunions have occurred in Key West and New Orleans for literary festivals—but it’s rare that the three are together since they now live thousands of miles apart. Recently, when Holleran and White encountered one another at a New York bathhouse, the meeting brought surprise, embarrassment, and not a little humor. But the breakup of the group also resulted in some bitterness. In his diary, three years after the group’s dissolution, George Whitmore bristled at the idea that he had brought the group to an end: I was the symptom and the scapegoat, he angrily recalls. Felice Picano, however, writes proudly and with unaccustomed self-depreciation about the meetings.

But no matter how useful the meetings were to its members, the work they produced during the formal existence of the Violet Quill—White’s A Boy’s Own Story, Ferro’s The Family of Max Desir, Picano’s stories for Slashed to Ribbons, and Holleran’s Nights in Aruba—had an enormous impact on gay writers and readers. Those works have come to represent for better or worse that moment between Stonewall and the advent of AIDS, that darkly golden time that has been both demonized and romanticized.

The Violet Quill itself fell roughly into two smaller alliances: on one side stood Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, and Andrew Holleran, and on the other side, Edmund White, Christopher Cox, and George Whitmore. Felice Picano tried to balance himself between the two. This divide was not ideological or artistic—the Violet Quill never developed any coherent doctrine; rather, these divisions grew out of bonds of friendship and sex: when and how the participants had met each other, with whom and how long they had slept together. In yet another letter about the breakup of the formal meetings, which he called a textbook example of WHEN QUEENS COLLIDE, Holleran discusses the parts members took in disputes, particularly White’s siding with George Whitmore. I see nothing wrong in Ed’s siding with [Whitmore], he wrote Ferro. I’d be the same in his case. Friendships are to a degree based on seniority. And many of the friendships go back at least a decade before the founding of the Violet Quill.

First, there was the Iowa contingent—Ferro, Grumley, and Holleran. All three met at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, the foremost writing program in their day, which they attended from September 1965 through June 1967. The Violet Quill probably started out as the Ferro-Grumleys’ attempt to re-create the atmosphere of Iowa. Ferro and Holleran had both been students of José Donoso, the acclaimed Latin American novelist, who ran one of the fiction workshops. Ferro and Grumley had studied with Kurt Vonnegut in another workshop. Holleran knew Grumley then, but only in passing. But Ferro and Holleran were sufficiently good friends that they started a correspondence immediately after leaving Iowa, which, with the exception of the 1970s when they were both living in New York and in regular contact, they maintained until Ferro’s death. Holleran and White don’t remember exactly from whom or where the idea for the club originated, but they agree that it was probably with Ferro and Grumley. Picano, however, is certain that the idea arose when he first met the Ferro-Grumleys. Such a club was their sort of idea, and there is a vague recollection that Ferro and Grumley had violet plumes made for the members as a token of membership. (No one seems to have kept his, and the vagueness with which the recollection is recalled indicates that such a gesture was met with indifference or embarrassment.) The Ferro-Grumleys liked to have people over for high tea, and even after the formal meetings of the Violet Quill had ended, various members took tea with them.

Ferro and Grumley were a couple—more than a couple, really: theirs was the one life-partnership among the Violet Quill, a union carefully preserved. After meeting at Iowa, they lived together for the rest of their lives. In the minds of the other members of the Violet Quill (and to others who knew them) they were a hyphenate—the Ferro-Grumleys—and publicly they presented a united front. They wrote only one book together—their first, Atlantis—but they were each other’s most trusted reader. They shared an obsession with interior decorating, transforming their West 95th Street apartment into a strange but arresting environment, lit theatrically in a warm light, every lamp aglow. (The apartment needed to be carefully lit, according to Holleran, because, situated on the second floor, it didn’t get much natural light.) They viewed themselves as a couple particularly singled out by fate. They were convinced, for example, that they had been destined to realize Edgar Cayce’s prophecy of the discovery of Atlantis, and they maintained a shared fascination in New Age spiritualism.

Money was always a problem for them—they made little from their writing and survived on small catering jobs and an allowance provided by Ferro’s father—yet they lived a rather luxurious life together, spending three months a year in Italy (until they became too ill to travel), having their clothes privately tailored, purchasing the finest china, and rebinding their books for their private collections. Michael Ferro, Robert’s father, told me that soon after Robert’s graduation from Iowa, he had a meeting with José Donoso. Donoso told the senior Ferro that Robert could do great things if he devoted himself exclusively to writing and remained undistracted by the crass necessity of making a living. The conversation led Michael Ferro or his wife to subsidize their son. But the allowance was never enough to provide the comforts Ferro and Grumley felt they both deserved, and conflicts over money find their way into Ferro’s highly autobiographical novels—particularly his last, Second Son.

Although Ferro and Grumley maintained this unified front, it was well known that they were not monogamous. They shared a passion for men of color, and their sexual pursuits created a good deal of tension at times. They developed separate and somewhat secret relationships, which needed to be carefully kept in the background. But their commitment to one another was so great and what united them so strong, that the relationship was never seriously threatened. Certainly to the other members of the Violet Quill—and with Holleran and Picano they developed very intimate relations—they maintained an imperturbable solidarity.

They were a very attractive couple. Edmund White found Grumley especially sexy with his thick, muscular, wrestler’s build. And it was as a wrestler that he posed for the legendary AMG studios as a teenager. I’d played football, he recalled in a column he wrote for the New York Native (June 6, 1983: 63), and lifted weights, and had the requisite flattop haircut of the day; I was judged acceptable. He posed with another boy before Greek columns and satin draperies, wearing a skimpy loincloth. This classical setting suited him, and he appeared later in a number of Italian films, both westerns and gladiatorial features. There is a picture of Grumley in silhouette on a beach. He makes a heroic figure: the shoulders broadly muscled, the torso narrowing to an hourglass waist, the legs two massive columns. Ferro was no less handsome if more slightly built. Dark, intense, Italian, he broods in the pictures I have of him, his smoldering eyes surrounded by long, shiny hair and a full, neatly trimmed beard.

It’s not surprising that Holleran sometimes felt himself physically overwhelmed by their glamour. Photographs of Holleran at the time show him as pale and wiry—as he is today—with short-cropped hair. Since Holleran suffers from eczema and must keep out of the sun, he had a rather ghostly pallor even in his youth. But it is the eyes—dark, haunted, defiant—that demand attention. Set deep, they seem to be all pupil, and they look out without missing anything.

Holleran came to Iowa straight out of Harvard, putting off law school for two years. After Iowa, he went on to the University of Pennsylvania Law School—not because he wanted to be a lawyer, but because he thought it was what his parents wanted him to do. A dutiful son, he could have screamed when years later his mother told him that they never had such intentions for him. Now you tell me! he had wanted to shriek. Sex was not what brought Holleran and Ferro together—they were both highly closeted, or rather, Ferro was highly closeted and Holleran still a virgin—but they shared a theatrical (even campy) humor that they surely understood set them apart from the others. It would take many years before they would reveal their sexual proclivities to one another. And yet—if their letters to one another give some sense of the tone of their friendship—there was a strong homosexual element to it. In one letter from law school, Holleran writes that he’s reading Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest: so good—would give anything to write another one even close (VQR:11). To which Ferro responded that he’d been reading De Profundis. It is a shock to me, Ferro replies, "to find him without, for once, his sense of humor. I think it was his real disgrace—not the trial and prison, etc.—but that treatise on gloom and sadness. He should never have admitted to us that he was wrong. Because, of course, he wasn’t. What will life do to us, if it did that to him?" (VQR:13). It is almost unbelievable that at that moment neither was out to the other, and yet Holleran has assured me that, during this period, he, still a virgin, had no idea that Ferro was gay. In 1968—a year before the Stonewall Riots—it took some bravery on Ferro’s part to insist that Wilde wasn’t wrong to be gay. Clearly, the discovery that they were both gay only solidified a closeness that had already been established. In fact, the origins of the Violet Quill may be read in this letter written a decade before the club was formed, for Ferro is already concerned about what life will do to us because of sexuality. Only by forming a group for mutual protection could they hope to retain in a homophobic society the humor and the honesty that they needed to continue as gay writers and gay men. That’s not to say there wasn’t a great deal of contention within the group, but they were united by a belief in gay literature.

Edmund White formed the center of the other contingent. White was the best-known writer of the group because of his success with The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), a bestseller that brought gay life even into the mall bookstores. He was also the oldest although, with his big baleful eyes and dimpled cheeks, he has maintained a boyishness that persists even now. Of course, White wasn’t always so boyish. The pictures taken around the publication of Forgetting Elena (1973) show a somewhat dangerous-looking guy. A mustache gives his face a particularly sinister air, and it accentuates the devilish cleft in his chin. His hair is long in the style of the day, unruly as if he had just gotten off a motorcycle. But by the eighties the mustache is gone, the hair is shortened and parted. In a photograph taken by Chris Cox that appears on the inside flap to States of Desire, White is resting his head on the palm of his hand and his eyes are turned upward like a schoolboy listening to a favorite teacher. He had yet to put on the weight that he has carried like a banker through the 1980s and ’90s, and yet he could look pudgy. Robert Mapplethorpe took a picture of White interviewing Truman Capote—an account of their awkward, uncomfortable meeting is given in The Burning Library—in which White looks like a Midwestern insurance salesman, a smile frozen on his face, his body stiffly erect, his suit disturbingly shiny while Capote lounges T-shirted and barefoot below a tapestry of a dense school of fish.

Early on in their relationship, Felice Picano committed to his journal this description of White: [He] is a charming man given to stringent self-analysis, but hiding it behind a lovely surface of shifting polish and childlike delight. White’s tact, which he would have to use repeatedly with the group, also strikes Picano: I have yet to hear an unkind word from his mouth, and I suspect I won’t. It was this capacity for generosity that made him particularly vital to a group of such large but easily battered egos.

Because of White, Chris Cox—his lover at the time—joined the Violet Quill, and although it was not a cause of the immediate dissolution of the group, White’s breakup with Cox corresponds roughly to the Violet Quill’s demise as a formal society. In a brutal sketch written after their breakup and intended for a book to be titled The Gay Sappho—in which White is accused of intrigue and character assassination—Cox recalls how, after their first night together, he purchased a copy of Forgetting Elena. When he got home he read it straight through to discover that White had used the same lines on him that the nameless protagonist uses in a love scene with Elena. From the beginning to the very end, our affair did not inspire art. Art inspired our affair. For Cox, each of White’s moves seemed scripted to put White at an advantage.

But the inspiration of art worked both ways. Without his connection to White, Cox would never have been invited into the Violet Quill Club. Before meeting White, Cox had been involved more with the theater than with literature, although at the time of the VQ meetings, Cox described himself in his resumé as a free-lance writer working for the Soho Weekly News. He had appeared in The Fantastics playing the mute, the only part he could play because I had a strong southern accent. He later joined the New York Shakespeare Festival and appeared on Broadway in its rock version of Two Gentlemen of Verona. But the experience taught him he wasn’t cut out for performing the same part night after night. In 1975 he started working for Virgil Thomson, the extraordinary composer and writer who, with Gertrude Stein, created Four Saints in Three Acts, one of the most important operas in American musical history. His job was to organize Thomson’s papers for Yale’s Beinecke Library. Since he was not a librarian, he credits his employment to the friendship that immediately sprang up between him and Thomson, based in part on the fact that they were both Southerners. Through Thomson, he was introduced to some of the most important literary, musical, and artistic figures of the twentieth century, and Thomson gave Cox a window into the historical connections of what they were doing. As White says in The Farewell Symphony (in which Cox is called Fox, a name that indicates both his slyness and his sleek good-looks): "He was aware that we were making history of some sort. He saw the links with an older generation (Ned Rorem’s, Frank O’Hara’s) and even [Thomson’s] much older generation, but he could also glimpse how the present was preparing a new youth of wild, loud, totally freaky anarchic kids" (341).

Throughout this period, White and Cox fought. Relationships have always been easier for White when he, to use W. H. Auden’s phrase, was the more loving one. But in the case with Cox, White was the pursued. Of all his long-term relations—with Stanley Redfern, Keith McDermott, John Purcell, Hubert Sorin, and Michael Carroll—White has been the one who has been the aggressor (or been allowed to think of himself as the aggressor) even as he has entertained sex with other men. For as much as he needs to be loved, he is made uncomfortable when that love is returned too forcefully. Cox made that mistake. Richard Howard tells the story of opening the door to a weeping Cox, who had made a jealous scene in a restaurant which ended with him throwing wine in White’s face and storming out. He’ll never speak to me again, Cox wailed and would not be convinced that it was just such rejection that would keep White coming back.

Keith Fleming, White’s nephew, who lived with White or under White’s auspices during the 1970s, speaks about White’s difficulties with maintaining intimacy for long periods. Fleming notes that White has only a limited capacity for heart-to-heart chats. When a dinner guest at the apartment made the mistake of … unburdening himself too extensively, the guest was sure to be criticized as ‘juvenile’ afterwards, Fleming notes (176). Indeed, White would after a few minutes chatting with any one person … feel trapped and want to move on (135). Yet, Fleming speculates, maybe part of the reason he felt so trapped with any one person was that he was able to put himself so artfully at your disposal that you would never get enough of it and you’d exhaust him. White’s remarkable gifts at empathy, his extraordinary acts of generosity, his need to be helpful could leave him with nothing if he didn’t put strict and seemingly arbitrary limits to his contacts with others. Perhaps he chooses lovers who distance themselves from him precisely because his capacity for intimacy is so great that those who demanded it would soon leave him empty. His remoteness is, it would seem, a form of self-preservation.

If White runs away from excessive intimacy, he also is unwilling to cut all contact with lovers. Despite the painfulness of his relationship with Cox, they kept in touch until Cox’s death. When he was still living in Paris, White paid for John Purcell’s apartment in New York until Purcell became too ill to live there any longer. In the case of the Violet Quill, White brought into the group his former lover, George Whitmore.

George Whitmore had been a boyfriend of White’s sometime before he met Cox. It’s clear from a letter that Cox wrote White that Whitmore saw the three of them as connected. At a dinner given by the novelist Coleman Dowell, who knew them all, Whitmore declared, "Of course, Chris and I both worship Ed. Such declarations irritated Cox, who was extremely jealous of White and wanted their relationship to be carried on alone in private. Cox complained of this intimacy George believes he has with me simply because he was involved with you." Yet there may have been another reason Cox was so upset. Whitmore was, no doubt, the most boyishly handsome member of the Violet Quill. Small, delicately featured, he is cute, in the way none of the other members of the VQ could be said to be cute, even the impishly dimpled White. More than their shared interest in Ed White united Cox and Whitmore; they were both theater people who started out as actors. But whereas Cox seems to have abandoned the theater, Whitmore kept working as a playwright through the seventies and early eighties.

Actually, all the members of the Violet Quill had theatrical aspirations of one sort or another although Felice Picano was dragged kicking and screaming into the theater, as he wrote me. Soon after he came to New York, White had his play Blue Boy in Black produced Off-Broadway, and he has continued to work off and on as a playwright. In the 1990s his play Trios was given several productions in England. Whitmore and Cox both worked as actors in New York. In addition, Whitmore wrote a number of plays; The Rights and The Caseworker both were produced Off-Broadway. Michael Grumley appeared in a number of films in Italy and, with Robert Ferro, worked for many years on a musical version of Dodsworth. Felice Picano has also written plays, including an adaptation of his novella An Asian Minor called Immortal, a one-acter (One O’Clock Jump), produced at the Tennessee Williams Festival in New Orleans, and The Bombay Trunk, staged at the New Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. During his twenties, Picano worked briefly in Cinecittá, the great Italian movie studio, as a translator and script developer.

Felice Picano, as I said, had neither gone to Iowa nor had sex with White. He did, however, date Whitmore during the period of the Violet Quill, a romance that ended disappointingly for both of them, and he remained closer friends with the Ferro-Grumleys after the group’s formal meetings ended. Like Ferro, he is Italian, but his face is rounder, softer. He lacks Ferro’s vulpine handsomeness. But with his slightly hooded, bedroom eyes, Picano has not lacked sex partners or lovers. Strong, forceful, unintimidated, he projects a self-confidence and energy that make him appear larger than he actually is. As he saw it, the Violet Quill was divided into three contingents: the two couples (White and Cox, Ferro and Grumley) and the unattached (Whitmore, Holleran, and himself). He was one of the most enthusiastic members of the group. Like Chris Cox, Picano had a sense that they were engaged in something at once unprecedented, and yet not detached from earlier writers and artists. In an entry to his journal that records first meeting White, Picano writes portentously: Somehow we will look back at this time as the coalescing of some acme in literature—I really think so, and I’m trying to make others feel so too. Whether the Violet Quill was an acme in literature, remains to be seen, but it was an important chapter in the history of gay writing.

If the eight formal meetings of the Violet Quill did not change any of the participants as writers (although novelist Dennis Cooper believes they may have harmed Edmund White), it may be because most of them had already established themselves as authors before the Violet Quill was formed. Although White had worked for Time/Life Books during the sixties and had a play performed Off-Broadway as early as 1964, the first VQ members to publish a book were the Ferro-Grumleys. In 1970 they published Atlantis: The Autobiography of a Search, their account of discovering what they believed to be the lost continent of Atlantis off the Florida coast, a book that caused enough of a stir that they were guests on The Dick Cavett Show, a nationally televised talk/discussion program. Although it claims to be an autobiography, Atlantis is not very explicit about Ferro and Grumley’s relationship, presenting them as nothing more than two single men traveling around the world together; and yet, in itself, that was enough to give away the subtext to any discerning reader of the day. With the exception of Holleran and Whitmore, the Ferro-Grumleys, like the rest of the Violet Quill, started out as closeted authors whose books, if they did not contain explicit heterosexual content, nevertheless are fairly discrete about gay subject matter. Perhaps oddly, after Atlantis Ferro and Grumley never wrote another book together, although they helped each other out with their books, particularly Grumley’s posthumously published novel Life Drawing.

I have said that the Violet Quill had little effect because the men were already working authors. In the case of Grumley, this statement obscures the harsher reality that by the time the Violet Quill had its meetings, Grumley’s career as a book author was virtually over. Although he published four books in the seven years between 1970 and 1977—in addition to Atlantis, there was After Midnight (1977), portraits of people who work night shifts; There Are Giants in the Earth, a book about legendary hominoid giants, such as Bigfoot; and Hard Corps: Studies in Leather and Sadomasochism (1977)—he never saw another volume into print after After Midnight. That is not to say that he gave up writing. For several years he penned a column (Uptown) for the New York Native, a gay weekly, and his papers are full of book proposals, including one on the great beaches of the world. But he never signed another book contract. His diary, which he maintained until he became too ill to write, is filled in his last year with the frustration over his failure to publish Life Drawing. It was only after his death and after Ferro extensively revised the manuscript that it finally found a publisher. So if the meetings of the Violet Quill had an effect on Grumley, it was probably to make him even more blocked than he already was.

The books that Grumley published in the seventies divide themselves into two groups. Atlantis and There Are Giants in the Earth are books about the mythic—creatures and places whose actual existence remains in doubt. After Midnight and Hard Corps are about people outside the mainstream because of their jobs or their sexual desires. But in fact all four titles are about the life that is all around us that we either deny or ignore, and so if they are not gay books, they are most certainly queer books. One of the important aspects of these volumes is the way that Grumley never isolates gay people from the larger social continuum. In Hard Corps, for example, gay men into leather and S/M are not split off from heterosexual couples. Indeed everyone is viewed as engaging in the same activity, and because sadomasochism is less about genital relations and more about power relations, it is a field in which the gender of the participants is quite reasonably viewed as secondary.

After Midnight is actually a better and more interesting book in its handling of sexuality. Still, much of the book has nothing to do with sex: it contains chapters on a hospital’s night staff and a community of night fishermen. One chapter is about the employees of an all-night radio show that serves as a dating service. Another is about a struggling actress in New York; yet another about cocktail waitresses in Las Vegas. These last two chapters discuss the ways that sex is thrust upon women who don’t want it, women whom men regard as virtually sex workers. Grumley deals with same-sex relations twice in the book. The first time occurs in a chapter devoted to a man ministering at night to the people of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Reverend Don meets his share of hustlers and transsexual prostitutes. Jonelle is a stereotypical chick with dick, whose johns want her affection more than her body. Yet Grumley tries to complicate matters a bit. One hustler, Bobby, a heroin addict who is now technically clean, worries about his wife, also an addict. She knows he is turning tricks on the street, and sometimes it gets her down (81). The more interesting and sustained presentation of same-sex relations is a chapter on factory workers in Milwaukee. Ben is the night foreman in a plant that packages food and cosmetics, especially baby powder. Ben is a big cartoon figure of a man, Grumley says. The men on the line call him Bluto, because he is six two and sports tattoos, a small blue and red dragon and his two initials (155). Gradually, Grumley reveals not only that Ben is gay but also that he has lived for seven years with Patrick, a painter. If, as narrator, Grumley is reticent about his sexual orientation, Ben is not. Ben has learned that it was impossible to run away from the facts of life and knows that being a homosexual is the best thing that ever happened to him and meeting Patrick is the second best (160). Today such a portrait is television fare, but in 1978 the image of a blue-collar factory worker in Milwaukee who is out and proud broke many stereotypes.

Through Ben and Patrick, Grumley is able to express his love for Robert Ferro, to whom the book is dedicated. Ben and Patrick’s union rests on string, he writes. They have never stood in a church and said, Till death us do part. They never would. Nothing legal or familial holds them together; they have simply chosen to spend their lives together. The string slackens or grows taut, and they do what they can to keep their balance (170). But it is more than this unsacramentalized marriage that makes Ben and Patrick’s relationship mirror the Ferro-Grumley ménage; it’s also the fact that Patrick is an artist, and discussing Patrick gives Grumley a chance to expound on the importance of such relations for the artist:

The painter creates only out of his own psyche, only through his own physical and emotional tools, from his own rarefied spirit. But his lover enhances his spirit, and by reinforcing his life reinforces his art. Wives of writers, husbands of poets, the lovers of each: these make up the armor that shields the artist and enables him or her to produce. (After Midnight, 170)

This passage tells us a lot about how the Ferro-Grumleys saw themselves—not only as a couple but as artists. They are rarefied spirits always under siege from a hostile materialistic world that mistakes the artist’s self-involvement with the cruder forms of egotism. The artist needs protection and reinforcement—protection from self-doubt and reinforcement so he may devote himself entirely to his art. Obviously, the role of protector isn’t limited to gay partners, but the gay artist has more need of protection. (Significantly, Ben works in the factory to allow Patrick to paint full time, just as José Donoso told Michael Ferro that Robert would only become a great writer if he weren’t troubled by having to earn a living in Ferro’s cosmetics company.) Lovers are armor, shields against the vulgar world which, even when it does not directly attack the artist, fails to appreciate him or her and their purer, more precious spirit. The Violet Quill was additional protection, added reinforcement.

The person who seemed most to benefit from the Violet Quill was Robert Ferro. After Atlantis, Ferro had published only one other book, a strange novella, The Others in 1977, the very year Grumley’s book career ends. The Others is a mysterious allegory set on a ship of fools, Ferro’s homage to Isak Dinesen. Like Atlantis, The Others is not overtly gay, but its hero, Peter Conrad, is the kind of sickly, sensitive young man one finds in Henry James, his delicacy a sign—if one cared to read it—of his lack of virility. The Others was a dead end for Ferro, although throughout his career he incorporated dreamlike allegories into his novels. His real bent, as he was to find at the time of the VQ meetings, was with a more realistic novel. Ferro found his way to his mature style during the period of the Violet Quill, where he read the opening chapters to what would become his breakthrough work, The Family of Max Desir. The meetings seemed to give him more confidence in writing a novel that was more autobiographical and direct.

As for Andrew Holleran, it is hard to know how the Violet Quill meetings affected him. He had already published Dancer from the Dance, the work that brought him fame. Insofar as Holleran’s work has altered over the years—and he is disappointed that it hasn’t changed more—it is not because of the few formal meetings of the group. Yet Holleran is the person who most needed the sense of a circle of friends even as he remained detached from it. The letters that frame the main narrative of Dancer are part of his strategy to locate that story in the give-and-take of private communications. Indeed the model for those letters is the correspondence that Ferro and Holleran conducted between the time they left Iowa to the time they both settled in New York. It was a correspondence they both cherished, each preserving all the letters. In fact, Ferro kept Holleran’s letters in a small wooden box especially reserved for them, a practice he followed for no other correspondent, and Holleran was equally careful, if not as ritualistic, in preserving Ferro’s letters. Such a correspondence—and Holleran keeps up quite a large number of them—suggests at least two things: first, the need for readers he knows and with whom he can identify, and, second, the need to distance himself from them. A shy man who exaggerates in his own mind his social awkwardness, Holleran finds in letter writing a way of maintaining contact even as he preserves his distance. Holleran writes best when he can think of his readers as his friends, a close group who need not have the references glossed. Yet like Edmund White, with whom he maintains a friendship so solicitous and diplomatic that it does not completely hide their mutual sense of rivalry, Holleran is a man who fears the very intimacy that he craves. The personal letter becomes the perfect solution to this conflict. Years after the Violet Quill stopped meeting, Holleran would refer to it in his letters to Ferro as though it were still going on, and—of course—for him it was. It was the bond of friendship that Holleran needed, not the face-to-face contact. W. H. Auden says that the end of art is an attempt to entertain our friends, and the Auden group of Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and Louis MacNeice is a circle of readers Auden tried to amuse. The Violet Quill functioned in the same way for Holleran.

It probably had a similar function for White. Actually, White moved in several literary circles. On the one hand, he was befriended by a circle of poets and critics. Some of these writers were older mentors like Richard Howard, David Kalstone, James Merrill, and Howard Moss, and some, like Alfred Corn, were close contemporaries. But except for Richard Howard, these men did not directly involve themselves with his writing. In an incident fictionalized in The Farewell Symphony, White tells us how he came to meet James Merrill, the son of the founder of Merrill Lynch and considered by many the finest American poet of his day. David Kalstone, the scholar and critic, had arranged the occasion because Merrill was not only one of White’s literary idols but also in a position to advance White’s career. Part of Kalstone’s strategy was to have White read a chapter from his then-unpublished novel Forgetting Elena in the hope that Merrill would champion it to a publisher. But the meeting was a disaster. In his fictional account, White writes, When I’d finished the chapter [Merrill] didn’t say anything. He just lowered his head at an enigmatic angle with a soft smile but no eye contact. White was devastated. Just at the moment I’d imagined I was about to win a word of praise from the greatest writer of the day he’d refused to make even a single assuaging remark (211). Later, Merrill and White became friends, but as this scene dramatizes, White never allowed himself or never was allowed to be an equal.

But White’s literary status was very different in the Violet Quill, as is made clear in one of the few references to it in The Farewell Symphony:

One evening we were eating an ordered-in pizza with friends, other young writers who belonged to a literary club we’d started where we’d take turns reading out loud to each other. I’d just read something and been praised for it (which was no surprise, since our organization was named the All-Praise Club). (346)

Here he is with equals, other young writers with whom he could sit and eat order-in pizza. (Actually the food at the formal meetings was more elaborate—the meetings were famous for their delicious desserts.) Nor did he worry about getting assuaging remarks from them. His renaming of the Violet Quill into the All-Praise Club, besides making it sound slightly evangelical, emphasizes that the work would be met with acceptance and not the grim silence he had received from the éminence grise. The Violet Quill gave him unquestioned approval, approval given freely and lavishly—perhaps more freely and lavishly than White would have wanted since, as someone haunted by being an arriviste, he distrusts easily given praise. Nevertheless, by the time the Violet Quill formed, White was one of the more prominent figures in gay writing: he had published two novels—Forgetting Elena, his variation of a Japanese pillow-book which, like Ferro’s novel, was not explicitly gay (in fact the only sex scene is between the narrator and his sister), but hardly normatively heterosexual, and Nocturnes for the King of Naples, a remarkably accomplished, explicitly and exclusively gay romance. More important, he had turned himself into the Virgil and Dante of gay society by coauthoring (with Charles Silverstein) The Joy of Gay Sex and then going solo for States of Desire, his journey through the various hells, heavens, and purgatories—not to mention purgatives—of gay America. He had published as many books as Michael Grumley—more if you count the ones he had ghost written—and they had received far more attention.

In fact, the only writer of the group who had produced more than White or Grumley at the time the Violet Quill formed was Felice Picano, who continues to be an enormously productive author. In the 1970s he published four novels and a book of poetry. He had founded the Sea Horse Press, which was dedicated to publishing gay and lesbian books, and in the years that the Violet Quill met (1980–81) he edited A True Likeness, an anthology of lesbian and gay writing—which contained work by most of the Violet Quill writers—as well as writing the novella An Asian Minor and the short novel Late in the Season, begun at the Ferro family house, Sea Girt, on the New Jersey coast. At the formal meetings of the Violet Quill he read from stories that would eventually be collected in Slashed to Ribbons in Defense of Love. These were years when Picano was in especially high gear.

Picano’s journals show how excited he was to be meeting so many writers he respected. A week after he met Andrew Holleran, they found themselves at a party. Picano records excitedly:

Last night I went to a literary party, invited by the guest of honor himself, Andrew. Everyone was there: faggots I’d seen around for years, publishing people I’d never met and never hoped to meet; celebrities such as … Taylor Mead, Fran Lebowitz; friends and authors such as Marty Duberman, … George Whitmore, Larry Kramer. (Bergman, Violet Quill Reader, 30)

Picano hadn’t gone to the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop like Holleran, Grumley, and Ferro. Nor