Felice Picano made a stop in Chicago to promote his latest memoir Nights at Rizzoli. The Center on Halsted hosted a reading for Picano and Carlos T. Mock. Picano has written three memoirs to date including Nights at Rizzoli, True Stories and True Stories Too, all unique in that the reader gets a vision of each historical moment in addition to the author's life. Typically known for his fiction writing, this style of writing is present in each memoir.
"I've led an extremely adventurous life… as I only discovered a few years ago. I've met all kinds of extraordinary people and so essentially that's what I'm doing: writing about people, places, and things and less about myself," said Picano. "I'm like the character watching all this happen."
Carlos T. Mock, who was on the group book tour with Picano similarly expressed: "One of the nice things about the books—the reason I really like them—is they not only tell his story but he tells the story of gay culture during the 60s and 70s."
Nights and Rizzoli depicts a life through the lens of a gay man in New York who lucked into a job at the elegant Manhattan bookstore—Rizzoli—that captures Picano's life as well as the lives of many others.
"It really was like a meeting place during that period. So in effect, Nights at Rizzoli, is about my very glamorous night life and my almost sorted life as a gay man—not really looking for a relationship."
Many famous writers and celebrities would come together at Rizzoli which allowed Picano to compile a laundry list of famous clientele, collecting a stock of stories to tell about his interactions with them.
"[I went] to work for a company I knew nothing about and [found] myself in the center of the most glamorous place in the world at that time," recalled Picano.
Picano uses his works of non-fiction to investigate his own life. For instance in True Stories Too, Picano investigates a real life murder mystery that happened in his family. A reader came up to Picano while he was on book tour, presented him with an old news article and inquired whether this unsolved murder of a person with the same last name could be related. He recognized the name and address as belonging to his grandmother.
"Each one of these [stories] is some kind of oddity," said Picano in reference to his memoirs.
In addition to his writing career, Picano also considers himself to be an activist. He was involved in both the Gay Liberation Front, the first large scale gay activist organization, and the Gay Activist Alliance. Later he also joined the Gay Men's Health Crisis as more and more of his friends passed away due to AIDS complications.
Present during the Stonewall rebellion, Picano recalled, "I was not at Stonewall [Inn]. I was across the street 900 yards away at a party picking up the bartender. When we finally got downstairs at three o' clock in the morning we couldn't believe what we saw. Shortly after that is when the activism began on those street corners in Greenwich Village."
Picano is also a founding member of the Violet Quill—a pioneering group of gay male writers in the 1980s. Among the membership was Edmund White and Andrew Holleran. The primary interest of the group was gay publishing:
"I was writing gay [literature] in the '60s with absolutely no hope of anybody publishing them," Picano said. "There was no possibility and no outlets. And I just wrote them anyway."
"You have to put it into context. At that time there was no such thing as gay literature—period," explained Mock. "He and [the people at Violet Quill], they started meeting at they started publishing themselves to get sold."
The members of Violet Quill also pressured the media in efforts to publicize books.
"We would approach them and say, 'Four good lesbian novels have been published in the past year and you haven't reviewed a single one'… until they did something about it," said Picano.
Violet Quill's papers are stored at Yale's library where the collect American writing groups. Their papers sit alongside Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau among others.
Picano's activism continues into today, as he teaches queer literature courses at Antioch College in Los Angeles and has written approximately 35 novels to date under the gay literature genre.
"I still like to make trouble," joked Picano.
