Writers who read, make readers of the word.

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Fact of Pride
The Violet Quill

In its narrowest sense, the Violet (or Lavender) Quill was simply a circle of gay male writers in Manhattan who met a few times in 1980 and 1981 to read to one another from their works in progress. In a much larger sense, however, the Violet Quill commands interest because this group of friends and rivals--Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White, and George Whitmore--helped create the post-Stonewall renaissance of American gay male writing.

The members of the Violet Quill were quite different from one another and did not consciously constitute a "school," but collectively and individually they placed homosexuality at the very center of their literary visions.

As David Bergman has observed, 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."

In retrospect, they may be seen as pioneers in the struggle to create a literature that reflected the social revolution wrought by the Stonewall uprising. Their works chronicle both the headiness of the early years of gay liberation and the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic, to which four of the seven have succumbed.- Claude J. Summers.This Entry Copyright © 1995, 2002 New England Publishing Associates. www.glbtq.com/literature/violetquill.html

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... because we should all write with such passion, want and exploration. We should all be driven by ourselves and the world around us. Because we have to speak, to say and to write.
- me

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The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
- Oscar Wilde

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