BY MICK MEENAN | The Stonewall Uprising that followed a June 28, 1969 NYPD raid on a Christopher Street gay bar was only the beginning in a series of historical events that would reshape queer consciousness, and society along with it.

Among the significant developments following the Stonewall Uprising was the publishing industry’s more receptive attitude toward explicitly gay titles about gay lives. Correctly sensing a commercial appetite for gay fiction, history, and biography, publishers like St. Martin’s Press (with the late, legendary gay editor Michael Denneny) actively discovered and promoted gay writers whose works continue to inspire and inform new generations of gay men.  

Sure to be of similar lasting effect is 2025’s Passionte Outlier: Gay Writers and Allies on Their Work, Frank Pizzoli’s impressive assemblage of his interviews with some of the nation’s most prominent queer writers, alongside his own reviews of writers whose works retain great relevance. The book’s introduction states the purpose of its author–who, in conjunction with his work as a prolific interviewer, has also distinguished himself as an essayist, a reviewer, and former editor/publisher of the Central Pennsylvania newspaper, The Central Voice.

“Knowing that legions of gay men of my generation would succumb to HIV,” writes Pizzoli, “I turned my attention to those writers of my generation who provided us with narratives of their lives.” Pizzoli notes he has “lived with HIV for most of my adult life, having been infected during what is called the First Wave cohort of patients.” He emerged from two years of chemotherapy “around the time that doctors began using HIV medicines in triple combinations.”

Pizzoli retains, from that era, “a nondescript box that contains decades of obituaries and funeral programs for legions of gay men and  others who weren’t able to hang on until durable treatment  protocols could be established. During those years, even now, I  cannot bring myself to open it except for when I have to place yet another death notice inside.”

As HIV “increasingly manifested itself in my life,” Pizzoli recalls, he became a frequent contributor to POZ Magazine, as it distinguished itself as a driving force in getting government, health officials, and pharmaceutical companies to develop proper testing protocols and medications. Setting out with a cassette recorder, pen, and paper, Pizzoli interviewed men and women whose literary and artistic careers began and flourished during the height of the epidemic.

The 20 chapters in Passionate Outlier were originally published as individual pieces in The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, Lambda Literary Review, Chicago’s Windy City Times, and The Brooklyn Rail. The collection represents work from 2007 to 2019.

We spoke on the morning of June 4, 2025, as news Edmund White’s death broke. The novelist, essayist, and biographer of Genet, Rimbaud, and Proust spoke with Pizzoli seven times over a fourteen-month period. White’s 1982 novel A Boy’s Own Story is the first in a loose trilogy that documents the quotidian aspects of an Ohio adolescent coming to terms with his homosexuality. White’s candid appraisal of sexual arousal and how a young gay man accommodates his identity to an otherwise hostile world also underscores, without it ever being explicated, the refrain shouted at gay protests: “We’re here, we’re queer.”

In his interview, White talks about how he felt compelled to portray his gay protagonists as being self-minded and not inherently tragic: “I certainly don’t want to be an apostle for positive role models or political correctness of any sort. But I feel that what is remarkable is that no matter how intelligent the authors are, you have to wait until you get to (Christopher) Isherwood in A Single Man before a reader can find a picture of a guy that is just a guy.”

Pizzoli told me that he considered novelist John Rechy to be one of his most interesting subjects. Rechy made his mark with 1963’s City of Night, distinguished by its candid depiction of unbridled male sexuality during the staid Eisenhower era, a time that regarded gayness as a threat to American security. On the road from New York to Los Angeles, Rechy’s protagonist–rather anonymously, yet also universally named “youngman”–is a hustler who takes to his work unapologetically and is not surprised to discover just how phallocentric men are in all the states he crosses.

Rechy, who is Mexican-American, is indeed an outlier in terms of being a gay person of color whose work predates the Stonewall Uprising and who was not writing for a middle class bourgeois audience with the hopes of having Hollywood turning one of his novels into a movie. He told Pizzoli about the scope of his fourteen fiction and three non-fiction titles: “Gay subjects, yes; but also a Mexican woman in L.A. (Amalia), teenagers in Texas (The Fourth Angel), a possible daughter of Marilyn Monroe, a spooky female evangelist (Bodies and Souls). In my essays, starting back in the 50s, I’ve written about discrimination against Mexicans in Texas, illegal jailing of ‘juvenile delinquents,”  GIs protesting the Vietnam War, and, of course, about the scourge – physical and psychological (on all of us) of AIDS.”

Jay Parini is an American writer and academic who wrote the official biography of Gore Vidal–an author, public intellectual, and celebrity, whose post-World War II novel The City and the Pillar (written in 1946, published in 1948) is the story of frustrated adolescent love and longing and how that tension thwarts the careers and hopes of two young men who go on to adulthood. A vicious backlash greeted the book’s publication, nearly wrecking Vidal’s writing career, which crippled his run for Congress and typified the sort of widespread, determined hate that met many young men even hinting at a same-sex attraction.

Parini’s anecdotes about the idiosyncratic and often prickly Vidal are among many of the gems Pizzoli has included in this volume. Parini recalled how Vidal wanted him as his official biographer after a previous biography had bombed and Vidal denounced the writer.

“My wife warned me against doing so, fearing we would never be friends again,” said Parini. “Gore was very thin-skinned and could not tolerate even the slightest criticism. I declined but began writing notes for a book that could only be published after Vidal’s death.”

In my conversation with Pizzoli, we covered a lot of ground about gay literature, including the bravery of pre-Stonewall writers including, quite importantly, James Baldwin (who died in 1987). A Harlem native, civil rights activist and intellectual, Baldwin’s 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room is a masterpiece of American fiction that also resulted in a backlash that still inexplicably continues. You would be hard-pressed to find the novel on any high school reading list, where it belongs–or college reading list, for that matter. Baldwin was forced to publish the novel in Britain after failing to find an American publisher. Pizzoli said he regretted never being able to interview Baldwin.

Delving into the work of Martin Duberman, a longtime novelist, memoirist, and City University of New York professor, Pizzoli writes, “In Jews, Queers, Germans: A Novel, he offers a gripping account of documented history in novel form. Readers eavesdrop on Kaiser Wilhelm, Fritz Krupp, Count Harry Kessler, Walter Rathenau, and Prince Philipp  of Eulenburg.” In his memoirs, Duberman recounts the torturous path he underwent in psychoanalysis that at times was as unforgiving of his gayness as was the society of his youth.

In 2016’s Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady, author Susan Quinn recounts the lesbian love affair between the president’s wife and an Associated Press reporter whom she met during her husband’s 1932 reelection campaign. Pizzoli writes: “I’ve always had a hankering for the Roosevelts. They were kitchen table talk in my house. My father served in FDR’s and (Harry Truman’s) the Office of the Price Administration. I have unused gas rationing cards in my family archive. My brother Louis was born on April 12, 1942, three years before FDR died on the same day.”

Daniel Mendelsohn is a professor of humanities at Bard College and the author of numerous books, including his translation of the poems of Constantine P. Cavafy, whose canon from the early twentieth century remains an important touchstone of gay sensibility and letters. Mendelsohn’s essays in The New York Review of Books expound on his nonfiction research, specifically his translation of The Odyssey done with an archaeological hermeneutic that detects hidden or misappropriated same-sex terms and milestones.

Mendelsohn’s father, himself an academic, once audited his class on The Odyssey. In his interview, Mendelsohn is open about how accepting his father is of his homosexuality and how he connected that acceptance with a deeper understanding of the meaning of the Greek epic. Pizzoli entitled this chapter Daniel Mendelsohn: The Odyssey Is All About Father and Son.

“How,” asks Mendelsohn, “could I not have noticed that before? It’s like looking at The Odyssey with a special pair of glasses – a father-son pair – because my dad was sitting right there, and suddenly all this stuff about fathers and sons leapt out at me in a way that had never happened before.”

Pizzoli and I discussed how far gay literature has come from the days when every protagonist was either murdered, committed suicide, or got married to a woman. While today’s gay literary market has seemed to have shrunk from its heyday, Pizzoli holds out hope for chronicles that depict the broad scope of today’s LGBTQ+ world. “Boy, are we diverse,” Pizzoli marvels. “We are not homogenized milk where we are processed and put into identical little containers.”

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