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

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

by David Bergman
The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture
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The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture

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

by David Bergman

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780231130516
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publication date: 05/05/2004
Series: Between Men-Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 288
Product dimensions: 0.74(w) x 6.00(h) x 9.00(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

David Bergman is professor of English at Towson University. The editor of The Violet Quill Reader, he has won awards for his collection of poems, Cracking the Code, his book Gaiety Transfigured: Self-Representation in Gay American Literature, and for editing the anthology Men on Men 2000.

Table of Contents

These Shreieking Violets
Gay Writing Before the Violet Quill
Two Journeys
Race and the Violet Quill
Beauty and the Beach
Love and Sex
AIDS

What People are Saying About This

Richard Canning

Nobody but David Bergman could have written this book, which is certain to become the standard reference work for the writings of all the Violet Quill authors. More than this, The Violet Hour brilliantly illuminates the context of all gay writing of the 1970s. It is beautifully written, ingeniously ordered and full of trenchant comment on every page. Bergman is to be hugely congratulated for this perceptive and challenging study. It will inform and strongly influence our view of post-war gay male writing for a long while to come, and confirms its author's pre-eminence among contemporary critics of gay male literature.'

— Richard Canning, author of Gay Fiction Speaks and Hear Us Out: Conversations with Gay Novelists

Sarah Schulman

An interesting social history that reveals the Violet Quill as emblematic of the trajectory of the gay male elite from dominance -- by caste -- of gay representation, to devastation by AIDS, to obscurity at the hands of contemporary corporate control of gay imagery. Bergman is particularly provocative in illuminating the various degrees of success to which survivors Picano, Holleran, and White have been able to negotiate both the plague and commodification.

— Sarah Schulman, author of Rat Bohemia and People in Trouble

Richard Canning

Nobody but David Bergman could have written this book, which is certain to become the standard reference work for the writings of all the Violet Quill authors. More than this, The Violet Hour brilliantly illuminates the context of all gay writing of the 1970s. It is beautifully written, ingeniously ordered and full of trenchant comment on every page. Bergman is to be hugely congratulated for this perceptive and challenging study. It will inform and strongly influence our view of post-war gay male writing for a long while to come, and confirms its author's pre-eminence among contemporary critics of gay male literature.'

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United States History
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General & Miscellaneous Literary Criticism
United States History - Northeastern & Middle Atlantic Region
20th Century American Literature - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism
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