The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture (review)

The members of the literary circle known as the Violet Quill—Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White, Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, and George Whitmore—were among the most important writers to emerge from the gay liberation movement. David Bergman's new book, The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture, is a perceptive and heartfelt study of this group, their writing, and the ideas and attitudes at work in the brief but tumultuous period between the 1969 Stonewall riots and the first reported cases of AIDS in 1981. Combining social history, literary analysis, and (auto)biography, Bergman's study is a clear and engaging account of a group of writers and a defining cultural moment that will appeal to a wide audience of those working in gay studies, literature, and history.

Bergman sets himself the ambitious double task of revisiting a not-so-distant but seemingly remote past and reading the literature of writers who tried to capture, influence, criticize, and come to terms with the rapidly changing world around them. What is great about this book is that it challenges the frequently dismissive attitudes toward these writers—attitudes that more often than not rely on critical hindsight—by returning the works to their own historical contexts. Indeed, so much of the way these writers have been received has been predicated on what happened after them in the wake of the historical accident of AIDS, making this study a difficult and perhaps especially important undertaking. Bergman argues for the importance of closer scrutiny of these writers and of "gay" writing more generally at the very moment when such writing might be deemed old-fashioned, irrelevant, and outdated. In the view that emerges from The Violet Hour the writers of the Violet Quill were articulating not a static ideal of gay life (otherwise privileged, white, male) but an experimental, exuberant, innovating cultural current everywhere besieged and in flux—and continuous with queer writing before and after it.

The first two chapters establish Bergman's objective to "anchor the Violet Quill in its historical milieu" (32). Chapter 1, "These Shrinking Violets," offers a general introduction to the study of and background on individual members of the group. It provides fascinating insider information and glimpses into what it was like to be part of the first generation to pass through gay liberation. Chapter 2, on gay writing before the Violet Quill, shows how these writers were inspired by—and resistant to—a body of gay writing that preceded them. In one of the most compelling sections of the book Bergman traces the Violet Quill's rejection of the classical influence of early homoerotic writing ("a literature of ephebes and older lovers") and the tragic story of gay life favored in the 1950s and 1960s (a literature of scandal, suicide, murder, and drunkenness) in favor of the more matter-of-fact, autobiographical style of Christopher Isherwood. What the Violet Quill saw, and what made them radical for the time, Bergman suggests, was the need not for more accounts of the seamy side of gay life (already admirably handled by Jean Genet, John Rechy, Hubert Selby Jr., and William S. Burroughs) but to explore "what happened to men from the middle class who identified as gay and who attempted to live their lives not in the closet but as gay men" (59).

Bergman's first full-scale chapter of literary analysis, chapter 3, "Two Journeys," focuses on narratives of gay migration to the city and the creation of gay communities. The formation of a group identity based on a set of common experiences and desires that marked the Violet Quill's beginnings, then, was also its subject. Through works as different as White's The Beautiful Room Is Empty and Holleran's The Dancer from the Dance Bergman traces the group's representations of the difficulties of leaving...