| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture. By David Bergman. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. xxii, 304 pp. Cloth, $62.50, ISBN 0-231-13050-3. Paper, $24.50, ISBN 0-231-13051-1.)
In times before the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Queer as Folk television programs, before global Web sites such as PlanetOut.com, and before international circuit parties that quickly disperse new gay cultural insights, there was a quaint medium that influenced gay culture with its reflections on such themes as forbidden love, dissent from heterosexual norms, and lives shaped in the outcast demimonde.	1
It was called literature.	2
David Bergman's new social history, The Violet Hour, is a celebration of some of that genre's best known practitioners during the 1970s—seven friends who rose to at least some level of gay literary prominence during that brief period between the 1969 Stonewall riots and the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic of the 1980s. In a clubby way, they named themselves the Violet Quill (VQ) and read works in progress to one another. Three are still alive—Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and Felice Picano. The other four—Christopher Cox, Michael Grumley, Robert Ferro, and George Whitmore—died in the epidemic.	. . .

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