Ian Young called me this afternoon to tell me Felice died "peacefully and not alone."
I'm proud to have called him a friend. When last I saw him, in April of 2024, he still had mischief in those beautiful, life-electric eyes of his. There's a poem in my chapbook Crow in the Desert, coming out in the next few weeks, that he's a big part of, and the fact that he won't get to read it makes me ache in that homesick kind of way. That feeling of my friend is gone.
ON KISSING ELDER GAY POETS
“Hey guy have a great day and year.
And thanks for that very public kiss in New York.”
- Felice Picano
Felice was referring to a panel at a literary festival in New York (Rainbow Book Fair) where he, Perry Brass, Philip Clark, Walter Holland, and I sat alongside Ian Young to give him his roses while he is still living. I realized as I sat there that I hadn’t prepared remarks, and now we were going down the line giving what seemed like prepared remarks. When I stood to speak I told of how Ian helped me in the early days of Sibling Rivalry Press, and Perry, too, with the early cheerleading from his role as organizer of the book fair, and Felice, who, when I was a Lambda Literary Fellow came to see me read poems at Antioch University and later provided a blurb for my book DIG. These were the writers who broke down walls and built our own gay house so I could simply walk through the door. I took it beyond Ian. I knew he wouldn’t mind. I turned to them and said, Ian Young, Perry Brass, Felice Picano: You changed my life. You saved my life. I love you. And I went down the line and kissed each of them. Was it performative? Of course. Pure spontaneous camp and circumstance. But was it sincere? Every single word. Later that night, at an apartment party for Ian, who rarely comes down from Toronto, a young nonbinary artist, I’m guessing around 21 years old, told me the kisses had been the moment they connected with most. Even later, in the coat room of the apartment as we said our goodbyes, Ian said, Bryan, I love you, too.
Beautiful words to say goodbye, and also to introduce someone, to someone like me, who did not know them.
Bryan, do you know what many old gay poets see as one of their greatest achievements? Reading and meeting young gay poets. The poems of those old gay poets kept me alive . . . literally. When I was a boy both rejected and threatened in an awful world, reading their work proved to me that I was NOT alone, NOT sick, NOT damned to hell. They convinced me I was just myself, and that was enough for me to sing aloud the song I already was. Thanks to them, I'm still singing it.