Thom Nickels: Three writers, three obituaries

Three noteworthy LGBT authors died within three months of one another in 2025. I knew two of them; the more famous one — Edmund White — I met only once. All three retained the radicalism they advocated in their youth. 

All three scribes bowed before the manufactured narrative that Donald Trump is an enemy of gay and lesbian people. 

Victoria A. Brownworth (died May 22, 2025)

In 2010, I was on a panel with Victoria A. Brownworth and a couple other writers at the Community College of Philadelphia. The occasion was the publication of Tommi Avicolli Mecca’s 2009 anthology, “Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation.” We both had essays in the anthology and when the discussion began, Victoria started off with the same comment I was preparing to deliver.

Why, she wanted to know, did the title of the anthology include the phrase “Smash the Church?” She then went on to explain the book did not deal with smashing the Church at all; in her case, her beef with the Church had to do with changing it, not eradicating it. I concurred when it came my time to speak delighted that Victoria was taking this approach. She even stated then that she considered herself Catholic. 

Victoria Brownworth, journalist, writer and editor, died after a ferocious battle with breast cancer, a damaged heart and a spot on her lung. She was a published author and the editor of several anthologies as well as a TV critic for the Bay Area Reporter, The Advocate, and the Philadelphia Gay News, among other publications. She was a prolific steadfast professional who sent out her columns from her hospital bed shortly before her death.  

I first saw Victoria’s work in print about the time I started writing for the gay press in the city. In Philadelphia, I came to know her when Stanley Ward, a friend I was close to in Boston, became editor of PGN. In those days gay men often jokingly referred to butch lesbians as flannel shirt dykes, while more feminine-looking lesbians — women in makeup, lipstick and long hair—were referred to as lipstick lesbians. 

Victoria was definitely in the latter category. She was, I thought, a beautiful woman with fine facial features and a “presence.” She was a stylist who knew how to wear French-style scarves; her earrings and necklaces resembled small museum pieces. Her hair was long and sumptuous — she’d flip it off her forehead like Susan Sontag used to do during a contentious interview. 

Stan, my editor friend, also admired her style although he maintained throughout his tenure at PGN that Victoria was bisexual and not exclusively lesbian. While this may have been true in the 1980s, as Victoria aged that became less so since for many years Victoria’s partner was the artist Maddy Gold, with whom she lived for many years in Germantown.

Having a close editor-friend meant I was sometimes privy to “back stories” concerning writers. Stanley confessed he sometimes had “issues” with Victoria. He also let it be known that he was much more comfortable with butch lesbians because in his view they were much more “straightforward.” 

Yet Stanley and I often disagreed. As much as I respected and loved him, one day he took me to task for receiving ashes on Ash Wednesday. In a tirade that knew no bounds, he condemned me for being so stupid and superstitious. “How could you!?” he balked, pounding his fist on a table. I mention this because he may have had a beef with Victoria’s espousal of liberal Catholicism. 

In the 1980s, Stan told me that Victoria told him she was dying.  (Perhaps the secret of a long life is to tell friends and acquaintances you are dying, because Victoria went on to live another 40-plus years). 

I was on a few author’s panels with Victoria at Giovanni’s Room. She had enviable speaking skills; she’d fiddle with an earring as she expounded on some topic; the words pouring forth effortlessly. Her piece on the NOW purge of lesbians in 2023 remains a classic as does her “lesbian nuns” report she wrote for PGN. She was also a Pulitzer Prize nominee. 

For a number of years I did not see Victoria’s byline at all although by that time I had drifted away from reading LGBT publications. A couple of years ago, I happened to access her columns on the web and noticed that politically she was as radical as she had been in the 1970s and 80s. She was vehemently, even “violently” anti-Trump and bought into the manufactured LGBT narrative that Trump is anti-gay because he has issues with gender ideology, transgender people in the military, the transition of children, and the use of pronouns. 

Of course, in the minds of many people — even gays and lesbians — objections like this are not tantamount to homophobia. 

Some months before Victoria died, I saw her anti-Trump postings on X. Their vehemence attracted a lot of harsh backlash, although she had her fans. I responded to several of her X posts, disagreeing with her but also telling her X enemies that, aside from a chronic case of TDS, Ms. Brownworth was actually a very nice person and a respected journalist. 

Edmund White (died June 6, 2025)

Edmund White was one of the founders of the Violet Quill, a group of writers out of New York who met and promoted each other’s works in the 1970s. 

White was one of the early cross-over writers in that he appeared in many non-gay periodicals such as the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. He also had a non-gay readership. He lived for many years in Paris — he was an ardent Francophile. I preferred White’s non-fiction to his novels.

I first met White when he was at Giovanni’s Room to give a reading and talk on his just published masterpiece, a biography of French writer Jean Genet. The crowd there was immense and celebratory; cameras and lights were everywhere. I attended with a documentary filmmaker, Gus Rosanio, who was doing a film on my book, “Gay and Lesbian Philadelphia.” We had arranged to interview White on film on the bookstore’s second floor after the event. Rosanio filmed my conversation with White. White was easy to talk to and very funny and forthcoming but just weeks after the interview Rosanio had a depilating heart attack and the film was canceled.

White was a treasure trove of back stories about celebrities and other writers.  In “My Lives,” an autobiography, he gives his thoughts on being the celebrated “father” of modern gay literature. 

He was born into a Christian Science family. In his youth he was bisexual. He writes: 

“In the mid-1950s, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I told my mother I was homosexual: that was the word, back then, homosexual, in its full satanic majesty, cloaked in ether fumes, a combination of evil and sickness.”

The author of A Boy’s Own Story, Forgetting Elena, and The Farewell Symphony writes that he began life as jailbait who intentionally sought out older men. Sex and lots of it is the theme of this memoir, which is populated by familiar figures from the literary, artistic, and musical worlds. 

He later returned home to live in the United States.

“In America I became obese, I suppose because the portions were bigger in restaurants and sugar was added to so many foods. It seemed to me that the secret of French cuisine was smaller portions,” he wrote in “Inside a Pearl,” about his life in Paris.  When he returned to America after living in Paris, he writes, he had to confront “the writer’s loss of prestige and the public’s neglect….” 

Even when he was internationally famous people in the general public would ask him: “Should I have heard of you?”

In “My Lives” he recounts affairs or friendships with the women in his life. Scant mention is made of Susan Sontag, with whom he had a long friendship in Europe and New York but with whom he had a contentious parting of the ways over his portrayal of her in Caracole. 

His views on love are cynical yet realistic. They certainly match the views of early gay liberationists who were very anti-gay marriage:

“Love puzzles me so much I can scarcely say whether I think it’s good or bad. It’s good (and bad) because passion-love, unlike esteem-love, is transformative, obsessional, impractical…. It pushes friendship aside and upstages family attachments. It crowds out every mild or disinterested pleasure; in fact, it has little to do with pleasure of any sort except at the very beginning of its trajectory when the poor lover still imagines he might live happily ever after with the beloved.”

Coming out for White was anything but a polite society dance. He’d head over to Kentucky from Cincinnati and spy on the young men in white T-shirts and beltless, low-riding jeans. 

Of all the portraits in the book, the ones of his parents are the most powerful. His mother wore a merry widow girdle that Edmund had to help her get out of. Mother admired rich people but had a pantheistic view of God that young Ed found “unconvincing.” 

“I never liked God in any form, even at his most universal. To me he was like Santa Claus — a grown-up conspiracy perpetrated on children to humiliate them. Too good to be true.”

Throughout his life White remained an avowed atheist although he said he loved going into cathedrals and lighting candles. 

In one of the last video interviews before his death, White cautions the LGBT community to be very afraid and cautious of Donald Trump. “We live in perilous times,” he said, later adding that if things continue it will only be a matter of time before gay people are hauled into prison.

Edmund White, for all his greatness, fell for the left’s political narrative.  

Felice Picano (died March 17, 2025) 

Felice Picano, the author of numerous books and a pioneer in the gay publishing world, died of lymphoma in his home in Los Angeles. Felice wrote the Forward to my book of essays, “Out in History.”

“Sure, I’d love to write it,” he told me, “but I would need some sort of honorarium.” My publisher instantly agreed. I met Felice through my literary connections in the city, namely the Philadelphia poet Jim Cory (now deceased) and some other friends. I was often invited to go out to dinner with Felice whenever he was in town. Felice’s commentary made these dinners sparkling and memorable. When the Behind Our Masks Literary Festival was held in Philadelphia in November 2000, my partner at the time threw a catered party in my apartment on Pine Street for a number of writers at the event. Present were Felice and novelist Andrew Holleran, two main draws at the Festival.   

There was a time when writing a serious gay story was considered a useless endeavor because there was nobody around to publish them.  In the 1970s, even avant garde trade paperback publishers rejected manuscripts with (non-pornographic) homosexual themes. The situation was so dire writers of gay fiction formed writing collectives to lend one another support.   

Picano was also a founding member of the Violet Quill Club whose members went on to become famous after helping to give birth to modern gay literature.  

Aware of the lack of opportunities for gay writers, Picano also founded Sea Horse Press in 1977, and in 1981 co-founded the Gay Presses of New York

The naturalness and easy universality of Picano’s writing challenges the art of pretense. Examples abound, but in True Stories: Portraits from My Past, he shares references that other writers might choose to suppress. While intellectualizing about the merits of surrealist Charles Henri Ford, for instance, he can then candidly admit, in another essay, that he’s studied astrology, imply that he’s open to the possibility of past lives, or to a belief in ghosts. This is a radical U-turn from the atheism of Edmund White.  If some considered it an intellectual sin for mentioning such things, Picano did not care.

A New Yorker before later moving to Los Angeles, Picano seems to have befriended or at least met everybody. The New York Times called his True Stories “a tremendously entertaining collection of anecdotes and portraits.”

Picano writes about his meeting Bette Midler at New York’s Continental Baths while friends with Midler’s producer, Jerry Blatt. “Jerry must have pointed me out to Bette because in the middle of one number, she came over to me, pulled me to my feet, leaned me against the piano and used me as a prop for a love-song.”  (I saw the still-unknown Midler perform at the Continental — accompanied by Barry Manilow — when I visited in 1970.)

The author’s first encounter with the legendary poet W.H. Auden happened when the old bard knocked over a flower pot on his New York window sill, almost killing Picano and a friend on the street below. The boys, unaware that the “Auntie” who knocked over the pot was the great international poet, agreed to have tea with him as a form of apology, and then they found that they were on the receiving end of a lot of questions.

Much later, of course, it came to Picano’s attention that the funny but endearing old queen who almost killed him and his friend was none other than the famous bard. Later, after meeting Auden as Auden at a New York party, a friendship developed between the poet and Picano that concentrated mostly on “silly, superficial matters.

In 2018, Felice was interviewed by Fugues magazine where he was asked what he thought of the Trump presidency. No surprises here.

“This presidency is off the charts! I think people who voted for him really thought some kind of change was necessary. Besides the fact that I think the election was essentially fixed at some point and that Trump is not a legal president — and I think this Mueller investigation will show that — I think Trump is moving quickly because he knows he has limited time. There is no question the Republican Party is betraying everyday Americans.”

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.