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Men Who Loved Me
Men Who Loved Me, the second installment of Felice Picano's memoirs, picks up the thread of his life in the mid-1960s. Sexually unresolved and unsuccessful in his relationships with women, unhappy in work and unfulfilled in life, Picano flees to Europe and settles in Italy in the golden era of Cinecitta, Rome's version of Hollywood. Even after he falls in with the questionable glamour of the time, his adventure is not over. He returns to Manhattan and a suddenly very gay world. This funny and sad remembrance of a Europe and New York that has entirely changed in today's world confirmed Picano's place among the most talked-about writers of his time.
- GenresLGBTGay FictionGayQueer
295 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
3 people are currently reading
136 people want to read
About the author
Felice Picano
99 books211 followersFelice Anthony Picano was an American writer, publisher and critic who encouraged the development of gay literature in the United States. His work is documented in many sources.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 27, 2016
gross. how this self-indulgent non-writer ever published so many novels is beyond me. once upon a time the queer writing industry must have been very desperate. boring, boring prose and a meaningless narrative. in this "memoir", Pelicano basically jerks off at the thought of himself and the men who apparently loved him. well I guess anything is possible.
January 10, 2011
One of my all time favorite books. The descriptions of life in Cinecitta in Italy are so gorgeous I've probably read it ten times. There's a short story called The Last Golden Bulgari based on the same section. Fascinating.
July 10, 2020
What a thing it would have been to live through Felice Picano’s years in Europe and then the West Village NYC, from the mid 60’s, through Stonewall, and into the plague years. I’m both jealous and chastened, jealous of this remarkable life where Felice fall into the very heart of changing culture, making all the fearless decisions I doubt I would have the courage to make. Chastened because, like so many men, I doubt I would have survived it as he did.
Felice is a force of nature, his charisma oozing from the page, his memory of detail daunting. His encounters with amazing characters both known and unknown is fascinating, and the obvious, if humbly reported impact he held on their lives.
He has some things to say about the drive to conformity he sees in my later generation of gay men, seeking to marry and build families. His gentle chiding is not altogether unearned, as he highlights a freer, more subversive gay life from his generation. Little wonder that there are some uncharitable reviews on this page, which I implore you to ignore.
If you haven’t yet read Ambidextrous, his earlier memoir, I suggest you start there before proceeding to this, to my reading, more remarkable telling, but both complement each other well.
Felice styles himself a bit of a historian of an earlier age of gay life, as many who lived it didn’t survive past the early 90s. I found myself looking for pictures on the Internet of faces, or locations that he details, and was often dismayed to find little. Felice, then, is performing an important role, as LGBT+ people must know their history.
The pain of the AIDS years was only beginning when he wrote this book, and it’s obviously too raw for him to delve into much. Check out “Art and Sex in Greenwich Village,” and “True Storie” for a more poignant telling.
I find myself wanting to know more about the people he encountered during his year in Rome, particularly his lover, the workman Cinecittà director of some obvious fame. And the young man who played Hercules in the Italian film I can now find no record of. In this book, Felice uses pseudonyms for many of the people and works he writes about. Although future memoirs un mask some of these names, he has written little more on this Roman year, at least from what I’ve encountered.
I’d love to hear if anyone has unravelled more from this time. Felice is an author I now think I would read anything from, and nurse a desire to meet I know will never be fulfilled. Such is our desire for all the best authors.
Check out my twitter thread on Felice’s earliest memoirs:
https://twitter.com/matthewwolfff/sta...
Felice is a force of nature, his charisma oozing from the page, his memory of detail daunting. His encounters with amazing characters both known and unknown is fascinating, and the obvious, if humbly reported impact he held on their lives.
He has some things to say about the drive to conformity he sees in my later generation of gay men, seeking to marry and build families. His gentle chiding is not altogether unearned, as he highlights a freer, more subversive gay life from his generation. Little wonder that there are some uncharitable reviews on this page, which I implore you to ignore.
If you haven’t yet read Ambidextrous, his earlier memoir, I suggest you start there before proceeding to this, to my reading, more remarkable telling, but both complement each other well.
Felice styles himself a bit of a historian of an earlier age of gay life, as many who lived it didn’t survive past the early 90s. I found myself looking for pictures on the Internet of faces, or locations that he details, and was often dismayed to find little. Felice, then, is performing an important role, as LGBT+ people must know their history.
The pain of the AIDS years was only beginning when he wrote this book, and it’s obviously too raw for him to delve into much. Check out “Art and Sex in Greenwich Village,” and “True Storie” for a more poignant telling.
I find myself wanting to know more about the people he encountered during his year in Rome, particularly his lover, the workman Cinecittà director of some obvious fame. And the young man who played Hercules in the Italian film I can now find no record of. In this book, Felice uses pseudonyms for many of the people and works he writes about. Although future memoirs un mask some of these names, he has written little more on this Roman year, at least from what I’ve encountered.
I’d love to hear if anyone has unravelled more from this time. Felice is an author I now think I would read anything from, and nurse a desire to meet I know will never be fulfilled. Such is our desire for all the best authors.
Check out my twitter thread on Felice’s earliest memoirs:
https://twitter.com/matthewwolfff/sta...
September 16, 2022
Men Who Loved Me: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel, by Felice Picano picks up after he has left home at sixteen. I read his childhood stories in his memoir Ambidextrous just prior to this book. His sexual & relationship experiencing continues, first with women which is not successful, so when a male friend suggests he might try men, he remembers his early male sexual affair and decides to move to Europe to become a homosexual.
The book starts in NYC, in an apartment on Jane Street, in the middle of a robbery. He is working as a social worker and has been offered the opportunity to go back to school for a degree, they would pay, but ask for a commitment of five years employment after completion. Coinciding with his impulse for change he says no to that future. We follow him to Italy where he finds a group of actors and starts a relationship with Djanko, a wealthy film director. A random quote from this section, "“Certo means “for sure,” and it is seldom meant to be utterly misleading. However, in Rome—a city with three thousand years of the most variegated history—nothing at all is certain; what counts is the intention, not the fulfillment of the promise.”
The writing is engrossing with high culture and literary references He's working alongside Djanko writing films and translating. Which helps him when he departs that relationship. He heads back to NYC and the apartment on Jane Street in the West Village where this book started.
Next he is swept into his next partner's aura, Bob, a play director who is of an older generation. And he immediately gets a job at an upcoming magazine, Graphique where he doesn't feel he belongs but winds up becoming the head of the department; setting the content and running the magazine. When they win the Art Director Award for Overall Editorial and Graphic Excellence due to his innovation to use a new material for the cover, he is worried. The cost to run the magazine with the special cover cost way more than a typical issue to produce. He raised the price at the newsstands to make the money back. He writes, "I'd discovered two things that evening. First, that a catastrophe needn't be sudden and total, it could take weeks to achieve its fullest effect, and it could slowly drain one's energy and spirit with worry and anxiety, alternating hope of adults and work, that those sudden inspirations and flashy effects that I'd depended upon for years in lieu of sustained thought and persevering labor, meant nothing unless they were backed up by something tangible and lasting." Mind you he's still in his twenties. The issue became a best seller, and doubled their circulation, but he felt it as a "failure narrowly averted."
The other fact, if indeed a fact, is his meeting with "Mother" an elderly English gentleman in the Village who drops a ceramic flower pot out of a window, just missing him and a friend. Invited up for tea they go. Later at an event to meet with W.H. Auden, a house party, where Auden is the guess of honor, it is a surprise that Auden is "Mother." This story makes the book, but there are many stories throughout. There are drugs: LSD, and pot, which his new partner does not like him using. There is sex and the free spirit of the early 1960s. He lived in an apartment with friends throughout the building. The book is very peopled and there are lively campy conversations and arguments. It is a Peyton Place situation where everyone talks. He ends the relationship with Bob who is living a closeted life, while he is not.
He writes well about the layers of difference and sameness in the gay community at a particular time in history. Near the end of the book there are hints of the AIDS epidemic to come. I'm looking forward to reading more of his many books.
The book starts in NYC, in an apartment on Jane Street, in the middle of a robbery. He is working as a social worker and has been offered the opportunity to go back to school for a degree, they would pay, but ask for a commitment of five years employment after completion. Coinciding with his impulse for change he says no to that future. We follow him to Italy where he finds a group of actors and starts a relationship with Djanko, a wealthy film director. A random quote from this section, "“Certo means “for sure,” and it is seldom meant to be utterly misleading. However, in Rome—a city with three thousand years of the most variegated history—nothing at all is certain; what counts is the intention, not the fulfillment of the promise.”
The writing is engrossing with high culture and literary references He's working alongside Djanko writing films and translating. Which helps him when he departs that relationship. He heads back to NYC and the apartment on Jane Street in the West Village where this book started.
Next he is swept into his next partner's aura, Bob, a play director who is of an older generation. And he immediately gets a job at an upcoming magazine, Graphique where he doesn't feel he belongs but winds up becoming the head of the department; setting the content and running the magazine. When they win the Art Director Award for Overall Editorial and Graphic Excellence due to his innovation to use a new material for the cover, he is worried. The cost to run the magazine with the special cover cost way more than a typical issue to produce. He raised the price at the newsstands to make the money back. He writes, "I'd discovered two things that evening. First, that a catastrophe needn't be sudden and total, it could take weeks to achieve its fullest effect, and it could slowly drain one's energy and spirit with worry and anxiety, alternating hope of adults and work, that those sudden inspirations and flashy effects that I'd depended upon for years in lieu of sustained thought and persevering labor, meant nothing unless they were backed up by something tangible and lasting." Mind you he's still in his twenties. The issue became a best seller, and doubled their circulation, but he felt it as a "failure narrowly averted."
The other fact, if indeed a fact, is his meeting with "Mother" an elderly English gentleman in the Village who drops a ceramic flower pot out of a window, just missing him and a friend. Invited up for tea they go. Later at an event to meet with W.H. Auden, a house party, where Auden is the guess of honor, it is a surprise that Auden is "Mother." This story makes the book, but there are many stories throughout. There are drugs: LSD, and pot, which his new partner does not like him using. There is sex and the free spirit of the early 1960s. He lived in an apartment with friends throughout the building. The book is very peopled and there are lively campy conversations and arguments. It is a Peyton Place situation where everyone talks. He ends the relationship with Bob who is living a closeted life, while he is not.
He writes well about the layers of difference and sameness in the gay community at a particular time in history. Near the end of the book there are hints of the AIDS epidemic to come. I'm looking forward to reading more of his many books.
November 27, 2025
I am going to write a 'kind' review because when I read this many years ago after reading the authors first volume of autobiography as a novel 'Ambidextrous' (which I enjoyed a great deal) I enjoyed it immensely. That Picano died this year (2025) and shortly before responded with great kindness to a request for information on an author featured in anthology Picano edited in the 1980s means that I can't be harsh - though I have been very harsh on much of Picano's oeuvre. I will review it as would have reviewed it many years ago on first reading it.
One thing that bothered back then was that Ambidextrous ended when Picano was 16 and this volume takes up the story from there and I couldn't help thinking that Picano was 16 for an awful long time - or he managed to do an awful lot of things while 16 - including, if I remember rightly graduating from High School and getting a job and saving up enough money to go to Europe - and lots more. There was, again if I remember rightly, there was the suggestion that while he was gay he was also was attractive to women and could have been a great heterosexual stud if he chose.
As this was originally published in the late 1980s the fictionalisation of or at least avoidance of real names or details of so many of the men he had affairs with and writes about is understandable. Reading it in the early 21st century I couldn't help wondering where the line between fact and fiction was. Lets be clear this book is long before 'metafiction' and Picano was never a 'literary' writer. Maybe when a biography of Picano some of that will be clarified.
His accounts of his time in Rome and as the boy friend of a famous director is fascinating as is many of his other stories but thinking back I can't help wondering how much of spin or reconstruction Picano has placed on his past.
One thing that bothered back then was that Ambidextrous ended when Picano was 16 and this volume takes up the story from there and I couldn't help thinking that Picano was 16 for an awful long time - or he managed to do an awful lot of things while 16 - including, if I remember rightly graduating from High School and getting a job and saving up enough money to go to Europe - and lots more. There was, again if I remember rightly, there was the suggestion that while he was gay he was also was attractive to women and could have been a great heterosexual stud if he chose.
As this was originally published in the late 1980s the fictionalisation of or at least avoidance of real names or details of so many of the men he had affairs with and writes about is understandable. Reading it in the early 21st century I couldn't help wondering where the line between fact and fiction was. Lets be clear this book is long before 'metafiction' and Picano was never a 'literary' writer. Maybe when a biography of Picano some of that will be clarified.
His accounts of his time in Rome and as the boy friend of a famous director is fascinating as is many of his other stories but thinking back I can't help wondering how much of spin or reconstruction Picano has placed on his past.
June 8, 2013
Beautiful love story! Read please!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews