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Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children
The Secret Lives of Children, Picano's memoir of suburban 1950s childhood, forever altered how we remember childhood and how we think of it today. So scandalous at the time that the book's first shipment to Great Britain was seized and burned on the London docks, Ambidextrous has become a much-prized classic.
233 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
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158 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 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 5, 2024
Growing up on Long Island in the 50s, Felice Picano delivers a very hardcore, funny, sometimes bleak memoir. Broken up into three chapters, he goes on to detail not only his various friendships, his family dynamics and his conflicts with teachers but also his first brushes with intimacy and sex. First chapter goes into details of his friendship and ultimate sexual adventures with three sisters next door. The second chapter moves to describe Felice's sexual adventures with Ricky, a new friend he meets during a bike race. Not only do the two become intimate, Ricky introduces Felice to drugs and a bleak world that he had little concept of. Final chapter introduces us to Franny, who becomes Felice's girlfriend. During one of his visits to her house, he discovers a series of hidden mirrors. It's this surprising discovery that upsets him deeply and leaves a long-lasting scar that remains with him into adulthood. Written with wonderful flair and a sense of wisdom beyond his youth, Ambidextrous is a wild ride without a seat belt.
November 12, 2025
First of all the GR synopsis containing the story of the book being burnt on the London docks is very unlikely, by 1985 when this book was published originally the London docks were long closed and business shifted to Tilbury. I have also seen the book burning described as happening in Liverpool but they too were long closed in 1985. Also cargo went by containers so it was impossible for anyone to get hold of the books at 'dockside' and burn them. There are also no newspaper reports from the time. This story is a typical urban legend.
If you want a reasonable synopsis try this from Publishers Weekly:
"This fictionalized memoir recounts the adventures of an Italian-American schoolboy as he undergoes the trial of maturity in an upper-middle-class New York City suburb. One teacher hates him because he is left-handed, while another admires his ambition to become a writer and a truthful adult. In a first-person narrative, the hero describes his initiation into the rites of never-quite-innocent and sometimes harmful sex with the precocious Flaherty sisters and his school pal Ricky Hersch; later, there is his love affair with beautiful Franny Solomon whose crippled father is a voyeur. Bearing many resemblances to Doctorow's World's Fair, this novel re-creates the post-war years by limning the attitudes and desires of a young boy growing up and by an itemization of the toys he played with, the books he read, the friends he made and the games he played."
I remember enjoying this book when I read it twenty or more years ago, long after publication, and I have always felt it was, along with his 'Men Who Loved', one of Picano's few really good books. If you look through his back catalogue you will find many disparaging reviews by me attached to quite a few of his books. It is interesting that throughout his long life (1944-2025) his association with the Violet Quill group was always placed centre forward - I always felt that, as a writer, he always felt, rightly, he wasn't as good as George Whitmore, Robert Ferro or Michael Grumley never mind Edmund White or Andrew Holleran - as if he was claiming a vicarious literary fame. Interestingly when he died in March this year (2025) most of his obituaries, and his current Wikipedia entry, concentrate on his work in promoting other gay writers through his publishing efforts and also a cultural commentator (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felice_...). The contrast with the obituaries for Edmund White (who died six months later) is striking.
Yet Ambidextrous is an enjoyable read - it was written before Auto-fiction was invented so is an unapologetic fictional memoir - but there is always a difficulty of being sure what is real and what is fiction. Also there was an annoying tendency to place his early sexual experiences with girls in a somewhat boasting vein - almost as if he was trying to show that though he may have chosen boys in the end he was and could have been a successful heterosexual stud.
If you want a reasonable synopsis try this from Publishers Weekly:
"This fictionalized memoir recounts the adventures of an Italian-American schoolboy as he undergoes the trial of maturity in an upper-middle-class New York City suburb. One teacher hates him because he is left-handed, while another admires his ambition to become a writer and a truthful adult. In a first-person narrative, the hero describes his initiation into the rites of never-quite-innocent and sometimes harmful sex with the precocious Flaherty sisters and his school pal Ricky Hersch; later, there is his love affair with beautiful Franny Solomon whose crippled father is a voyeur. Bearing many resemblances to Doctorow's World's Fair, this novel re-creates the post-war years by limning the attitudes and desires of a young boy growing up and by an itemization of the toys he played with, the books he read, the friends he made and the games he played."
I remember enjoying this book when I read it twenty or more years ago, long after publication, and I have always felt it was, along with his 'Men Who Loved', one of Picano's few really good books. If you look through his back catalogue you will find many disparaging reviews by me attached to quite a few of his books. It is interesting that throughout his long life (1944-2025) his association with the Violet Quill group was always placed centre forward - I always felt that, as a writer, he always felt, rightly, he wasn't as good as George Whitmore, Robert Ferro or Michael Grumley never mind Edmund White or Andrew Holleran - as if he was claiming a vicarious literary fame. Interestingly when he died in March this year (2025) most of his obituaries, and his current Wikipedia entry, concentrate on his work in promoting other gay writers through his publishing efforts and also a cultural commentator (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felice_...). The contrast with the obituaries for Edmund White (who died six months later) is striking.
Yet Ambidextrous is an enjoyable read - it was written before Auto-fiction was invented so is an unapologetic fictional memoir - but there is always a difficulty of being sure what is real and what is fiction. Also there was an annoying tendency to place his early sexual experiences with girls in a somewhat boasting vein - almost as if he was trying to show that though he may have chosen boys in the end he was and could have been a successful heterosexual stud.
June 14, 2012
This is an honest and truthful memoir of three childhood years in the 1950s. His courageous stance against intellectual bullying from his teachers and his willingness to accept his natural sexuality, whatever it is, remain inspirations inspirations to all. It deserves to be more widely read.
September 14, 2022
Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children, by Felice Picano is a stunning review of his young life as a Italian-American boy growing up in Long Island in the 1950s. Published in 1985, he is able to give us a summary of what happened to some of the people. This memoir is laid out in three chapters: Basement Games, A Valentine, and The Effect of Mirrors.
He writes about his first encounters with sex with his neighbors, three sisters who invite him and his friends over to play games, including spin the bottle. He figures out how to bring the oldest sister Kathy, the most beautiful sister, to a climax one day, then loses his virginity without realizing till later that he had his first orgasm inside her.
Also in this chapter, we develop strong empathy for the boy who experiences extreme abuse from his teacher, Mr. Hargrave. Ambidextrous, Felice liked used both hands, but this teacher insisted he use his right hand. With two older brothers and a sister, and his mother expecting another baby, his parents were distracted. They didn't understand the amount of bullying he was experiencing and asked him to be good. But the bullying was too much, and he was harassed to the point of a blow up in class. He walked out slamming the door, the glass shattered into the teacher's face. Finally, after being called in to the principal’s office with his mother, she agreed to speak up on his behalf, and he was transferred to a different class with a new teacher where his grades begin to improve.
In the second chapter, A Valentine, he writes, “Children are the best anticipators because of their impatience, their unsteady grasp of time—it’s entirely psychological, subjective; and clocks are the biggest liars.” His rival Ricky, challenges him to a bicycle race through the underground tunnel of a mall being built, no trespassing allowed, but they do the race. The guard is waiting at the end and tried to stop Felice as he nears the finish line, but still in the tunnel. He crashes into the wall and it is his rival who sends the guard to call an ambulance, screaming at him he'll be prosecuted and lose his job. He then helps him get out, stopping when he starts shaking, cold from the shock. Under bushes, hidden from the world, Ricky puts his leather jacket over him and then spoons him with his warmth. Soon after this, they become lovers in Ricky's attic bedroom where he introduces him to sniffing glue blow jobs, and every other kind of sex.
A Valentine’s day incident in the classroom makes Felice identify with the ugly male student who is rebuffed of his gift to the prettiest girl in the class. He threatens suicide and tries to jump out of the window. Watching this, Felice knows that Ricky would respond against him should he get too close, so he ends the relationship using the lie his father found him glue huffing and he was forbidden to hang out with him. Later we learn Ricky, who went to military school after grade school, was killed in the war.
Chapter three, The Effect of Mirrors, enters another girl, Franny, one of the most pure and beautiful girls in their class. "Franny was one of a kind and she was to become the third lover of my life, how or why I never really found out." Her mother worked, and her father was disabled in a wheelchair. There are secrets in her house, mirrors placed on the ceiling, "An evanescent tiny flash of yellow light, only a pinpoint in size. After a minute or so I was able to correlate its flashing to the movement of the small gold ring I'd received from my parents as a birthday gift only a few days before." This while she was giving him a blow job. The next time, he did investigate and found the three mirrors so that he could see where the father sat looking into a fifth mirror and he was jerking himself off. Did Franny know? She is upset and crying and he believed she knew. He is righteously incensed. But soon after he stopped going to her house the father called him to ask why he wasn’t coming back or to find a new friend for his daughter.
He writes, "It would take me almost twenty-five years for me to finally understand that intelligence and perceptiveness and alertness are not always a gift, too often a curse." And jumps ahead to a sexual relationship with a man who becomes the teacher that makes him understand this lesson. He reverts back to the scene with Franny and how he had to know, once the seed was planted he could not let it go.
These are but a few of the main plot lines in this memoir. Near the end of the book Felice writes, “…I’d already been a fornicator and petty criminal at eleven, a drug addict homosexual at twelve, a seducer and a sexual exhibitionist as well as a successful purveyor of pornography by thirteen.” All true. A very fulfilling book to see the secret lives of children and why today's parents have become helicopter parents.
He writes about his first encounters with sex with his neighbors, three sisters who invite him and his friends over to play games, including spin the bottle. He figures out how to bring the oldest sister Kathy, the most beautiful sister, to a climax one day, then loses his virginity without realizing till later that he had his first orgasm inside her.
Also in this chapter, we develop strong empathy for the boy who experiences extreme abuse from his teacher, Mr. Hargrave. Ambidextrous, Felice liked used both hands, but this teacher insisted he use his right hand. With two older brothers and a sister, and his mother expecting another baby, his parents were distracted. They didn't understand the amount of bullying he was experiencing and asked him to be good. But the bullying was too much, and he was harassed to the point of a blow up in class. He walked out slamming the door, the glass shattered into the teacher's face. Finally, after being called in to the principal’s office with his mother, she agreed to speak up on his behalf, and he was transferred to a different class with a new teacher where his grades begin to improve.
In the second chapter, A Valentine, he writes, “Children are the best anticipators because of their impatience, their unsteady grasp of time—it’s entirely psychological, subjective; and clocks are the biggest liars.” His rival Ricky, challenges him to a bicycle race through the underground tunnel of a mall being built, no trespassing allowed, but they do the race. The guard is waiting at the end and tried to stop Felice as he nears the finish line, but still in the tunnel. He crashes into the wall and it is his rival who sends the guard to call an ambulance, screaming at him he'll be prosecuted and lose his job. He then helps him get out, stopping when he starts shaking, cold from the shock. Under bushes, hidden from the world, Ricky puts his leather jacket over him and then spoons him with his warmth. Soon after this, they become lovers in Ricky's attic bedroom where he introduces him to sniffing glue blow jobs, and every other kind of sex.
A Valentine’s day incident in the classroom makes Felice identify with the ugly male student who is rebuffed of his gift to the prettiest girl in the class. He threatens suicide and tries to jump out of the window. Watching this, Felice knows that Ricky would respond against him should he get too close, so he ends the relationship using the lie his father found him glue huffing and he was forbidden to hang out with him. Later we learn Ricky, who went to military school after grade school, was killed in the war.
Chapter three, The Effect of Mirrors, enters another girl, Franny, one of the most pure and beautiful girls in their class. "Franny was one of a kind and she was to become the third lover of my life, how or why I never really found out." Her mother worked, and her father was disabled in a wheelchair. There are secrets in her house, mirrors placed on the ceiling, "An evanescent tiny flash of yellow light, only a pinpoint in size. After a minute or so I was able to correlate its flashing to the movement of the small gold ring I'd received from my parents as a birthday gift only a few days before." This while she was giving him a blow job. The next time, he did investigate and found the three mirrors so that he could see where the father sat looking into a fifth mirror and he was jerking himself off. Did Franny know? She is upset and crying and he believed she knew. He is righteously incensed. But soon after he stopped going to her house the father called him to ask why he wasn’t coming back or to find a new friend for his daughter.
He writes, "It would take me almost twenty-five years for me to finally understand that intelligence and perceptiveness and alertness are not always a gift, too often a curse." And jumps ahead to a sexual relationship with a man who becomes the teacher that makes him understand this lesson. He reverts back to the scene with Franny and how he had to know, once the seed was planted he could not let it go.
These are but a few of the main plot lines in this memoir. Near the end of the book Felice writes, “…I’d already been a fornicator and petty criminal at eleven, a drug addict homosexual at twelve, a seducer and a sexual exhibitionist as well as a successful purveyor of pornography by thirteen.” All true. A very fulfilling book to see the secret lives of children and why today's parents have become helicopter parents.
December 4, 2007
Freakishly tearjerking
August 21, 2020
Mildly engaging story of a boy growing up in the 50s and 60s. The book is basically his somewhat precocious sexual experiences interspersed with life at school and home.
Don't go out of your way to read this one.
Don't go out of your way to read this one.
March 24, 2016
Ambidextrous by Felice Picano
This is a tale told in the first person of Mr. Picano's youth, from ages 10 to 13 and his many sexual encounters with both boys and girls. It is a time capsule of life of young teenagers in the fifties.
Unfortunately, the book is a slow tedious read and not Mr. Picano's best effort. His homosexual relationship with Richard Victor (Rickie) Hersch is genuine, and a marvel to read, but his heterosexual relationships with Susan Flaherty and Franny Solomon are tedious and not "real." One feels like the writer is working too hard to tell his story.
His prose is unorganized and jumps from the future to the past in an annoying way. His sense of self aggrandizement is at most boring and unbelievable.
To quote Mr. Picano: "...your first successful piece of writing is your best piece of writing--until you finally out achieve it with another piece of writing, terrifically new and phenomenally well done." Ambidextrous IS NOT that piece....
This is a tale told in the first person of Mr. Picano's youth, from ages 10 to 13 and his many sexual encounters with both boys and girls. It is a time capsule of life of young teenagers in the fifties.
Unfortunately, the book is a slow tedious read and not Mr. Picano's best effort. His homosexual relationship with Richard Victor (Rickie) Hersch is genuine, and a marvel to read, but his heterosexual relationships with Susan Flaherty and Franny Solomon are tedious and not "real." One feels like the writer is working too hard to tell his story.
His prose is unorganized and jumps from the future to the past in an annoying way. His sense of self aggrandizement is at most boring and unbelievable.
To quote Mr. Picano: "...your first successful piece of writing is your best piece of writing--until you finally out achieve it with another piece of writing, terrifically new and phenomenally well done." Ambidextrous IS NOT that piece....
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews