The Violet Quill Club brought together the finest and most important gay writers to emerge in the first generation after Stonewall, writers who consciously set out to create gay literature. Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Robert Ferro, Felice Picano, George Whitmore, Michael Grumley, and Christopher Cox - these are the writers whose novels, plays, short stories, and journalism defined what it was to be gay in that golden decade or so between the Stonewall Riots and the first announcements of AIDS.

The Violet Quill Reader includes work never before published: stories, essays, and letters available nowhere else, as well as selections from Michael Grumley's and Felice Picano's journals and the correspondence of Robert Ferro and Andrew Holleran. There are also excerpts from their most important novels: A Boy's Own Story, Dancer from the Dance, Family of Max Desir, and Nebraska, among others.

But The Violet Quill Reader is much more than a compendium of the first generation of post-Stonewall gay fiction. It is a portrait of the most exciting and tragic years of gay history, beginning in the heady possibilities of gay liberation, chronicling the roaring age of discos and Fire Island, and ending in the sober realities of AIDS.

Award-winning author and scholar David Bergman helps readers survey this rich and exciting treasury of gay literature with his illuminating introduction and incisive notes.