George Stambolian (April 10, 1938 – December 22, 1991)

I'd become acquainted with that consummately sophisticated critic of French literature, George Stambolian. I knew that he was a professor of French and interdisciplinary studies at Wellesley College. I would learn that he'd attended Dartmouth College and received his PhD from the Univeristy of Wisconsin. I'd perused his study, Marcel Proust and the Creative Encounter (1972), and the volume he coedited with Elaine Marks, Homosexualities and French literature (1979).
But rather than the unquestionable intellectual those text represented, it was the sensual side of Stambolian that I ended up connecting with. He had noticed me, he told me sometime later on in our friendship, in the spring of 1978, while he'd been out walking his dog, Bodo, quite early one Sunday morning: I'd been coming home from a night out dancing and drugging. As I unknowingly passed him, I had my arms aroung two other men, dressed like me, out all night like me, George said. Clearly, we'd looked to George like we were on our way to one of our homes for a menage a trois to screw away the rest of the weekend. This moment had intrigued George and he would refer to it - and to glimpses of me together with the young artist Scott Facon he had at the Pines - as being critical to our connection and to our friendship, even though we never had sex, seldom spoke of it, and never did more than exchange friendly kisses when greeting.
[...]
George had been doing in-depth anonymous interviews with gay men for Christopher Street magazine, one of which had even found its way into that bastion of Nouvelle Vague, the seminal quarterly Semiotext(e). He wanted to interview me, not as Felice Picano, but as a specific Stambolian type, in my case, "a self-made man". I never actually understood what this term signified, even when the interview came out and I read it. But it somehow fit with Stambolian's other in-depth interviews: "With a Handsome Man", "With a Deformed Man", "With an Intellectual", "With an Artist", "With a Dying Man". For George, the very anonymity he provided would offer not so much cover for further excavation and discovery as a screen behind which various kinds of personae and scenarios might more easily develop and flourish. --Art and Sex in Greenwich Village: A Memoir of Gay Literary Life After Stonewall by Felice Picano

American photographer Robert Giard is renowned for his portraits of American poets and writers; his particular focus was on gay and lesbian writers. Some of his photographs of the American gay and lesbian literary community appear in his groundbreaking book Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers, published by MIT Press in 1997. Giard’s stated mission was to define the literary history and cultural identity of gays and lesbians for the mainstream of American society, which perceived them as disparate, marginal individuals possessing neither. In all, he photographed more than 600 writers. (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/giard.html)