Released in 2025, Frank Pizzoli collects 20 interviews and reviews of queer writers, activisist and advocates for his latest book Passionate Outlier: Gay Writers and Allies on Their Work. The book includes Edmund White, Felice Picano, Andrew Holleran (separately and together as the then three surviving members of The Violet Quill), Christopher Bram, Salman Rushdie, Martin Duberman, Sean Strub, John Rechy, Gore Vidal’s official biographer Jay Parini, Lesbian Avengers co-founder Anne Christine d’Adesky, Susan Quinn on First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s love affair with reporter Lorena Hickok and more.
“If, as writers, activists, and advocates, we stand on the shoulders of all those who came before us, it is our first responsibility to know who they were in their own words,” Pizzoli wrote in the book’s introduction.
The intro reveals that the book goes back to pre-Stonewall times and also the height of the AIDS crisis. In these chapters, writers share their views of these events. Pizzoli’s pieces are presented chronologically.
The book also features an afterword from Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters and Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America.
Pizzoli was named a Living Legend as part of Pennsylvania’s capital city Harrisburg’s sesquicentennial celebrations. His essays, book reviews, profiles, reviews and interviews with prominent LGBTQ and other authors and celebrities have been published in LA Weekly, Raw Story, Lambda Literary Review, Windy City Times (Chicago), Brooklyn Rail, abc.com, Huffington Post, White Crane Review, Instinct, POZ, HIV Plus, AlterNet.com, Body Positive, New York Blade News, and Washington Blade. His works has been included in the anthologies Conversations with Edmund White (University of Kentucky Press), and Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book (ITNA Press).
He is the founding publisher and editor of central Pennsylvania’s LGBTQ newspaper The Central Voice. He is founder of the Pennsylvania-based nonprofit agency Positive Opportunities, Inc., a Points of Light Foundation award winner, that provided employment counseling and training for HIV-positive individuals from 1997 to 2017. His HIV work is cited in Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies (NYU Press) and chronicled in Out in Central Pennsylvania: The History of an LGBTQ Community (Penn State University Press, May 2020).
Pizzoli currently writes for The Village Voice and Pennsylvania Capital-Star.
–From staff reports