Jesse Monteagudo: Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance writer who has been writing book reviews since 1977. He receives e-mail messages at jessemonteagudo@aol.com online. This article was originally published in Gay Today (Vol. VII, Issue 78). It is reprinted with permission from www.gaytoday.badpuppy.com online.
“Don't even think of writing autobiographically until you are forty years old!,” Picano admonished his students at the Writer's Voice Workshop. By that time (1984), Picano (age 39) was already working on Ambidextrous. Picano could be forgiven for doing so, for by then he had already “put out six novels, a book of short stories, a book of poetry, a novella, and … edited an anthology.” Ambidextrous, appropriately subtitled The Secret Lives of Children, was so scandalous that it was banned in Britain; and Picano had to publish it himself as part of the Gay Presses of New York. Reviewing the book at the time, I compared Picano's childhood memoirs to similar efforts by Edmund White, Rita Mae Brown and Robert Ferro. I was wrong, of course: Ambidextrous is one of a kind.
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