Gay journalist and writer Frank Pizzoli’s debut book, Passionate Outlier: Gay Writers and Allies on Their Work, was released this past February and features 20 interviews and reviews from his extensive body of work.
Pizzoli grew up in Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Coal Region which is home to many ethnicities, cultures and languages. His path towards a journalism career began when he was 10 years old and started a publication called The Daily Blab with his friend David and David’s sister, Joan.
“I come from a face-to-face storytelling culture,” said Pizzoli. “Anyone who could spin a good tale, season it with imitative or familiar voices and work in a punchline was valued.”
Pizzoli went to college at Bloomsburg University where he got his BA degree in Sociology and a Journalism certificate in 1973. Prior to Pizzoli’s freelance journalism journey, he worked at a healthcare trade association in the communications department. In his free time, he wrote a business trends column, was an editor at a business journal and wrote for the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania PBS affiliate. Pizzoli also received a 1976 National Institute of Health Scholarship to study “combined treatment approaches to address mental health and addiction issues.”
“My freelance journey kicked in big time in 1996, when I began writing for POZ magazine,” said Pizzoli. “From there it flourished and now it’s been almost 30 years.”
Pizzoli’s essays, book reviews, profiles and interviews can be found at ABC.com, AlterNet.com, AlterNet Syndication, Body Positive, Brooklyn Rail, HIV Plus, HuffPost, Instinct, LA Weekly, Lambda Book Report, Lambda Literary Review, New York Blade News, Pennsylvania Capital-Star, Positively Aware, POZ, Raw Story, Rivendell’s Q Syndicate and Press Pass Q, The Village Voice, Washington Blade, White Crane Review and Windy City Times, where he wrote 16 articles from 2013-2020.
Additionally, Pizzoli’s work was included in the anthologies Conversations with Edmund White and Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book. His HIV work is cited in Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies and chronicled in Out in Central Pennsylvania: The History of an LGBTQ Community.
To create Passionate Outlier, Pizzoli compiled a selection of interviews and reviews from his collection. The result is 20 pieces published from 2007 to 2019 in four different publications, including four from Windy City Times. They appear in the book in the same order they were published.
Pizzoli said that as he re-read the interviews he realized each one successively builds on one another. He added that throughout his journalism career he adapted what people say about writing books—write the book you want to read—to the way he conducted his interviews.
“I asked the questions I wanted answers to and that is when the momentum began,” said Pizzoli.
Pizzoli decided to publish this specific book because of his strong sense of history and the fact that Americans in general and the LGBTQ community specifically doesn’t really know their own history.
“As I was drafting my Introduction, I noticed in the July 2023 print edition of Harper’s Magazine that the Readings section started off with an excerpt from Alva Noe’s The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are,” said Pizzoli. “His book is about a young girl’s 12 dancing days and the magazine’s excerpt was titled ‘Dancer from the Dance,’ the same title of Andrew Holleran’s iconic 1978 novel about Fire Island. In the gay classic novel, he captures the queer movement’s heady times immediately following the June 28, 1969, Stonewall Riot. In conducting the interviews, I came to understand just how closely ‘history’ tracks with my subjects’ work written over time.”
The criteria Pizzoli used when it came time to choose each person’s interview for inclusion in the book was whether it had a sense of queer history in their life journey and “how it both illustrates and dissects our queer history.”
Some of the people featured in Pizzoli’s book are Edmund White; Christopher Bram; Felice Picano; POZ Magazine founder Sean Strub; Jay Parini on Gore Vidal; Susan Quinn on Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok’s love affair; Anne-christine d’Adesky; and Salman Rushdie.
When asked what Pizzoli wants readers to take away from reading his book he said, “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. My book presents interviews and reviews in which my main endeavor was to have each participant adequately portrayed.”
Pizzoli’s elevator pitch to get people to read his book has been, “I think my book curates a collection of voices that covers the waterfront—the famous, the not famous, the will be famous. Think Sly & the Family Stone song—just a family affair.”
In addition to Pizzoli’s work as a freelance journalist, he created a now-defunct ad-based LGBTQ bimonthly newspaper and website, The Central Voice, where he also served as the publisher and editor from 2006 to 2020. Pizzoli said that this endeavor was “20 years in the making” and “the high point” in his life.
Pizzoli, who has been HIV-positive for decades, also founded the non-profit Positive Opportunities, Inc. to provide employment counseling and training for HIV-positive individuals which he ran from 1997 to 2017. He decided to create this organization to assist people as they survived the disease when the day-to-day of AIDS changed with the standard intervention shifting to combination HIV therapy. Pizzoli said that many of his approaches became standard operating procedures at AIDS services organizations, so he felt his work was done.
To recognize Pizzoli for his work at Positive Opportunities, Inc., he received a Points of Light Foundation award from its founder, former President George H.W. Bush. He also was named a “Living Legend” as a part of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s sesquicentennial celebrations in 2010 which took him completely by surprise.
Pizzoli said that he has been “to death’s door and back” due to his HIV-positive status, which has given him thoughtful pause. He added that when he got his “devastating diagnosis” he stared into his bathroom mirror “in the middle of a troubled night” and said out loud to the disease, “I’m not done yet. I’m not going anywhere.”
One of the ways Pizzoli expresses himself outside of writing and activism work is through dance. He studied ballet, jazz and modern dance from ages 24-39 and specifically during the summer of 1978, took classes at Merce Cunningham. Pizzoli has performed “here and there” in recitals over the years.
“Moving in unison with a corp de ballet is the most invigorating feeling I know,” said Pizzoli. “I recommend it to anyone.”
Now Pizzoli spends time doing meditation exercises and reading anything Sherlock Holmes— which is also his dog’s name.
Pizzoli’s message to the world is “keep the faith. These are troubling times. Don’t make the moments ahead more difficult by not knowing our history. Like I often said and wrote during the height of the AIDS crisis: ‘Piss ‘em off. Survive.’”