A writer's journey: Felice Picano talks about his latest novel, a tale of love and travel through time.

Felice Picano suspects that he's lived before, but don't ask him about his past lives. "I don't know who I used to be," says the award-winning novelist, "but I do know that I'm not originally a person of the 20th century. I've seen things in my life that tell me otherwise."

Picano explores themes of reincarnation and shared memory in his new novel, Looking Glass Lives (Alyson, $12.95), a tale of love and loss set in three different eras. "A couple of characters in the story become convinced that it isn't just our own psychology that shapes our lives but fate and destiny as well," Picano says.

Picano's destiny, it seems, has been to lead the way for a generation of gay writers. One of the famed Violet Quill Club--a group of important post-Stonewall writers that includes Andrew Holleran and Edmund White--Picano helped create the gay literary genre. He founded Sea Horse Press, New York City's first gay publishing house, cowrote The New Joy of Gay Sex in 1992, and over the years has written 16 books of his own, including the memoir A House on the Ocean, a House by the Bay.

For Picano, who began Looking Glass Lives nearly 20 years ago, the book's belated publication is bittersweet. "There are people I'd have liked to share this book with who are gone now," he says, recalling friends lost to AIDS. "Nearly all my original readership has died off."

Nevertheless, Picano is looking forward these days. His next novel, The Book of Lies, is already out in England, where it's being lauded as "a Henry Jamesesque comedy of manners," and he's started on another book as well. "People want to see me as this legendary writer, this piece of literary history," Picano says, laughing. "But I'm writing about late-20th-century gay male experiences. Regardless of who I was before, today I'm a writer of the present, not of the past."

Pela is coauthor of the upcoming Idol! The Who's Who of Fifty Years of Teen Heartthrobs.