Reading Felice Picano’s new memoir, “Art and Sex in Greenwich Village,” took me back to the 1980s, when Joel Rose and I would load cartons of our magazine, Between C & D, hot off our dot-matrix printers, onto the back seat of our old Chevette and drive around Manhattan to deliver them to bookstores. One of us would stay in the car to avoid getting a ticket, while the other would hurry to drop off the new issue.

Those felt like heroic days for small presses and literary magazines, and Felice Picano, the founder of SeaHorse Press and one of the founders of Gay Presses of New York, was one of the most prominent and prescient of these publishers, giving a forum to the new gay literature and art. As he puts it in his exhaustive memoir, he had discerned “quite clearly ... that there was a great big gay and lesbian community out there and it was not remotely being served by publishers.” Promoting those new gay voices, at the time, was nothing short of revolutionary.

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When SeaHorse Press began in 1977, it was the “second gay publishing company in the world,” Picano writes, after Gay Sunshine Press in San Francisco. Two years later, Picano founded Gay Presses of New York with Larry Mitchell and Terry Helbing. SeaHorse and G.P.N.Y. published some of the most important gay poetry, plays and fiction of the post-Stonewall era, that golden period when the newly liberated and outed “gays” replaced the old closeted homosexuals — until AIDS brutally put an end to it. Among the now-classics issued by SeaHorse and G.P.N.Y.: Harvey Fierstein’s plays in his “Torch Song Trilogy”; Dennis Cooper’s books “Safe” and “Closer”; Brad Gooch’s collection “Jailbait and Other Stories”; books based on the Rev. Boyd McDonald’s smutty “Straight to Hell” magazines; Picano’s anthology of gay fiction, “A True Likeness: Lesbian and Gay Writing Today,” which helped start the gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender literary movement; Alan Bowne’s novel “Forty-Deuce”; Robert Glück’s novel “Jack the Modernist”; and Picano’s own novel “The Lure” and memoir “Ambidextrous.” These publishers also reissued older works, like Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s “Young and Evil” (1933), and Renée Vivien’s famous turn-of-the-century Sapphic collection, “Woman of the Wolf and Other Stories.”

“Art and Sex in Greenwich Village” is a real who’s who of the gay literary world from the mid-’70s to the mid-’90s, when G.P.N.Y. and SeaHorse closed. Picano seemingly knew and worked with everyone who was worth knowing and working with in the G.L.B.T. community. Part of what makes his memoir invaluable and enjoyable is his willingness to dish. Picano functions, in that sense, as an important historian — “a role,” he writes, “I never prepared for,” yet one he fulfills with remarkable thoroughness. “In the parlance of the counterculture, I was supposed to live hard, die young and leave a beautiful corpse, as so many men of my time actually did — men smarter, more talented, better looking and just plain better than me.” But it so happens that he is a survivor, and his book is meant to set the record straight and sometimes settle scores.

In spite of a tendency to self-aggrandize, calling attention to his own talent as publisher, art director and writer — and as an indefatigable, irresistible and “classically proportioned” lover — Picano has assembled a tremendously entertaining collection of anecdotes and portraits that only a witness (and a good writer) could report in such vivid detail. Among the many raunchy scenes and catty asides are priceless bits about Charles Ludlam, the founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company; Virgil Thomson, who blindly stumbles around his room at the Chelsea Hotel; a larger-than-life (literally and figuratively) Harvey Fierstein in drag; Boyd McDonald, “who looked like a grown-up version of Alfalfa from ‘Our Gang’ ”; Robert Mapplethorpe, obsessed with his collection of penis photos; and an aging Charles Henri Ford in his apartment in the Dakota building. Ford’s novel, “The Young and Evil,” was, Picano writes, “thought by many to be the first true homosexual novel, and probably the first ‘coming-out’ book.” His portrait of Ford is itself intriguing, following the young author and his sister, both gorgeous teenagers, who leave their native Mississippi to meet Gertrude Stein in Paris and experience la vie de bohème.

The 20 years from the mid-’70s to the mid-’90s constituted an extraordinarily fecund era for gay art and literature, and Picano recreates it with photographic memory. What’s moving about his memoir is that it’s about a period so close to us, yet one that now feels so distant, standing on the far side of the great divide of AIDS, as if it belonged to another, long-extinct galaxy.