Picano's poetry has appeared in two collections, The Deformity Lover and Other Poems (1977) and Window Elegies (1986), which won a Poetry Society Chapbook Award.

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His poetry has also appeared in a variety of anthologies, including Getting from Here to There: Writing and Reading Poetry (1982), edited by Florence Grossman; The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (1983), edited by Stephen Coote; The Badboy Book of Erotic Poetry (1995), edited by David Laurents; and A Day for a Lay: A Century of Gay Poetry (1999), edited by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard.

Picano has also written several plays, including Immortal!, a play with music, co-written with Jerry Campbell, and based on Picano's novella An Asian Minor, which was produced in 1986. The one-act play, One O'Clock Jump, was also produced in 1986 and won a Jane Chambers Playwriting Award. The Bombay Trunk, a full-length murder mystery, was produced in 2002.

In 1992, Picano co-wrote, with Dr. Charles Silverstein, The New Joy of Gay Sex, an updated version of the book Silverstein had originally created in 1977 with Edmund White. The new version included safe-sex practices and information reflecting the AIDS crisis.

A fully revised and expanded third edition of The Joy of Gay Sex, again with Silverstein and Picano as co-authors, was published in 2003.

He has also contributed articles, poems, stories, and reviews to periodicals, including Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner, Advocate, Washington Blade, Genre, Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly, Lambda Book Report, Out, and Soho Weekly News.

Picano currently lives in Los Angeles.

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