Perry Brass's Blog

One of the joys and strange problems of being an artist is your relationship with other artists; that is other artists who are your contemporaries, and possibly equal, and artists who came before you and who loom in your life bigger than you can handle.

Two great examples of the later were Michelangelo and Beethoven. Michelangelo scared other artists of his time; he was so huge, so "protean." He was like a thing and law unto himself. Same with Beethoven. Many composers who came after him experienced what became known as the "9th Symphony Syndrome." They were terrified of writing a ninth symphony; it had been Beethoven's last, and how the hell could you beat, or even compare yourself, to that? There were composers who wanted to skip their ninth, and just go on to their tenth, then maybe go back, and write a ninth.

When I was a young writer, I felt this way about Tennessee Williams. I was in awe of him. His plays were heartbreakingly huge—they had elements of Greek drama, and, frankly, I think they knocked a lot of Eugene O'Neil off the board. But O'Neill got the Nobel Prize, while Williams got often snubbed by the upper-crusties who considered him trashy.

One of my favorite stories from this by-gone point in New York cultural history, was that Ten, as he was called, when he was not called by his gay friends "the Great Bird," was enamored of the poet W.H. Auden. Ten wrote poetry, but he knew he could not hold a candle to Auden—the only problem was that Auden was an English cultural snob. He professed that he did not want to meet Williams under any circumstance. So, when Williams made a trip down to the East Village to meet the poet where Auden lived, Auden refused to answer the door, and told Chester Kalman, his partner, that as far as he was concerned, he was not at home.

This hurt Ten a lot. And from what I have gathered from many accounts of him, he was a sensitive and sweet man. I don't know but should.

Another story: in 1972, while I was going to NYU to finish my degree in Art Education, the journalist Arthur Bell who was a friend of mine back from my Gay Liberation Front days, invited me to see Small Craft Warnings, one of Williams's last plays at the small off-off Broadway Truck and Warehouse Theater also in the East Village. Williams's career had taken an eclipse; he could not get plays produced on Broadway anymore which had been hijacked by musicals like Cats and Hello, Dolly! He was having problems from alcohol and his drug intake during this period, which he once called "my dark drug years." He was being declared "washed up."
The play, I'm afraid, was a disappointment, especially to me as a young man. It was basically a series of monologues that hardly went anywhere. There were two gay characters in it who were cardboardy, and the ending felt tacked on. Supposedly Williams's mother Edwina saw it, and said to her son, "I think it's time for you to find another profession."
That line really galled me. Here was the writer of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana, Sweet Bird of Youth—plus dozens of often-done one-acts—who was being written off. Disposed of. So I wrote a poem for him. It began, "Now that you are no longer/ young and thin and good-looking" and I gave it to Arthur Bell who had become friends with Williams. Bell called me the next day
.
"Ten wants to meet you," he told me.

I panicked. I was 24 years old and felt that I had done nothing (which was not true; I had done a lot, but, God, at 24 you don't know this). What was I going to say to Tennessee Williams? What could I possibly talk to him about?

So, I told Arthur, "I can't meet Williams, I just can't."

Arthur was very understanding. "You're just star struck, but it's OK. A lot of young writers want to meet him, so he won't feel let down."

Years later, I realized, I was young and pretty stupid, and, coming from the background I did, of rot-gut poverty in the South, not prepared for what I thought would be a "power meeting." I also did not realize that what Williams would say to me was the important thing, not what I would say to him.
Also, I was still very involved with the gay movement, something that Williams and most writers from his generation could not fathom—being gay had been so much a source of their rejection and pain. Why would you put that out on the street, something that the vast majority of queer men and women still wanted to keep as far back in the dark as possible?

Then in 1983, at the age of 72, Williams died in New York; strangely enough, I was living in New Orleans at the time, in the French Quarter, or the Vieux Carré, the "old quarter," which became the name of a group of one-acts Williams wrote. Williams had maintained a house in the Quarter, and had come there frequently, but I still never got to meet him.
I thought about him a lot. I was writing plays myself at that time, but the one thing I didn't want to do was write Williams's plays—a trap that other New Orleans playwrights I knew had fallen into, trying to recapture Williams's flowery Southern cadence and diction and often falling on their faces.

Then, later—so much seems to happen "then, later"—I was watching an older Anna Magnani movie on TV; I looked her up and learned about her close friendship with Williams. Williams felt that he had found a piece of his own voice and being in her, and he wrote at least two vehicles for her, including The Rose Tattoo, first as a play, then a movie. I'd seen both the play and the movie. They were so queer! Williams's heroine Serafina has a longing for men that most gay men can identify with. The play, and later the movie, with Burt Lancaster as the object of female desire, are saturated with a kind of morbid, dark Southern sunlight, and, of course, sex.

I was fascinated by the friendship of these two very talented artists. I feel that writers need to be friends with other writers, especially dead ones. You read them as your friends, as people you can share secrets with, because they have shared such a secret with you—the amazing trick of turning human experience into art, of knowing how to use words as tools as well as signs and representations of "things." That is, of being itself.

So, thinking of Ten, or the Great Bird, as my friend, and Anna Magnani as his, I wrote this poem.

Anna and Ten

Anna Magnani and Tennessee Williams
met in Rome in the summer of 1958.
He was writing a film for her,
The Fugitive Kind, and she was
his favorite actress. She liked boxers
and he liked beachboys and they both
knew little good would come of it,
but they stayed out all night a lot,
drank and smoked and did cocaine,
and ran after boys who tempted them,
and knew they could not keep their hands
off them, and little good would come of it.

They were both looking for something
unapproachable—youth, beauty
innocence—
yet who could avoid approaching it?

The boys of Rome were so beautiful then,
so knowing and friendly, and unknowing
but still friendly. They could be had
for little. Maybe a few nice words
or a cigarette lighter or a coffee at a caffè.
and then you were friends for the night
and in the morning no one was wiser,
but at least happier, and the boys had questions
like: “Perché mio?” “Why me?—
Why me, when Rome is so full of boys?”—
and Ten would try to answer that the boy’s
particular youth was special, when he knew
it was not.
What was special was the poet’s attraction,
his investigation and delight, stripping these
flowers
from the bough and placing their scent
briefly behind his ear or in his shirt.

And that, sadly, is what Anna thought
too, although she knew some flower,
simple as it appeared, often caught her
and took her deeper into its sweet heart
than she could ever make herself go.

April 8, 1998
Bronx, NY


Years later, I realized there is something about this poem that seems too jocular, too brazen, from another time, really, in dealing with the exploitation of youth, something we're having a great distaste for now in the age of Jeffrey Epstein, the former Prince Andrew, of course Donald Trump, et al. It's like I was speaking in another language that we don't want to speak today, or even more so, I was trying to speak in the language of Tennessee Williams and Anna Magnani back in 1958, when so much could barely be spoken in any language, but deeds certainly spoke for themselves. 1958 was 13 years after the end of World War II, Italy was still desperately poor, and there was a lot boys would do for a kind word, a cigarette lighter, or a coffee in swell place. There was still that pursuit of innocence which we don't like to talk about anymore, especially in this country when no one seems innocent of anything, anymore.
This brings me, or anyone, for a nostalgia for that period—for a pursuit of innocence, especially in this period of brazen lies and an aggressive ignorance threatening civilization itself.

In 1995, I published Albert or the Book of Man, the third book in a trilogy of queer science novels I called the Mirage trilogy. In it, I formulated a genuine "queer mythology" which I called "the Book of Man" and set the book in 2025, when Christian fundamentalists, through the dominant White Christian Party, would take over the country. Divorce and abortion would be outlawed. Gay men and lesbians would be forced onto "gay reserves," where they could have a margin of safety and freedom. One of the gay reserves of course is Provincetown, MA.

The lead off to the trilogy was Mirage, 1991, centered on the tiny distant planet Ki whose inhabitants are divided into three groups: the nature-loving brothers of Ki, also known as Same Sexers. The Off-Sexers, class-stratified heterosexuals in a constant state of tribal warfare. And the Sisters of Ki, renegade Off-Sex women who serve the goddess Ki and keep the "balance of Ki," which on a small planet with limited resources is vital.
Mirage was a huge hit—and the basic premise of the book, that the Brothers of Ki could travel through space and time using their "third egg," a magical third testicle, really appealed to gay men who were going through the walking hell of AIDS before any relief in the form of protease inhibitors emerged.
Two years later, I produced the second book, Circles, set in the then-present: Ronald Reagan, barely skirting dementia, is president and the dodo-brained Dan Quayle vice president. I burlesqued Quayle and called him "Rich Quilter," who is 150% for "family values," and is basically a political showman for televangelists.

Here is a pivotal excerpt from Albert,. 2025 celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, and as you can read below, it was a prophecy way before its time.


She found herself looking at women.
At first she thought she was only wondering if any of them were going through what she was going through. The country (even the world) had settled into what the government intellectuals called the "New Conservatism." New Conservatism was not a party; it was more like a philosophical movement, as Existentialism had been during the old century. Basically, it said that America’s old, egalitarian secular democracy was a myth. America could (and would) feed on it publicly, the same way kids still pretended to believe in elves at Christmas; but it could not operate through it. The workings of the new technoculture were too complicated for the "common people,"—the grunt workers who still lived in the old shopping mall/tabloid culture. Only a small highly privileged class could manipulate and use technoculture. They would do this through the highest levels of literacy and information access, to which the grunts had no access at all.
But the New Conservatives, in reality, were only the more educated upscale wing of the WCP, the often ridiculous White Christian Party, whose philosophy, (in a nutshell: the People's Will is Christ’s Will) was now running the country. Most Eastern establishment types, like Sandy’s comfortable parents, the Feltners, tried to joke off the WCP. "White-trash types with Amex cards," Lorna said scornfully; Sid dismissed them as "technopuppets," since they were the lower caste whose jobs were mostly to feed data into the info processing points, exactly as they dished out mass food at the chain slopperias that served them. ("No difference between their heads and their stomachs," Sid said. "They both process the same dreck.")
But the Feltners, like most establishment people, were also very scared of the WCP. There was something about its smiling, honey-sweet stupidity that belied the not-too-innocent movements of power underneath. The WCP was a gorgon that only appeared to have a Santa Claus face. Its face was that of Brother Bob Dobson, the WCP's leader. Brother Bob was a telecom personality who brought in billions, mostly through the orchestrations of popular fears: crime; delinquency; the stigma-laden condition of illegitimacy; abortion; and the "tragedy of sexual deviancy," which never ran out of gas as a family issue and dollar-grabber. At the turn of the century, Brother Bob had tried to run for President, waging a grassroots, "Christian lifestyle" campaign. But after getting the pants beat off him, he learned that he could have more influence behind the scenes preaching and instructing than getting involved with the daily knee-to-the groin activities of professional politicians, which Dobson had found sickening. There was still a remnant then of an influential liberal press, which meant that Dobson had to shake hands with Jews, a few open gays, and members of the media who wrote distorted things about the Christian Right. For example, that it was attempting to take over the country and subvert the separation of Church and State.
This was exactly what Brother Bob wanted to do and did do, all without ever running again for anything. Through constant "instruction," Dobson was able to turn his empire of White Christian schools, youth groups, universities, charities, and museums of "decent religious art" into the official public culture of America. He appeared, in person and on the telecom, to be a plump, genial, smiling man of absolutely unlimited sincerity. His personality seemed totally transparent, as if all you saw of him on the telecom screen was what there was. It was a stupefying trick. Hardened media pros stood in awe of him. He was a perfect exponent of the art form of public "personhood" as it had been advanced by the more successful "celeb" talking heads of the late Twentieth Century. In a world in which knowing anyone had become a dangerous, illusive activity, Brother Bob made you feel that knowing him was always safe. In truth, his devoted following was sure that Brother Bob Dobson had never had a private or subversive thought in his head.
Although J. Richland Quilter, as a pioneer New Conservative and the leader of "Our Families First," pretended to be all inclusive, he was smart enough never to kick Brother Bob and the White Christians, for whom he felt pure distaste, out of his political bed. Quilter often appeared at WCP rallies, smiling just as Brother Bob did and talking about the "new family values"—that were in his (unoriginal) words "tying the good folks of our country back together, just like Christ Himself ties a good marriage together." When the occasion called for it, Quilter could out-Brother-Bob Brother Bob any day.
Everything was now smoothly integrated. Brother Bob. Brother Rich. Marriage. The family. Divorce was strictly out. Young, with-it people did not like to talk about divorce. It had become a credit-and-career risk. No kids was okay. But every couple desired more than anything to keep its Integrated Assets account intact and to keep themselves in the System.

For more information about Albert or the Book of Man, go to https://perrybrass.com/albert. All books ordered from my website will be personally autographed.
Have a great fall. Enjoy the cooler weather, the color of trees turning, but remember we are in difficult times, and the real White Christian Party, that of ICE, is lurking around too many corners in our America.

I want more people to know about my memoir "A Real Life, Like Mark Twain with Drag Queens."
Why?
Because the people who have read it have loved it,. To me, it seemed like a magical book. I had never wanted to write a memoir—I didn't want to dredge up my past; I wanted to write books that took people on an adventure away from their daily problems. But one day, while doing my daily exercises, the first sentence of the book just came to me.

Like magic itself.

And from there the book grew, paragraph by paragraph, telling the story of my younger self when I was 17 years old, and I wanted to—
OK, here is a short taste of the the first chapter—

I was seventeen years old and on a quest: to find myself and to find love, although I had very little idea what either of them was. The only thing I knew for sure was that what I was—the deepest, central core of me— was forbidden. The year was 1965. Lyndon Johnson was president; John F. Kennedy had been killed two years earlier when I was a senior in high school, and the country was still roiling from the specters of racial integration, rock ‘n’ roll, teenage sex, and other threatening forms of “Commie subversion,” including the one that I knew in truth included myself: I was attracted to boys.

I was born in the Deep South, in Savannah, Georgia, and grew up there in this polite, beautiful, azalea-filled coastal city where people like me were routinely murdered, if they didn’t kill themselves.

I had tried to do that at fifteen, in the summer of 1963—driven to it by constant bullying at school with a hate-filled whispering campaign in the halls; and at home, by my mother, Helen Landy Brass, a once tall, strikingly beautiful woman who had looked like a 1940s movie star. Later, as an often-hospitalized “mental patient,” she had been subjected to repeated elec-troconvulsive shock treatments administered in tandem with various highly addictive prescription drugs. The result was that for several years she had been determined to destroy me. I was the whipping boy, the stand-in, for all of her failings and psychiatric problems, and the final problem: we were both "queer." She a secret, totally self-hating lesbian, a fact that I would not come to grips with for several more years, and I . . . both of us were cowering deep inside that labyrinth of shame that people in Southern towns erect to keep the black-and-white monstrosities of their own fears hidden. So there I was, dripping from sweat at the scalding dawn of summer break (after my self-described “Year of Incarceration” at the unsurprisingly redneck University of Georgia, in Athens near Atlanta, where, as a too-“aesthetic,” painfully shy pansy I’d had repeated death threats in my freshman dorm room), hitchhiking from Savannah to . . .

San Francisco.

The Emerald City.
A Real Life: Like Mark Twain with Drag Queens

I want more people to read A REAL LIFE, Like Mark Twain with Drag Queens. Why? Because there has never been a book like it—a totally true account of what it was like being out, queer, and a homeless teenager years before Stonewall. When you could be arrested for just "walking gay." Or breathing. Or being seen with anyone who looked "that way."
It was a hard time, but gay teens quickly learned to survive. And they did it together before smart phones, the Internet, Grindr . . . before just about everything.
This is a good read for people interested in queer history, in the history of gay youth, and how gays learned to love each other when no one else did.
As the author of numerous books, I think you will not be disappointed.

A Real Life: Like Mark Twain with Drag Queens

I have done many interviews, but they usually center on my life as an activist in the early years of the modern gay (or as we now say, “LGBTQ”) movement. I talk about my involvement with the radical Gay Liberation Front; with the founding of the Gay Men’s Health Project Clinic, the first clinic specifically for gay men on the East Coast, in 1972; about the approach of the AIDS crisis and our community’s reaction to it—but I rarely get to speak about my growing up in the violent, racially segregated South, about my parents and their influence on me, about my leaving home at 17 and being almost completely out by that point, in 1965—about the intense tribalism of being queer in the early 1970s, that soon gave way to disco and AIDS (I’m not claiming a relationship—disco did NOT cause HIV!), and about my life as a writer and artist.
In Mike’s interview I get to talk about the full tapestry of my life, from “porn to poetry,” from queer science fiction to “The Manly Art of Seduction,” from HIV to Modern Dance.
I hope you will get a chance to look at it, and share it. Let me know what you think of it. If you have any questions for me I'm always open to them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywyx1...

I just posted a review of two books from The Other Press—"Madonna in a Fur Coat" and "For Two Thousand Years" on my Huffington Post blog. You can access it at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/p...

I also reviewed "God's Own Country," a beautifully framed queer-themed movie set in England's wild Yorkshire country, home of Edward Carpenter and other English romantics and eccentrics, on Huffington Post.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/5...

I hope you'll get a chance to look at them, and let me know what you think. God's Own Country will be opening in the US soon. It was extremely popular in UK, and I hope it will be here, too.

Perry