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I was very lucky that I had two very attractive, physically attractive parents and and I was able to inherit some of the better qualities of both.
Achim Nowak 00:10
I am so happy for you, Perry. I figured this
Perry Brass 00:13
is what you’re supposed to be when you’re young and attractive in New York at this period, you dated older men with money, and I did a lot of that. You got involved with the arts, and I did a lot of that so much was going on in this period.
Achim Nowak 00:28
Welcome to the MY FOURTH ACT PODCAST. I’m your host, Achim Nowak, and I have conversations with exceptional humans who have created bold and unexpected lives. If you like what you hear, please subscribe on any major podcast platform so you won’t miss a single one of my inspiring guests, and please consider posting an appreciative review. Let’s get started. I am absolutely delighted to welcome Perry brass to the MY FOURTH ACT PODCAST in 1965 when Perry was 17, he hitchhiked from Savannah to San Francisco, an adventure which he recalled as being like Mark Twain with drag queens. He spent a year living on the streets, sleeping between parked cars or in SRO hotels, doing any job he could, and loving the freedom of it. This is going to be a longer introduction than I normally do, because there’s a lot of wonderful facets to Perry’s life. In 1966 Perry moved to New York, where he quickly became involved with artists, writers, dancers and poets. In November of 1969 curry joined New York’s groundbreaking Gay Liberation Front, and the staff have come out the world’s first gay liberation newspaper. Larry wrote poetry stories and news pieces, pieces. In those years, his work was seen in the gay liberation book from Rolling Stone press the male muse, the world’s first openly gay poetry anthology, mouth of the dragon, their first gay male poetry zine and Penguin book of homosexual verse, the first mainstream collection of queer poetry. There were a lot of firsts in this period. He has published 23 books since then and been nominated for six Lambda Literary awards in three different categories. Now, two other things I need to mention, which I find incredibly interesting and hope we get to talk about. In 1972 with two friends, Perry started the Gay Men’s Health Project clinic, the first clinic for gay men on the East Coast, still surviving as New York’s Callan Lord Community Health Center, the Gay Men’s Health Project, clinic, organized and run by the men who used it, rather than by doctors, became the model for many grassroots health organizations in the gay community and and this really intrigued me. Perry has also collaborated with numerous composers, including the late christablazio, Ricky, Ian Gordon, Fred Hirsch, Christopher Berg and Scott Gandel. I love the title of Perry’s just released book, my life without money and Other Poems, and I know we’ll have a chance to talk about it. So thank you for indulging this very long introduction. Hello, Perry, hello. What’s it like to hear all that stuff? Does that make you feel? What what it
Perry Brass 03:51
makes me feel that I’ve had quite a life. Your podcast is called the fourth chapter. I’m really sort of at chapter three and a half because I feel like I’m still incredibly creative. I’m 77 years old, and I’m at a point where a lot of writers stop writing, and I’m still doing it. I still get a great kick out of my creativity, out of my creative life. I like the fact that I’ve had this background and three real components to this background. Number one, there was my creative component. Number two, there was my political component, and number three, there was my personal component. So I really enjoy this. I’ve been, I’ve really enjoyed my life. I really have, and I’ve, I’ve been through a lot as anyone would at 77 Unfortunately, I’ve outlived too many of my peers and friends who’ve been taken by AIDS, and now they’re starting to be taken by other things, but I also have younger friends not like that.
Achim Nowak 04:55
I am curious, because you you grew up in some. Savannah, if I remember that correctly. And then you, at some point, went to San Francisco, when you were a young boy in Savannah, you were thinking about who Perry wanted to be when you when he grew up, what did you think about?
Perry Brass 05:14
I knew from the time I was about 15 years old that I really had this talent to create. And I was very lucky. I had wonderful teachers in Savannah Georgia in public schools. I always said that if you were a smart woman in Savannah Georgia, back then, what else could you do to teach? So I had brilliant teachers. Many of them really encouraged me, really recognized me. I grew up dirt poor. My father died when I was 11 years old. He died of cancer, and he left my mother and my sister and myself with virtually nothing. My mother had terrible psychiatric problems. I learned after her death that she’d been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, but she was often violent, and this violence was very often an exercise on me very, very difficult relationship with each other. So by the time I was certainly 16, I realized that I was going to leave Savannah and I was going to be this person that I needed to be. When I was 15, I tried to kill myself. I was pushed into this by my mother and her family and by what had been happening to me at school, in high school, when there was a, let’s just say, a whispering campaign about me, that I was queer, and back in 1964 you could not have that. So I tried to kill myself. And when I recovered from the suicide attempt, I made a pact with myself, I would never let anyone ever drive me to suicide again, and I would be the person that I was meant to be, although, frankly, I wasn’t even sure what that person was, but I knew that no creative and was going to be himself
Achim Nowak 07:00
I mentioned in the introduction that at the age of 17, you got yourself to San Francisco. So part of the many things I love about you is you were sort of in key points of history. You showed up and was, I know, 1965 was before the big summer, but I still imagine 65 San Francisco. Well, instead of me telling you what I imagined, what did you walk into there? What was that like for
Perry Brass 07:34
someone who’d come to this extremely repressed background in the South San Francisco? Was incredible liberation. There was something, I think at that point in San Francisco, there’s something like 40 gay bars, and we’re talking mid 60s. I mean, they were all over the place, that being gay was difficult there. I mean, it was not easy there. It was difficult there, but nothing compared to being in the south. And actually, it was much, much better than being in New York, because when I came to New York, New York was still incredibly repressed in going through the famous New York World’s Fair of 64 when the mayor closed all the gay bars, there was entrapment, which you didn’t have in San Francisco. You did not have entrapment in the bars. And what I did in San Francisco is I became part of a kind of underground of gay teens, there were coffee shop, what they called coffee houses, that were open for kids who were under 21 so that there were so many gay kids in San Francisco, they had places for them to go to. I wrote about that in my memoir of real life, like Mark Twain with drag queens about what to be on your own, 17 and 18 years old in California and San Francisco, the men I met things I had to do, prostituting myself at times, men who were very much in the closet would pick me up things like that. You
Achim Nowak 08:58
already mentioned that your sense was that New York was different, but you got yourself to New York. I mentioned you hung out with artists in the village. So the stereotype in my mind when I hear that is, oh, it was free wheeling, straight, gay, it didn’t matter. I also imagine you were the pretty young thing in town, and you could play around. These are my stereotypes. I know I
Perry Brass 09:23
was I wasn’t. I was very aware of that. I was very aware of that. I was very lucky that I had two very attractive, physically attractive parents and and I was able to inherit some of the better qualities of both.
Achim Nowak 09:39
I am so happy for you. Barry, yes,
Perry Brass 09:40
no, I really. I enjoyed it. I figured this is what you’re supposed to be when you’re young and attractive. In New York at this period, you dated older men with money, and I did a lot of that. You got involved with the arts, and I did a lot of that. So much was going on in this period. There were these famous places that I would go. To like cappuccino, which I uploaded, la mama. I would go to that there was the second avenue Theater, which had become like a drag purview. So Jackie Curtis did her shows there. I used to go to Max’s Kansas City, back in the day, it was spectacular. Andy Warhol would hang out there. So you’d have a steak with Andy Warhol next to you, and the Warhol tribe was there. It was an amazing period to be in New York and to be young, because it was also very cheap to live in New York. You could just get some job that would keep you alive and find someplace to live, and then you could really enjoy the city.
Achim Nowak 10:39
You know, sometimes, in hindsight, we appreciate something almost more than when we were there, because we take stuff for granted. So I’m curious, when you were this lovely young man arriving in town and doors opened themselves to you, did you at all get that this was a special or unusual time, or was it just, of course, that’s how life is.
Perry Brass 11:03
On one hand, I did feel that way, because I felt that we were kind of like in the mid 60s. And I realized something that I was a child of this period, very, very much child of this period, this period when being, you know, hip or a hippie, a smoking dope in Central Park. I mean, Central Park was this exquisite scene, this amazing scene free expression, which doesn’t go on, I’m afraid, anymore, but anyway, I had that feeling of that. But on the other hand, I will say that the city was so incredibly generous to me, and I did not realize its generosity that I could arrive in New York. I had no money, no education, no family, and immediately I found a place to live, I found a job, I found friends. I was working at that point in advertising. I got to work in one of the greatest ad agencies in New York. It was like everything just kind of clicked for me, and I was still kind of cynical, though I still had a kind of cynicism, and it has taken me a while to realize how that I didn’t give people the credit for their generosity.
Achim Nowak 12:12
In my mind, going from that to joining the Gay Liberation Front, yes, is that’s a leap. How did you find the Gay Liberation Front? Or how did they find you and and how did you decide to get involved?
Perry Brass 12:27
Well, first you have to understand when stone will happen. I was around the corner. I was in the bar called Julius, which I still love is, of
Achim Nowak 12:36
course, I have many memories of Julius myself. I mean,
Perry Brass 12:40
everybody should love Julius. I was in Julius both nights of Stonewall. The first night, some people came running into Julius and said, the girls are rioting at the Stonewall. And I thought, okay, big deal. There were street queens who were always doing crazy things on the street. And I knew some of them. And I used to go to the Stonewall a lot. I really did. Second night, I went out to see what had happened, to see what it was like. And it was just amazing. The whole area around the Stonewall was ringed with cops or cops all over the place, but hundreds of people had come out for it. The cops had put out riot lights so that it was very theatrical scene. So Stonewall had happened, and then very shortly after Stonewall, some people got together who had been in what they called the Mattachine Action Group, who were more radical than usual, random people, and they created GLF out of the Mattachine Action Group. It was the name of it was given by my GLF sister, Martha Shelley, who said, Okay, we’re the Gay Liberation Front as a play on the National Liberation Front. After Stonewall happened, I remember talking to some of my Julius friends, some of whom were just aghast. They said, Oh, my God. You know things are so good for us. You know, we get to go to Fire Island, we get to go to East Park. We get to have a couple of bars. Why are the girls making this so difficult for us? The sweet Queens. And I thought, This is fabulous. I was so enchanted that Stonewall had happened, that we had finally fought back, that we had left our passivity and being a what I call a kick ass Southerner, I don’t like passivity. I like people to fight back. I want to fight back. So GLF started throwing what they called gay community dances at a wonderful place on Sixth Avenue and 14th street called alternate u so I went to a couple of their dances, and then I decided I should go to a meeting. So I went to my first meeting in mid November, and after my first meeting, as they say, I drank all the Kool Aid. I just plunged into the Gay Liberation Front. I had not been political. I knew very little about politics. I thought that mainstream politics hated queers. There was no place for you to be gay in. Mainstream politics, even in leftist politics. And this was true, and suddenly I’m in this radical gay organization that espoused the overthrow of the US government. I’m also now the president of the Gay Liberation Front Foundation, an organization that GLF people put together to preserve the legacy of GLF, and what GLF did that was so stunning, was we were the first group to really formalize what gay oppression really came from, that it didn’t come from our psyches. It didn’t come from our psychiatric problems. It didn’t come from our spiritual problems that they the center the source of gay oppression was patriarchy, and we saw it as a triangle at the top was patriarchy. On the right corner, you had sexism on the left corner, you had homophobia. It was patriarchy led to sexism, led to homophobia, and once we did this, everything just fell into place. I mean, you knew why people hated us so much, why we needed to organize, why we were why were existences were political.
Achim Nowak 16:12
Well, it totally makes sense to me and at the same time. And I think this has gone on at different decades afterwards. You know, there are, they’ve always been what I call the the assimilationist homosexuals who want, who want approval from the dominant class and not ruffle any feathers. And exactly even the name Gay Liberation Front, you know, to me, that’s like anarchist, like rebellious. Well, you know, there’s
Perry Brass 16:40
a first organization in America, national organization America, to have the word gay in it. Before that, you always had these groups like Matt Achim and San Francisco. They had one called serve society for individual rights. They could not use the word gay in it. So just using the word gay was an affront to the establishment.
Achim Nowak 16:58
What are some of the activities that GLF engaged in, and curious beyond articulating what you just
Perry Brass 17:05
articulated, people often ask. They said, What did GLF do? And I always say everything we were the first, openly, we want to use the word now queer, openly queer group in America. And we had this distinction for about almost a year. During that year, by the end of the first year after GLF was formed, there were something like 30 GLF groups all over the country. I mean, places like Lawrence, Kansas had GLF. We did demonstrations all over the place that we would demonstrate against oppression of queer people. We put out the first gay liberation newspaper. It’s called come out, and when I say gay liberation, it was the politics of gay liberation. It was not homosexual liberation. We made a big difference between the idea of homosexual liberation and gay liberation. Our feeling was not simply that queer should have the right to have sex on the street. Now, our feeling was that to be liberated, we had to fight for the liberation of all people and the real liberation of gay people. We weren’t fighting to keep the mafia bars open, but we were fighting to make sure that gay people in New York had some place to congregate. We also started the first youth group for queer people. It’s called gay youth, that came directly out of GLF. We formed a Marxist group, a youth group, a gay feminist group that was called Radical lesbians. It never been anything like that before. It was a lot it’s
Achim Nowak 18:29
extraordinary, and I appreciate you listing it, yeah. Now the two thoughts I have you know all of this is, before social media, internet, it was a very different world, right? That somebody from a different generation probably can’t even imagine. But at the same time, I’m curious, when you all were out in public and would imagine there was a lot of pushback from both the rest roles and gays, who might have been uncomfortable with such a quotation mark, radicalism
Perry Brass 19:00
there was. There was a lot of negative reaction to us. There really was. And the weird thing was, so many of those people who had the negative reaction to us two or three or four years later were marching in what we call now the gay pride parade, which GLF put together. I mean, we put together the first gay pride parade, except we called it the Christopher Street Liberation Day parade, and it was to mark the first year after Stonewall. That’s that’s why it was in June of 1970 so all these people were saying, wait a second, you’re rocking the boat.
Achim Nowak 19:38
Now this is a little tidbit I just became aware of in recent months and to our listeners, just want to acknowledge that Perry and I crossed paths in the 90s and and we did not know each other well, but we hung out with an organization called the publishing trial, so we knew each other at a certain point in in queer literary history. Let me put it that way. Um. Um, but so we’ll talk about your writing. But I had not known that you done some erotica writing. What might be like pornographic writing? What was that like? Can you just walks into that world images of how did pre breast into that?
Perry Brass 20:19
That’s a great question. I love that question. I had been writing, quote, gay stuff since probably about 1960 about 1966 I wrote a gay novel in 1966 and I was told you’ll never be able to get this published. I started out as a visual artist. My whole academic background and my degree was in visual arts and drawing and painting. And then I decided to become a writer. I was like writing like gay poetry, gay short stories, and I was having a very, very hard time getting them published. By that time, there were some gay lit magazines like Christopher Street that was that were being published. And I was having a very hard time getting into these publications, because I came from this different background. I came from this liberation background. And to me, the whole idea of writing queer stuff was to have that moment of recognition and liberation of feelings. And at that point, there was this kind of movement in gay lit towards what they called clone lit. I don’t know if you’re
Achim Nowak 21:25
familiar with clone I’ve never heard of that phrase. Chuck
Perry Brass 21:29
ort lib, who published Christopher Street, I think he coined clone lit. And the whole idea of clone lit was to legitimatize the masculinist aspect of queerness, whereas, I mean, I thought this was just basically a mask for people’s insecurities. So I was not writing these kind of stories. I was writing stories about people who were throwing off their insecurities and doing things that made them pop out into the world their own self. That’s what I wanted to write. And I couldn’t get these stories published, so I met several guys out there in the market who were doing pornography, and they said, Well, why don’t you just start writing porn? And I said, at first, I said, Oh, my God, I can’t do that. And then I thought, Well, okay, they’re gonna pay me for it. Yeah, I started writing porn stories, and I wanted my porn stories to have that same texture and feeling that I had in my my other stories, this idea of liberation and sex as a liberating aspect. In other words, you let out all your feelings in sex insects. It wasn’t just a blow job in a back, in a dark corner, but these were deeply romantic, open feelings coming out. And I was very lucky, because a number of editors started to just love me. I mean, they loved my work. I was writing for first hand magazine, the movidian magazines like torso and honcho and inches. I wrote for all those magazines. I wrote for blue boy, when it’s published in Miami, when I was possibly the the greatest gay slick magazine ever published. At that point, I was making money from this. And I love this environment. I mean, you’d go up to these magazines that were all you know, where you know, your gay friends would be editors and as gophers. And it was like a kind of world unto itself. And I used to call them monasteries. You go up into the monasteries, the monks would come out, read your stuff, and then we’d go out and have, you know, drinks afterwards. And you know, one editor actually said something to me, actually, he was at a straight porn house, and I’ve been writing straight porn too. And he said to me, Perry, I’ve heard that you go to bed with editors to get your work published. And I said, Well, if that were true, a lot more of my work published.
Achim Nowak 23:56
This is delicious, so many levels. Listening to you and thinking, Did you have a pseudonym, or did you publish as Perry bro? Yes,
Perry Brass 24:04
I first I had a pseudonym. I published another name, smokey George. And I book later called works and other smokey George stories, which was a collection of my porn stories. I had, like I said, some wonderful editors. I had a wonderful editor at First Time Magazine named Lou Thomas, and it’s like you are one of the great writers of your age, Perry, but no one’s going to read you, because these are all born.
Achim Nowak 24:31
I at the same time, I mentioned introduction, and this so interests me. This was before HIV AIDS you were involved with starting something called the Gay Men’s Health Project clinic? Yes, I read that and ago. Like, how the hell did two do a bunch of gay buddies decide that we’re going to start a Gay Men’s Health Project clinic? Like, how does one do that?
Perry Brass 24:57
I’ll tell you how. Again, this came. Very much from the GLF experience in the idea that you find a need and take care of the need. You don’t worry about the professionalism of it. You take care of the need. And it was started by two friends of mine, a guy named Leonard ebreo, a man named Mark Rabinowitz, and both of them succumbed to HIV, but Lenny had been involved in something called liberation house, which was basically like a care place for queer people, where we would take care of ourselves. He and I were talking at one point when he came to this conclusion that the real problem that gay men had was self hatred and self fear. And so we talked about this, and he said he came to this evolution in his own thinking, and I was very much with him at the same time that gay health was the center of all of this, that if we could provide health care for gay men in a liberated, open environment, then so much of the self hatred and self fear would disappear. I mean, one of the problems we had was, if you were gay, where do you go to get medical help? I mean, you had either be in the closet to your doctor or you go to a couple of gay doctors who charged you up the ass for any kind of care, because there were a couple of gay doctors at that point who were notoriously expensive. So we started out Lenny and I and Mark. We started out with a consciousness raising group around the body. I don’t know if you’re familiar with CR groups, but this is a format coming to a political awareness through an exchange of personal stories, truthful personal stories. So we started to see our group around the body, like every week, we would take a different part of the body, or different aspect of the body, and say, I went through this, I went through that, and went through this, and then at the end of it, we say, what do we have in common here? What are our common theories about this? Like, how do you feel about your penis? How do you feel about your asshole? How do you feel about your nipples? How do you feel about your mouth? I mean, like every week we would do a different part of the body, and we got about eight people in the CR group, eight guys in the CR group and towards the after the CR group had basically come to a natural conclusion, the three of us decided we should start a clinic. What else can we do? We know that there’s a need. And liberation house was in a raw concrete floor basement on West 11th Street. And we said, Okay, we’ll use this raw basement for our clinic. And we did. We picked a date, then when we opened the clinic, we went to the New York City Department of Public Health and told them we were going to open the clinic and some gay one gay men and maybe two who were working at the Chelsea clinic then said, this is a great idea. You can do it the village. You’re going to get a population that we can’t have in Chelsea. So they helped us open the clinic, gave us supplies and using only flyers as a means of media, I mean social media. We’re handing out flyers on Christopher Street on weekends, our first night, and it was a Tuesday night in October. I came down to the clinic, and there was a line around the block. Wow. 50 days showed up our first night, and then after that, we were only open on Tuesdays. Then we began opening on Tuesdays and Thursdays. After that, we would get like 5075, 100 guys would show up one of our clinics because they knew that they’d be treated beautifully there, with a great deal of kindness, great deal of love. And it just took off from there,
Achim Nowak 29:00
beautiful in so many ways. And part of what I’m learning is I’m listening to you. You said this to me, these parallel, intertwined defense between your writing, your activism, and how that all is holds together. Yes. Now the other thought I had though you and I met in the 90s, when suddenly mainstream publishing houses were looking for the Big Gay book, and suddenly there was something, and they had a couple of them. They did and and it was a heady time when you and I met during that time. And at the same time as I’m listening to you, I’m thinking people might have thought, well, this guy’s a little too far out there, or he’s a little too dangerous, or he’s, he could be trouble. You know, he’s not in assimilationist homosexual. I’m I’m using labels now. But any thoughts on my thoughts on this matter,
Perry Brass 29:58
there? Uh, there was that attitude about me. And I think part of it also was that the fact that I came from this Gay Liberation Front background, and at that point, GLF and its kind of stepson, gaa, were very suspect. In the 80s, America went through what I called its 180 degrees swing to the right, and the gay movement became much more corporatized. And on one hand, it became much more corporatized. On the other hand, the proletariat of queers had just dropped out of the movement. It was not reaching a great number of gay people anymore, except, of course, I mean, you still have the parades and stuff like that, but the idea that there was something else besides just, you know, corporate gayness was difficult for them. So you did. I mean, as far as I was concerned, there was that attitude towards me, and I was going to say also about GLF was that we were, unfortunately, very anti professional. We did not like professional. Fight against it. We thought that professionalism destroyed real liberation. And took me a while to understand that what was really happening was, I always say there is always this gay tendency. I should say was always this gay tendency to subvert power. It’s very hard for queer men to deal with power. I think we’re now, we’re leaving that. I mean, when you have a man like Pete Buttigieg, you know, you realize that we are now inside power, and I frankly, like it when you have no one in a position of power that’s from your group. You have no black people in power. You have no queer people in power, no women in power, which is what the Republicans want. Now, if you have that, you are really screwed.
Achim Nowak 32:00
I have so many other places I want to go with you, and I’m mindful of how much time we only have. So I love, love, love the fact that you ended up collaborating with composers, or that composers found you. Yeah. So let me put it this way. How did those collaborations happen? Perry, oh,
Perry Brass 32:21
that’s a lovely story. I like that story very, very much. I had been writing, like I said, I’ve been writing poetry, and I love writing poetry, and my poetry was very lyrical when first started to dissurface. Friend of mine, I’d sent him a kind of like a suite of poems called Five gay Jewish prayers that were going to be a read. I was living in New Orleans with my husband at that time, and they were going to be read in New York at an AIDS cafe. So he gave the poems to a young gay composer named Chris de Blasio. And Chris set these these poems, they were done by the New Orleans Gay Men’s Chorus. So I got to hear them done as a choral piece. And Chris and I became much, much closer. And he then did another suite of songs, and these were not pop songs, but these are what we call art songs. He did another suite of songs called villagers. There were five songs, and the last song was set to a poem of mine called lyric for which listeners can hear lyric for you just go to YouTube and look for lyric for Chris de Blasio, because several people have sung lyric for and it is one of the most exquisite songs, I think, written in the last quarter of the 20th century. So after that, we were kind of like off and running, and AIDS was really starting to come up at this point. And I said to Chris, I said, I would really like to do a whole suite of songs about AIDS, and Chris had just been diagnosed with HIV, and he said, No, I don’t want to go there. He was working with act up. He said, AIDS is not my life. I don’t want my artistic life to be involved with with AIDS. And so I was very kind of crestfallen with this. And then about seven or eight months later, he called me, and he said, I have a surprise for you, Perry. And I said, What’s that? And he said, I’ve just set five of your poems into a suite called all the way through evening. And he told me the names of the songs. And the last song was written to a poem of mine called Walt Whitman in 1989 and Walt Whitman in 1989 just absolutely took off. It was adapted as part of what they called the, what was called the AIDS quilt songbook, which was a compilation of art songs that deal with AIDS. It was done probably, I think what went in 1989 was probably done maybe 150 times all over the world. I mean, it was done in London, it was done in Berlin. It was done in Tokyo. It kind of put. Me on the musical map for a while, and then other composers started to come towards me and the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, they, let’s just say, they kind of adopted me at a certain point, especially through Gary Miller, who is the leader of the Gay Men’s Chorus at that point. So they we did two beautiful choral pieces. One was called the angel voices of men, that was set by Ricky Ian Gordon, this gorgeous piece that was called waltzes for men, which was my take on the Brahms Levis lead of balsa it was set by Craig connaghan. And then after that, a number of other composers started to approach me. I love this aspect of my writing career.
Achim Nowak 35:40
I totally get the delight and the satisfaction of those collaborations. I We mentioned that they’ve been 23 books, and I the title of your just released poetry book is my life without money, which I mean other poems I love. Just the title my life without
Perry Brass 36:02
it’s actually a life without money, but
Achim Nowak 36:04
a life I am sorry. I’m glad we clarified a life without money. Have you had a life without money? What has it been like? Is this about you? Is it about other people? Is it about it’s
Perry Brass 36:18
about what you have to do in America to survive, to make money, to survive, how much of yourself you have to give up? How much of yourself, how much of yourself you have to cut off. You know which part of your limbs you have to cut off to be competitive in what’s become the merciless 24/7 world of American capitalist competition, and it’s about that, and then realizing that it’s possible to relinquish so much of that, to go as far as you can without money, and to have this enlightenment moment Where you are finally your real self, aside from this, aside from this, as I say, this 24/7 competition to survive. And I think we really I see this now so much. I see this, especially with young people who’ve given up so much of their life now, just to survive in America, and especially to survive in New York,
Achim Nowak 37:21
given what you just said. So what’s the lesson you learned about yourself? Or what are some some decisions you made to not cut off too many of your own limbs?
Perry Brass 37:31
Oh, I think that’s part of being an artist. I think that you can do whatever is necessary. Be able to remain whole and creative and to work. Can I read a short poem from it? Oh, I would love it. Okay, I think that this is so indicative of what’s going on now. And this is a poem that, actually I wrote 12 years ago. It’s called what we did not know, that we would pay for the foolish greed of others with our destiny, our own children, that we could fail the rich gifts given us by the Earth, the seasons, the mysteries of life, uncoiling by themselves, and not see their Messengers sent by the winds, the seas, the land, in gripping pain that we would ache for things we could not have but know them only in the courage of wise people. What we did not know was so small we could hold it in our hands and bring it to our hearts, the meaning of closeness and of truth.
Achim Nowak 38:34
I really I’m hearing it for the first time, but I love the title what we did not know, but I also like all of the different things that you list here for us. Yes, it also makes me think we’re recording this. And in 2025 the world seems completely insane. I’m talking to somebody part of the Gay Liberation Front. And so the insanity around really trying to gay people back into the closet in the United States, disempowering them. How do you, Perry, work through all that yourself, as somebody who has been on this journey for a very long time,
Perry Brass 39:17
I think you have to. And I’ve said this for years, one of the things I like so much about gay men and lesbians is that the smarter ones among us, and I hope I can count myself with that, realize you can’t do this alone. Yeah, there is a tribe. We have a tribalism to us, and this tribalism is extremely important for our own survival. It’s going to be even more important as Donald, as Donald Trump, our POS president, as his own stuff becomes more normalized, and that’s happening at an incredible rate. I can’t get over how fast it’s happening the. Thing as young people need to understand this isn’t normal. This is not normal. This is not something you can just say, well, this is the way things are. We’ve gotta go. Gotta get in step with it. We can’t be in step with you.
Achim Nowak 40:12
Mentioned you’re 77 what gets you out of bed in the morning? Where you go, Oh, this is important to me. This is what I want to do. This is where I want to put my energy. How do you decide what to do with yourself? Well,
Perry Brass 40:25
there’s a lot to do. I’ve been able to still have this artistic life that I like and a political life that I like. I’m involved with a dance company I love dance I think the thing really kind of gets me going is the realization that I’ve still got a lot to give this world and we need that. We need to know what we can give the world. In my book, I talked about the gay work. As gay men have important work to do, and one of the aspects of this work is to recognize the beauty of other men, our value as human beings, and this value is denigrated terribly now, and we see this also in the huge suicide level of young people. Young people in America are now killing themselves faster than automobile accidents. They’re killing themselves much, much more, they’re being killed by other people, which is a statistic that most people don’t realize. All you hear on the news about is homicide. You never hear about suicide. So we have this work, this works to save each other.
Achim Nowak 41:37
What do you know now? And I feel like you just answered part of them. Here is what, no, no, that couldn’t have one you said he went to San Francisco that would let others, gay people, to know, besides what you just mentioned, anything else come to mind? I
Perry Brass 41:56
think what I did not even glimpse in when I was 17 years old, living in San Francisco. Was that we had power. And I always tell my friends, in a very shocking way, that I admire politicians. I mean, I met Harvey Milk when he lived in New York. In the company of people that I like in politics, I give them a lot of respect. I think that the worst thing is when you are deprived of power, and that’s something that I had no idea when I was 17 years old. And I realize that now queer people, we still, despite Donald Trump and his ilk, we have a lot of power, and we need to use that power and come together, because only in coming together do you consolidate that power. You know, there’s an old saying among American Indians, you set out five fingers, and each one is alone and powerless. You set out a fist, and you’ve got power. So you’ve got to put these five fingers together.
Achim Nowak 43:02
There’s a lot of power and wisdom in your writing, and there’s a lot of work out there. So where would you like to direct our listeners to? Going, Gosh, I want to check out more of Perry’s writing. Where do I find his work? Where would you like to send them? Ah,
Perry Brass 43:18
well, you can certainly go to bookstores. You can certainly get stuff of mine on Amazon. You can get it at Barnes and Noble and get a lot of independent bookstores. They can order my books. My latest book is a life without money. I’m going to be I’m working on a new novel which I’m really excited about, and I hope that’ll be out in about a year, and it is a gay horror novel. Always like the idea of writing about something that scares the shit. Somebody who scares the shit out of me. So
Achim Nowak 43:47
the creative force in Barry brass is alive and well and speaking, I just want you to know that I appreciate you and I appreciate your work, but I appreciate all all the different things that make you and I, I’m glad we dipped our toes, and some of them know there’s more. Invite our listeners to find a work, read your work as intertwined with queer history in this country. So I invite our listeners to to read your work in a time when there are forces to want to make that history disappear.
Perry Brass 44:28
Oh yes. Achim,
Achim Nowak 44:29
thank
Perry Brass 44:31
you. Yeah, wonderful talking with you again.
Achim Nowak 44:37
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