All Human Wisdom, a new series by Perry Brass

“All human wisdom is summed up in two words; wait and hope.”
Alexandre Dumas Pere, last words in The Count of Monte Cristo.

People often feel that wisdom is something associated with age. Not true. Some of the smartest people I have ever known have been young. In fact, they got dumber as they got older because thinking that idiocy was the way to survival, and needing the protective coloring of crowds, they put aside their own important and native beliefs and became as passive and self-satisfied as the rest of the docile masses. Therefore, hold on to the wisdom of youth, but take it with a grain of learning, patience, experience, and even cunning.

Life. What do we mean by life? Is it simply existence, or something deeper and more meaningful and, of course, more satisfying? Life does mean that period of time when we are occupied with sustenance, with existence, with being alive, and with surviving and even overcoming numerous daily problems. But more important life is about being aware, about being present in the moment of existence. If life has a religious significance, and most of us believe it does, that significance is certainly of being aware, being conscious of who we are, what we are doing, and how it effects others and the world. This consciousness is what puts God in life. Therefore life without consciousness is pretty dead, although strictly speaking all of us know a lot of dead people walking around.

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Truckin’ at the Trucks

1970s picture of the trucks in the Village

I heard about the trucks my first summer in New York, in 1967. One of my older friends from Julius’s informed me that guys went to a certain street on the west side of the West Village “to suck cock. It’s sometimes called, ‘the Express,’” he informed me. So you might hear men say, “I’m taking the Express tonight.” Meaning, they were dispensing with all the folderol of going to the bars, and just getting down to business at the trucks. 

It’s kind of hard to imagine, in this age of the very yuppified West Village (we’re talking $7 mil duplex apartments on West Street) what the area was like when it was still working class, you could buy a whole building for $70,000 (the going rate in the mid-60s), and there were warehouses along the waterfront, which necessitated working loading docks for—what else?—trucks.

The interesting thing I always thought about the trucks was that they were left open at night after they were unloaded, so guys could play in them. I didn’t actually go to the trucks until somewhat later, after I had joined the Gay Liberation Front in 1969, when GLFers used to leaflet them. This was again another interesting aspect of “the trucks,” a generic term that specifically referred to these huge open empty Mack rigs where scores of guys went to congregate and have sex. (In other words, you had “the trucks” just like you had the “tubs,” another simple term for the baths.)

Anyway, another interesting aspect of the trucks was that lots of men went to them for social purposes as well as the obvious sexual one.

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Gay Pride, 2010

Original Marchers in front of the Stonewall Inn, June 27, 2010
(l to r:) Bob Spiegel, Roberto Camp, Rick Landman, Jim Fouratt, Mark Segal, and Perry Brass.
Back right: John Knoebel with the GLF Banner.
(photo courtesy: Mark Segal) 

Yesterday was the Gay Pride Parade in New York, and I marched in a contingent known as the First Marchers. We were men and women who had marched in the first gay pride march on June 28, 1970. The contingent was organized by one of my Gay Liberation Front brothers Rick Landman, who took it upon himself to organize us in last year’s march, the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, and this year for the 40th Anniversary of the Gay Pride Parade, which started out as the Christopher Street Liberation Day March to remember Stonewall.

We carried two banners: one provided by John Knoebel was a replica of the first banner GLF had carried in the first march; the other banner, provided by Mark Segal, publisher of Philadelphia Gay News, said, it all: “Original Marchers June 28, 1970. Christopher Street Gay Liberation Gay. Gay Liberation Front.”

Marching with this group, and these banners was a total joy. People cheered us and thanked us, and we cheered back and smiled, and sometimes cried remembering all those years between the first march and now, and who was there and who will never be here again.

I remember that first march very well, but remember even better the Gay Liberation Front meeting, in the spring of 1970, when Bob Kohler brought up an idea that had started with Craig Rodwell, the owner of Oscar Wilde Bookstore, to have such a march and to name it for Christopher Street, a street whose associations had become as clear and evident as other New York street names, like Broadway, Wall Street, Seventh Avenue, or Madison Avenue.

Perry Brass at the NYC Gay and Lesbian Center June 25, 2009

By Father Tony

The other day, while reading up on new QNY voice Perry Brass, I began to think that I recognized him. I looked into my Youtube archives and found this. I don't know if he's ever seen it.

QNY Welcomes A New Voice - Perry Brass

By Father Tony

On behalf of our growing QNY family, I'd like to welcome our newest member Perry Brass!

Perry is an accomplished author and well known speaker who moved to NYC in 1966 and was one of the earliest members of the Gay Liberation Front.

Please visit PerryBrass.com for a complete list of his many books and projects. His newest book is The Manly Art of Seduction. He has just begun his QNY series  Lost Gay New York.