Perry Brass: 12 Seductive Gifts for Christmas

                                                                                 Image courtesy of MySpace. 

“Santa baby, slip a sable under the tree, for me.”

I know Christmas is a drag. There are all these rituals you have to do, like office parties and get-togethers with people you’d rather not get together with, and presents you have to accept from your Aunt Yetta that came either from the bargain basement section of Filene’s Basement (sad, ain’t it that F’s B is going out of business: what will Yetta do?), or the aisles of Walmart, when what you really want to do is . . . of course, get laid.

I mean, like who wouldn’t want to spend the holidays in bed with a gorgeous guy? Is there any red-blooded American who’d feel differently? Even gorgeous straight guys want to spend the holidays in bed with a gorgeous guy—namely themselves—if they could find the right person to accompany that idea.

So, with this in mind, I have solicited my own humpy Santa to come up with 12 scrumptious presents for the 12 days of Christmas. You can tailor this list a bit and cut it down to 8 for the 8 days of Hanukah, but the idea is basically the same: unwrapping something that foreplays further unwrapping. And all of this comes from the author of The Manly Art of Seduction , so of course I know what a seductive present should be like.

1) A book of poems. Start here. A good book would be something like Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, or Perry Brass (The Lover of My Soul , which has a genuinely seductive poem called “The Man Sucked Me Off in San Francisco”; who could ask for anything more?), or Gavin Dillard, the Naked Poet. You can find these books and more at most lgbt bookstores, or even Barnes and Noble. But I prefer you patronize your own seductive neighborhood booksmith. Now, after you unwrap the poems, read them in bed. And if he has a favorite poem, read it to him between recitals of licking him all over.

2) A black cashmere sweater. Nothing looks better on a man, aside from chest hair, than black cashmere. My favorite cashmere sweaters come from Brooks Brothers (it’s a fatal weakness; I admit it). But you can get other cashmere variations at J. Crew or some discount place (OK, back to Filenes, but they’re going under . . . ). The point is, as soon as it comes out the box, put it on him and nothing else. Few things look as good on any guys as just a black cashmere sweater. Now, if you can’t/won’t spring for cashmere, then get a black merino wool sweater, but I have to warn you: anything other than cashmere may make his nipples become erect fast. Golly. How awful. But isn’t that the reason hot Guido-type guys have been wearing tight sweaters with nothing under them since the time of Michelangelo?

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Alexander McQueen at the Metropolitan Museum

It’s hard to imagine that at one time not that along ago, New York was a city awash in fashion, in its own sense of New York style and feeling. Now you walk up Fifth Avenue, and “style” is the Hollister store, the NBA store, H & M, and other dreary corporate dreck-sellers, where the important thing is selling not a look or feeling but the shopping bag that the stuff comes in.

But New York, especially lost gay New York was all about fashion; this sense that you felt fantastic, and sexy, so everything you put on felt that way too—and you could be outrageous with it. One incarnation of this was cranberry red velvet jeans. It seemed that in 1968 they were all over the place. You saw men in them and women in them; they were of a red of such unabashed intensity that it stopped traffic on the street, so walking down New York avenues became like Morse Code: lots of stops and dashes, just looking at this amazing color stretched across the thighs and asses of so many good-looking people. Fashion seer Diana Vreeland once said that the two most stylish periods of American life were the 1920s and the 1960s: she was right. There was this sense of outrage and also just the right amount of money running around—you need money. Fashion needs money, but even more it needs a sense of permission, something that Right-Wing gorgons like Michelle Bachman want to choke the hell out of.

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, still running at the Metropolitan Museum reminded me of this full flowering of youth and excess that is now barely glimpsable. The show, the most popular in the history of the Metropolitan Museum, is both wondrous and sad.

(photo: Alexander McQueen, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: George Platt Lynes at Throckmorton Fine Arts

George Platt Lynes, courtesy Throckmorton Fine Arts

We now live very much in the Age of George Platt Lynes, a miraculously queer photographer who died in 1955 at the age of 48 of lung cancer. Whenever you see a stop-in-your-tracks image of a young, well-built, sexually enticing man in an isolated setting—in other words, what you’re looking at is the man, either alone or with another man, nude or with as few clothes on as possible, and that’s it—you’re staring at a George Platt Lynes image.

It can be a gym-sleek ad for GNC, a hot fashion shot for Armani, one of those Abercrombie & Fitch creatures dripping innocent sweat and sex, 2-Xist or Calvin Klein, Dolce and Gabbana, or Dolce and anything: all George Platt Lynes. He did it first, and better, and he knew how to knock your eyes out with a kind of sweet effortlessness that took a genuine dollop of genius to create.

Who was he, and how did he do it at a time when you could not even send nude shots of the men he photographed through the mails without risking arrest?

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Doric Wilson

Doric Wilson, 1962, at the Caffe Cino, courtesy doricwilson.com

Doric Wilson died last Saturday, May 7, at the age of 72. The exact time and cause is at the present unknown, but he died in his apartment at roughly the same time as a new play by Joshua Conkel called “I’m Gonna Destroy You” was being read by TOSOS II, Doric’s own glbt theatre enterprise, as part of the Robert Chesley/Jane Chambers Playwrights Project. I know: this last sentence was a mouthful, but it seems like every word in it (Bob Chesley, a wonderful, early HIV-killed friend of mine; Jane Chambers: “Last Summer at Bluefish Cove”; TOSOS—The Other Side of Silence, Doric’s bang-up of a name) brings back some part of Lost Gay New York to me, and now Doric Wilson is definitely a piece of it. Lost for us, or maybe not. Because as a playwright you live on, and Doric will.

He was an amazing character: delightful, funny as hell, completely irreverent, crusty, difficult at times, but incredibly sweet and affectionate. I’d known him for so long that I can’t remember not knowing him. I think we met sometime during the Gay Activists Alliance era—or possibly even earlier when I’m sure I panted after him. He was a tall, lean, gorgeously handsome red head, and he moved beautifully like a dancer. Years later, after he had gone through health problems and gained a lot of weight and lost the red hair I kept wanting to see that young man inside him. I knew he was there, and both Doric and I missed him. But he was always bubbling with life and discovering new things, which is what keeps us moving, changing, and young inside. He loved opera, all forms of theatre (including tending bar, one of the great forms of theatre and acting), plays and writing them, and keeping gay theater alive in New York (and elsewhere).

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Lance Loud

Picture of Lance Loud courtesy FindaGrave.com

I was blithely watching “Royal Wedding” the Saturday night before Easter on Channel 13, PBS—one of those vintage movies where the cast (Fred Astaire, Jane Powell, and the ever-tasty Peter Lawford) make the drivelly content worthwhile, when, at the end of it, Neal Shapiro, president of 13 made an amazing announcement: It was going to air the entire run of “An American Family,” all 12 episodes of it, that night. This had not been done in 20 years, and I somehow vaguely remembered that happening: just watching it with my jaw dropping in sheer astonishment. I’m not sure if they did it as a one-gulp marathon back then, but here it was: an entire night of the Pat and Bill Loud Show, with of course their five children in tow, the most unforgettable one being their eldest Lance.

So, although my eyelids were getting very heavy, I watched until the screen went blank, or I did, and had to go to sleep. It was like Proust’s dipping the madeleine into the lime-flower tea, a total recall of a time that is so far back as to seem fictional, and yet so utterly delectable in its youthful perfection (as well as imperfections) that all I could think of was: God, now a whole new generation of kids will want to dive headfirst into an Early Seventies revival: the wonderful, body-fitting clothes, the music, the attitudes, the flowery smell and feeling of it. And at the center of it, glowed Lance and his mother Pat, with a relationship that was so Oedipal, so Hamlet-and-Gertrude, that it shocked the living crap out of mainstream America (and even blasé New York) when it was first aired on PBS in 1973.

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Alvin Baltrop at Third Streaming on Green Street

                                               Alvin Baltrop: Men at the Piers, courtesy Third Streaming Gallery

I remember Alvin Baltrop well; I met him several times at the old Hudson River piers down in the Village that are no more. The piers had been part and property of the great, venerable steamship lines that crossed the Atlantic to Europe and back, back when Cole Porter went with his millionaire wife and an entourage of servants, Louis Vuitton luggage, and clandestine boyfriends. Cole Porter went with the Vanderbilts and their cousins the Whitneys, and all the other rich people who knew each other and had fun together. For about a decade or so, during the 70s and into the 80s, gay men in New York were having fun at the hulking remains of the same piers, after the lower Village part of the West Side Highway that had fed the piers into the city was closed for safety reasons. The piers were immense queer playgrounds and the canvas for many artists and the material for writers like myself. I started going to them in the fall of 1974, after I had spent a summer in Provincetown and one of my NY friends told me that he’d never been to anything like them.

He was right: for a sheer expanse of nakedness in the city, there were nothing like them, nor would there be again.

Perry Brass: All Human Wisdom: Revisiting Angels

picture courtesy Signature Theatre Company

“All human wisdom is summed up in two words; wait and hope.”

Alexandre Dumas Pere, last words in The Count of Monte Cristo.

My partner and I and another friend went to see the revival of Ton Kushner’s Angels in America at the Signature Theatre last night; my partner actually sat through both parts in one day, seeing Part One (“Millennium Approaches”) in the afternoon and then staying with us for Part Two (“Perestroika”) in the evening: an almost Wagnerian day of theater in the sheer exhaustion of concentration it takes.
Altogether, it was seven hours of sitting, so he could have flown to London in that amount of time, with little spurts of getting up to go to the bathroom. We did have dinner in between, so it was kind of like the way Eugene O’Neal’s 4-hour play “Strange Interlude” used to be staged, with a dinner break between the middle acts. But, again, Tony Kushner blows “Strange Interlude” out of the water: Eugene O’Neil must be choking on envy someplace, because, sadly enough, everything that he ever wanted to do, or be, or say but couldn’t is in Angels in America. We had both seen the original production of the first part when the plays were originally done on Broadway. I was blown away by the ending then of Part One, but since we actually saw on its last day of its Broadway run, there was no way to see Part Two. So I was all set to see how Angels ends, and I did. 

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Go See “Making the Boys”

                                                                                 Original cast picture from The Boys in the Band

Last Friday night was I lucky enough to attend a special showing at the Quad Theatre on W. 13th Street in the Village, of Making the Boys, Crayton Robey’s documentary about the creation of The Boys in the Band, Mart Crowley's famous play about a gay birthday party where almost everything hangs out. 

This was really Lost Gay New York, and a keyhole into a world I knew only too well. It’s a wonderful movie, very moving at times, a bit over-long (Robey tries to attach everything gay, cultural, New York, American, queerish, etc. to The Boys in the Band; sometimes it sticks and sometimes it just doesn’t.), but ultimately very rewarding whether you were a life-time fan of the play, or like me, someone for whom the play with its bitchiness and bitterness, held a lot of repulsion and embarrassment, because afterall, aren’t we embarrassed by the truth? And The Boys in the Band is the truth. It’s not the only truth by a long shot, but all of us—OK, I know who you are out there—have been to a party at some time in our lives that ends up with drinking too much, saying too much, and hurting others too much, and we’ve lived to tell the tale. Mart Crowley did live, and told us some things that have taken me a lifetime to understand.

Making the Boys does something that is really important, although it doesn’t always get the message right, at least by me. It sees the most important aspect of the play being that moment when Michael, the host of the party (and I hope I have this speaker right) makes what was, in 1968, a truly life-changing statement: “You are a homosexual, and nothing you do will change that. You were born a homosexual and you will die one.”

Perry Brass: That Rock and That Hard Place Finally Meet at the LGBT Center

                                                                             LGBT Center, 208 West 13th Street

It began fairly innocently enough: a group called Siege Busters, composed of a few people (I gather) ardently against the Israeli blockade of Hamas-led Gaza, wanted to have a party (or program) at the LGBT Community Center on West 13th Street and they wanted to call it “Anti-Israeli Apartheid Week.” Siege Busters had actually met at the Center before, and the person in the Center office responsible for booking rooms, in the Center’s long-standing tradition of inclusiveness (which it actually has, despite some posturing by Center critics to the contrary) booked the room.

News of the meeting/party was put up on the Center’s website, and from there all heck broke loose. Several well-placed and well-heeled supporters of the Center, which it needs, because, after all, the Center is in New York and not Nebraska, went into a screaming fit. They organized a phone blitz on the Center’s staff, threatening the new ED of the Center, Glenda Testone, and other staff members, that if this offense to Israel were allowed to take place, they would “reconsider” all of their past support for the Center and cut off every penny to it in the future. 

Primary among them was porn-star entrepeneur Michael Lucas, who ran an email blast to his several thousand nearest-and-dearest asking them to “Boycott the LGBT Center,” stating of course that Israel is America’s only democratic ally in the Middle East (no lie) and that only in Israel are gays and lesbians given any real chance for personal freedom and freedom from injury and possible death, as they are in the rest of the Arab-Moslem world. (Again, no lie: you can slice this and dice it as many ways as you wish, but it is the unfortunate truth.)

Perry Brass: David Kato: One Death Makes A Huge Difference

                                                                  (picture by Steve Parelli, Other Sheep)

Two weeks ago, on a Wednesday, January, 26, 2011, a high school teacher named David Kato was murdered in his small house in a rundown section of Kampala, the capital of Uganda. His skull was bashed in by a hammer attack, and he died shortly afterward in a hospital. There have been a few theories (usually trying to justify it) about his death, like it was simply a garden-variety robbery, that his attacker had not broken open any doors, so he was probably known to Kato, that it was anything except a homophobic execution, which it doesn’t take a lot of horse sense to see it was.

Kato was a leader in SMUG (Sexual Minorities Uganda), and literally had a price on his head in this large country in East Africa which has become known as one of the most homophobic environments in the world.

First, because Kato’s name, picture, and address were published in October, 2010, in a revolting article in a tabloid, supermarket-style magazine called “Rolling Stone,” that reached 2,000 people in print (print in Africa is often passed around to dozens of readers, so it might have reached 10 or 20 times more readers).

The headline for the Rolling Stone article announced: ONE HUNDRED PICTURES OF UGANDA’S TOP HOMOS LEAKED.

This Day In Gay History

For the past year or so, sometimes with a few interruptions, Bo Young and Dan Vera of the White Crane Institute, the publisher of the venerable White Crane Journal, have been putting out an online column called "This Day In Gay History."

It is fantastic. Truly amazing. Not just because it's informative—there have been a lot of glosses on this topic over the years, and many of them never get too far away from Madonna's birthday—but because it's such a passionate assertion of what I have called for ages "gay tribalism." This is the idea that there is an invisible cord running through the soul and spine of queer men and women that links us. Christopher Isherwood referred to this as "our kind," as in his wonderful book Christopher and His Kind.

This does not mean that we all have something in common, like Judy Garland (OK, maybe we do all have her; who can look at Meet Me In St. Louis or The Wizard of Oz all the way without tearing up?) but that we have an understandable, common core of sensibilities and feelings that we can tap into and that are indeed the real "gay roots." I love this idea; it feeds me every day. This is our own family, and it has sustained me all my life. It is seen in a line of glbt writers, thinkers, acters and actors, explorers, scientists, martyrs, lovers, fighters, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, philosophers, artists, dressmakers and artisans, and just plain common folk who were brave enough either to come out or not be hidden totally at a time when hiding was forced on us.

So get to This Day in Gay History. Bo and Dan run it on the White Crane website, and it also runs on their FaceBook page. You can reach it at:

http://www.facebook.com/l/e4fbbh-zovzPFisRD3_u7nPB03A;GayWisdom.org 


And let them know how much it means to you. 

All Human Wisdom, a new series by Perry Brass: "Men"

“All human wisdom is summed up in two words; wait and hope.”

Alexandre Dumas Pere, last words in The Count of Monte Cristo.

Men. 

Men of late have taken a horrible rap in this life. Testosterone, aggression, and every kind of gross stupidity and wild-hair-up-the-ass chauvinism have been linked to them. Everything they do is suspect, and linked either to a crime or a social misdemeanor. They are out there alone, unstable, and barely able to make a living in this unbrave new world where neatness counts, “style” is looking exactly like every other stylish person, and labeled as either a sports-nut lughead, a vacuous yuppy, or an airhead pansy. Dad, who used to know best, is gone. He was thrown out of the house after his company was sold from under him, even though it was no fault of his own; he’s feeling utterless powerless (see “God” in next episodes). So unless he’s bringing in a secure, regular, and always increasing paycheck he might as well fly off to the Moon. Our consumer culture is now geared 90% toward women who do that much of the actual buying. If you look at TV, it’s about shampoo, hair coloring, Maybelene mascara, and how to make a 30-ton SUV can look feminine enough for a woman who will have the ultimate say in its purchase.

Man—as the silent ballast, bastion, balance, and security of the world—is over.

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: Sunday in Lost Gay New York

Perry Brass hangs out in Southhampton, 1976. Note: Mark Spitz mustache.

Sometime in the mid-60s and into the 1970s, Sunday became “the” gay day. I know, the idea sounds a bit crazy. Why would God’s day, once dedicated to church, family, bad food, and other mortifications of the flesh become queer as 3-legged goose? I think there are lots of solid reasons why. A few would be:

By the mid-60s and especially by the mid-70s, there was enough of an urban gay culture that a lot of men, myself among them, started to really resent the fact that they could not come out at work. In the 50s, your greatest hope was not only that you’d never be out at work, but that no one on American soil got a whiff of what you did in your bedroom. Or any other places. But in the next decade or so, it became apparent that work = closet was miserable. Pure shit. The weekends were for you (and many of my friends actually began their weekends on Thursday nights, knowing that they could coast through Friday if they had to) and Sunday was the last day you had to be your real self.

After that, it was indentured servitude inside the closet for most guys.

There was also the idea that Sunday was for you and your friends. It might turn romantic, especially at the bars that offered free buffets on Sundays (more about that later), but staying overnight Sunday with a new friend (or “trick,” not a word I’m crazy about if you read my book How to Survive Your Own Gay Life, but it works, too) was often not in anyone’s cards—which meant that Sunday’s trick could turn even more romantic because you might make another date with him, if you’d not had enough of him Sunday evening.

So Sunday in New York became this great gay-licious holiday, and there were so many ways to do it, depending on where you lived and at what point in the calendar you did it.

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: Lost Gay New York: Riis Park, a.k.a, “Screech Beach.”

Perry Brass and his sister Nancy at Riis Park, early 70s. 

My first summer in my new apartment in the East Village, 1967, I learned how to get to Riis Park, the gay beach in New York, known affectionately as “Screech Beach.” At that point, there were three places to go by the water in New York and be queer: Fire Island, difficult to get to; the Hampton, extremely snot-nosy and not yet invaded by share-houses; and "Screech." Riis was a small slice of the Rockaways, bordered by Belle Harbor, Queens. You got there using the subway and a bus, so it was utterly democratic. Much of Riis at that time was still very old-school Queens-Jewish, until you got to Bay One and Bay Two, two sections divided by jetties that had somehow been colonized by queer factions. Even these had designations: one part was very black and tough working-class lesbian, the other was for white guys, with a section for the lesbian allies of white guys.

Named for Jacob Riis, a pioneering photojournalist from the first decades of the twentieth century who captured tenement life in New York in a famous study called “How the Other Half Lives,” Riis was designed by Robert Moses as “the people’s beach,” and has a landmark Art Deco bathhouse, similar to its larger cousin at Jones Beach on Long Island, another Robert Moses gift to New York. Riis at the time of its building had the largest parking lot in the world, hard to believe but true. The park was designed to give working class New Yorkers a seaside playland of their own, since they couldn’t swim on the largely private beaches of Long Island and New Jersey.

What made Riis interesting was that it was extremely friendly. You could easily talk to 20 or 30 guys on the beach. Just being there was an act of defiance, and the cops regularly patrolled the boardwalk and sand to make sure no hanky-panky was going on. Zeroed in were guys who wore bathing suits that showed the cracks of their butts; you could be arrested for this, and hauled off in a paddy wagon. I actually saw this happen several times, and made sure that my suits covered this backside cleavage. Usually the guilty parties were either black or Latino, and their arrest by the cops would also be accompanied by the drama of their friends hissing and screaming at the police.

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Love at First Sight & The Walk Between the East & West Village

Peter Orlovsky & Allen Ginsberg, mid-60s.By Richard Avedon 

About six weeks after I moved into Jerry Borensky’s apartment in the East Village (still trying very hard to escape Borensky’s constant efforts to get into 19-year-old pants), I was at Julius’s one very packed Friday night. Suddenly from the depth of the crowd in the back of the bar, a young man emerged uttering the oldest pick-up line in the human race:

“Don’t I know you from some place?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. I looked at him. He was about six-foot-one, handsomely built, with very sweet regular features, blue-green eyes, dark silky hair, and a deep voice. I didn’t care where he knew me from; I smiled and he smiled back. But his next question was more direct.

“Can I go home with you?”

I did a slight double-take. I was used to men trying to pick me up—when you’re nineteen and been sneaking into gay bars since you were seventeen, you expect it. But this was fast. He was slightly older than I, maybe twenty-three.

I just shrugged. “Sure.”

So we left Julius’s, and I realized that I didn’t know his name, so he told me.

 
“Dick.”

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Riis Park, and DADT

Perry Brass in May, Battery Park City.

            

My friend Toby Grace, whom I adore and who is the editor of Out in Jersey, one of my favorite gay papers, and one of its founders, has an interesting weblog on WordPress called, “The End of DADT - The Begining Of The Right to Die For Insanity,”  in which basically he iterates all the reasons why beautiful young gay men should stay out of the service, and by extension, out of war. He’s right: war is not just hell, it’s Shit & Hell. The best thing, in my opinion, ever said about war was from Oscar Wilde. The divine Oscar said: “As long as men feel that war is evil, they will continue doing it. It is only when they realize that it is downright vulgar that will they stop.”

War is downright vulgar. It’s sloppy, ugly, ruthless, and goes directly to the mangled corpse of the human soul.

It’s the game where all rules are off. Which is probably why at heart humans love war. They adore it. It goes back to those scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 when our near-chimp ancestors duked it out with sticks, stones, and bones.

The only problem is that war has outstripped our capacity to control it. We can’t control war no more. (Forget about “I ain’t gonna study war no more!”—that only worked in a Pete Seeger song.)

Perry Brass: Lost Gay New York: Uptown and Downtown: Caffe Cino and The Old Reliable

Author Perry Brass, 1971

In October of 1966, after I had been in New York only 3 months, and was struggling with a dirt-pay job as a messenger at an art studio and going to art school at night at Cooper Union, my 42-year-old roommate on Central Park West Bob Schwiller asked me to sit down for “the talk.”

“I’m gonna have to ask you to leave,” he announced.

I was surprised.

“Why?”

“I don’t like your attitude,” he said.

“Whaaa?”

I was in disbelief. I had thought I had a good attitude. At least as far as I could see, it was good. For a 19-year-old kid it seemed good. I was a polite Southerner and most people saw that. New York had been difficult for me to get used to: it was crowded, abrasive, and pushy. I was not and didn’t want to be.

“Your attitude. You think you’re better than other people. I can tell it. You’ve been rude to my friends. Damn snotty if you ask me. And you don’t bring guys home. Wha’s th’ matter? Think you’re too good for guys on Central Park West?”

I tried to catch my breath. This came as a shock; I’d felt so alone in New York and now I’d be thrown back into the cold again.