Judging a Book by Its Cover, and Then Some, Part I
by Perry Brass

The story of how I started publishing my own books is curious, but hardly surprising to most people who fall into publishing, which isn’t known as the “accidental profession” for nothing. Up until about a decade ago when New Media became an accessory of accumulating teenage hormones, hardly anyone at twelve-and-a-half declared, “I want to be a publisher when I grow up!”

By 1990, I had been writing poetry since the Year Gimmel, as the Jews say (that’s for about twenty years), and by many standards had some success at it. I had been involved with the creation of a major poetry magazine, “Mouth of the Dragon,” the first ‘zine devoted exclusively to the poetry of gay men, which was gestated in my living room in Hell’s Kitchen in 1973; I was included in the world’s first anthology of gay poetry, The Male Muse, and had been published in enough magazines and collections that a growing number of people thought of me as “Perry Brass, the poet.”

(I know that also means, as in, “starving to death,” but it’s a nice way to be thought of when you’re young and romantic.)

So after a number of dry runs (or heaves) at it, I decided to publish a volume of poetry of my very own; the only problem was I had no idea how such a thing was done. I mean: do you just send off a “sheaf” of verses to people who publish poetry; do you schmooze and wine with other poets; or do you send off letters of inquiry to numerous iddy-bitty presses and hope one that already recognizes your name will say, “Sure ‘nuff, let’s see what you got”?

I did all of these things and got nowhere.

Zippo. Nada. Over and over again.

At the same time, by the late 80s, I was becoming more known as a writer through the graces of numerous small magazines and the editors thereof, who “loved” me but were still not going to publish a book of mine. Concurrently in New York, an interesting phenomenon was taking place: the birth of commercial queer photography. Suddenly, gay photography, as witness by the rocketing valuation of prints by photographers like Robert Mapplethorpe, Joel-Peter Witkin, Duane Michaels, and Arthur Tress was becoming hot enough to gouge a pocket-deep presence in the New York art world. A major center of this was Wessel-O’Connor Gallery, which had opened on lower Broadway in a beautiful, well-designed space on an upper floor of a classy building. Before that time, to see pictures of naked men you had to rattle up a freight elevator to a dingy loft, with rodents scampering at your feet. Now you could walk into a marble lobby, press a button and step right up to see gorgeous men nicely framed, with serious price tags attached to them.

Since I was also doing journalism at the time, I became friendly with John Wessel, the co-head of Wessel-O’Connor, and after a visit to his gallery had a reasonable idea: why not combine gay poetry (mine) with delicious pictures of guys (theirs). I suggested this idea to John, and he said, immediately, and generously, “I’ll let you have any images in our gallery [for a very small fee].”

I was elated. No one had done this kind of thing at that point; so, being naive enough, I sent out several query letters to the newer gay presses that were also emerging, with this proposition: a volume combining these beautiful, now emerging images, with poetry. And I got back the usual, very standard answer: No.

As in, don’t even think about it.

(Go screw yourself, nicely; etc. etc.)

I was crushed—momentarily. The idea seemed commercial enough, even for poetry, which at the time was leaving its customary cloister and becoming popular, especially with gay audiences, both male and female, because often, only in poetry could you be so unashamedly open about feelings so normally repressed.

Then I had one of those rock-out-of-heaven-and-plunk-on-the-noggin ideas: I’d publish the book myself. OK, I mean I’d never published a book, had no idea how to do it, but had lots of friends who were published writers, and a few of them had, in turn, started presses (who would not publish me: lesson learned). But I turned to them for encouragement and moral support and they said, “Wow! Great! Go to it! It’s no skin off our behinds, and we’re looking for more publishers anyway.” The idea being that gay bookstores were, in turn, starting to pop up, and the bookstores were looking for more product (i.e., books), so . . . “this gives us a little more to throw at ‘em.”

Now I could go to John Wessel and say, “I’ve got the book, let’s look at what we can put in it.” I was immediately drawn to a photographer from Detroit named Joe Ziolkowsky, a young, extremely talented guy, then struggling in New York, who did nudes with such an elegant classical refinement, they were unsettling. They did not look like statuary come to life but more like men turned into statues and still deliciously touchable. John brokered the use of three images from Joe including an incendiary, bluntly powerful cover image of a man hanging upside down, face turned away. I decided to call the book, Sex-charge, after a poem I hadn’t even written yet, and we were now off to the races.

Part II, Tomorrow.

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