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

I soon learned that even doing a small poetry book was much harder than I had anticipated: choosing which poems to include, their sequence, front and back cover material, and how the design of the book would sell both the book and the poetry inside. I also had to deal with printers (back in the days before POD), a designer, and the distribution of the book. Even getting a printer was daunting in 1990: many printers refused to handle “this kind of material,” especially if the cover was at all sexually or homoerotically suggestive. One of my fellow publisher friends told me flat out: “It would be a lot smarter to go with a neutral cover. You don’t want to be too obvious, and frankly, I think that hot covers on poetry books are out.”

Of course, his idea of a hot cover was a drawing; this was a photo, and there were no poetry books with covers this hot out there, the idea of which was either too daunting or too totally exciting. I decided to stick with Joe’s shot for the cover. It sold to the walls. By some sort of dumb accident I printed 3,000 copies. I didn’t know any better; but was later told that even big publishers are happy to sell 750 copies of poetry books, despite a print run of thousands. Sex-charge sold 2,500 copies within its first two years in print. The book became a phenomenon and I’m sure the cover had a lot to do with it. Gay men who’d never bought a book of poetry devoured it. The book was reviewed all over the place, including a glowing review in Dutch from Holland, and it was included in a German PhD thesis that said it was one of the few examples of sexual freedom in the United States.

My next several books had covers that were just as suggestive, although none of them would have made the general run of Harlequin books blush, except for the fact that (often) there were two shirtless men on the them, instead of one half-naked man ripping off the bodice of some young woman. None of the men were kissing, though, and I learned that to really stick heat in the sales, it was important that there be some kind of ambiguity in the “narrative” of the cover art. In other words, the men should look like they are attacking one another with unbridled lust, passion, savagery, hostility, fury, or any combination of the above. So I liked these images and they worked. The books I was putting out were successful, gay bookstores were selling thousands of them, and I became known for a kind of commercially workable book that most of the larger presses with merely a “gay line” would not touch; their salesmen would not sell books with covers this hot out in the hinterlands.

This allowed my books to be very comfortable in gay bookstores, and just squeak into Barnes and Noble where they were sold in larger urban stores, but probably not in some outposts out in Topeka. People were judging the books by the cover, and most of my gay male readers as well as hordes of female readers liked them.

Then something odd and discomforting happened about five years ago: I started to see that younger gay readers were now embarrassed by my book covers. They wanted images on their queer books that were blander, more Gap-khaki-oriented, more Dave Sedaris, more keeping with the (now) universal trend of “good-gay consumerism,” and at least a good country mile away from any sort of overt activism, confrontationalism, or unflinching evidence of deeper human involvement.

Mr. G. W. Bush and Mr. J. Ashcroft were swinging their axes in a right-shifting arc, and a huge number of kids were going along with it nicely, as if swept up in a vacuum. The worst example of the right-wing shift came when my website, www.perrybrass.com, was dropped after four years by PayPal, who declared that my covers “showing men touching each other” were obscene, and unless I took the images of these same covers off my site I could not do business with the behemoth. (I was not going to suddenly put T-shirts on my cover models and keep them from touching each other—and that was all they were doing: just touching, nothing else). But getting dropped by PayPal ended up costing me $1,000 my first year in credit card, shopping cart, and banker’s fees, which taught me a lesson: unless you run a XXX porn site, literature on the Web doesn’t pay.

About a year later, after being sited numerously in the Media for censoring the 400 sites they had dropped (for such infractions as selling penis-shaped macaroni: I am not making this one up), PayPal, in one of the coldest letters ever penned by a human hand, told me they were willing to reinstate me. (I’ve maintained a Go-f*ck-Yourself attitude toward the beloved PayPal ever since).

Here, of course, we do have the judging-the-book-by-its-cover attitude totally up the wazoo; still I was suffered to have my upfront covers thrown at me even worse, when my latest book was mauled in Lambda Book Report, one of the last vestiges of queer book reviewing left in America, in its Winter, 2008 issue. Rose Fox, a young woman I gather, and the Sci-Fi/Fantasy book review editor of Publisher’s Weekly, reviewed Carnal Sacraments, my latest novel.

I knew something was awry when Ms Fox did an online interview with me several months before the piece appeared, and the first question she asked was not about the characters, setting, premise, or plot of the book, but about the cover.

Part III, Tomorrow.

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