THINK TANK | Perry Brass Revisited « Urban Molecule

THINK TANK | Perry Brass Revisited

10Jun08

The following is a re-release of Perry Brass’s interview, run in February in PDF format.

UM: The LGBT community recently celebrated the life of activist and revolutionary Jack Nichols with the release of his biography, written by Louis Campbell. You knew Jack personally. Some sources go so far as to suggest that Jack successfully petitioned the APA to rescind the categorizing of homosexuality as a mental illness. That’s no small feat.

PB: I don’t know if Jack did “successfully petition the APA to rescind the category of homosexuality as a mental illness.” I think he opened up the question, but several people were involved in it, notably Evelyn Hooker, John Money, among others. I haven’t read Louis Campbell’s book, so I don’t know what he wrote about that.

UM: Jack committed his life to combating the Goliath of ignorance, yet he never considered himself a leader. According to Cambell, “pioneer” was the label he was most comfortable with.

PB: I think that Jack had this huge belief in himself that was separate from his “earthly” role. He never achieved a lot of “success” in his worldly life, even though he was very, very famous at one point. In fact, he and Liege were the most famous gay couple in America for several years in the 1970s, when they were constantly photographed, followed, interviewed. Then America went into its celebrity “culture” infatuation, when Jack was bumped off the interest list of most gay publications—he was not Elton John, etc. He never made any money as an activist; in fact, he was often miffed that other people became professional activists, while he had to work as a hotel clerk to keep himself alive. But he also liked the outsiderness of his role, and as he got older, he became an amazingly radical person—much more so, I think, than he was in the 1970s.

UM: Might Jack have considered himself as David, not insignificant, but a “lesser value” gaining power through faith and determination?

PB: What astounds me about Jack was his role and persona in the 50s and 60s, when he was a very young man: he was literally movie-star handsome, extremely intelligent, and self-generated. He just literally produced himself, but with help from his grandfather, his mother, perhaps his father, and Frank Kameny. He was an absolutely amazing human being.

During the 70s, I saw Jack and Liege everywhere, and occasionally spoke with Jack, but was not close to him. I became very close to him when he became the editor of GayToday, and I worked for him for about 7 years as a writer. We spoke often on the phone, emailed often, and I saw him a few times in NY. He invited me to visit him in Florida, and I’m afraid I never did—I wish now that I had.

UM: It’s interesting that you talk about Jack’s persona in the 50s and 60s. It might be difficult for the current generation to imagine what it was like to be gay 50 years ago. I see straight tolerance of the LGBT community growing more and more (reflected in the media, to a certain degree in politics, in the smiles of pedestrians across the street as partners laugh and hold hands). Urban life may in a sense “sequester” that acceptance for one reason or another. Do you feel this tolerance differs in metropolitan vs. rural and suburban areas?

PB: It differs hugely, and in some places hardly exists at all. It differs I’m sure from the West Village in Manhattan to Kingsbridge in the Bronx, near where I live, where a Latino gay man was severely beaten up last year after leaving a Jack LaLanne gym. It differs from Atlanta, Georgia, which is fairly progressive in the South to Birmingham, AL, which is slightly smaller than Atlanta, but extremely Christian conservative. Cities have long offered tolerance as a trade-off for their anonymity and (perceived) lack of caring.

Having grown up in the Deep South in the 50s and 60s, I learned that when people perceive that everyone shares their own values, there is more hearty “openness” of manner, but less tolerance. We now have in many urban areas no perception of shared values, so there is more surface tolerance, and also more resentment which often explodes into violence, like the kind Kevin Aviance was shown in the East Village a year or so ago, when he was beaten up to the point of hospitalization.

UM: How do you feel Jack Nichols effectively “produced” himself? Is there some sort of recipe for integrating yourself fearlessly into society, for making a bold statement about who you are and what or who you want to fight for?

PB: I’m not sure how Jack “produced” himself, except through the support, like I said, of his grandfather, a Scots minister, and his mother, who was extremely supportive of him, as well as his father, who seems to be absent from his story (he did work for the FBI, and insisted that Jack use a pseudonym early in his writings), but his father might have had a real streak of independence, of assertiveness, of raw character that Jack might have inherited. I know that I inherited from my own father my extremely romantic feelings, my desire for adventure, my attachment to friendship, and probably my attachment to men. I think Jack is one of those great mysteries, and I told him so often; l asked him often the same question, and he always said, “I was taught to believe in myself.”

The fact that he could accept that belief in himself, early on, is remarkable. Many people are taught to believe in themselves, but don’t really understand that until much later. He was also a deliciously imaginative person, and he liked sex; he thought that sexuality and touching, especially men touching each other even in a non-sexual way, was good. He believed in the deep-seated value of people, and of men, in a very Greek, maybe even pagan way. Today men are usually seen only as having the value assigned to them by role, assets, salaries, and positions. Jack rejected that early on. There is something truly spiritual about that, even though Jack always asserted his own atheism. But I always felt that under his atheism was a touching spirituality—he loved poetry and stories—that many “religious” people lack.

UM: Taking into account this perception of shared values, could spreading tolerance and celebrating diversity be about emphasizing a shared value of spirituality?

PB: Yes, in the sense that we all have common stories, and that LGBT people have too long had their stories repressed, distorted, or falsified. In fact, one of the central issues of our lives is that often we have been too ashamed even to tell our stories or believe that we had them. I am not sure, though, that tolerance is a part of what now describes itself, too often, as “spiritual,” and one of the aspects of all organized (and even disorganized religions) is exclusion and finding parameters of belief. Even LGBT religious groups have this problem, with gay Catholics not wanting to open themselves to gay Jews, etc. But our own spirituality, I feel, stems from us all being strangers, orphans, and cast-offs desiring some space for shelter. This is one of the central myths of both Judaism and Christianity and probably Islam, too.

UM: So, just to clarify for our readers, are you against organized religion?

PB: No, not especially. I think all religion eventually becomes organized; maybe it’s part of human nature and the nature of religion. I have noticed though that in many gay spiritual circles, as the level of “spirituality” goes up, the level of exclusion does, too. I had a pretty spirited discussion once with Christian de la Huerta, the author of Coming Out Spiritually, when he said, quite seriously, that he thought that men who went to gay bars were spiritually retarded, or “in the dark.” I told him I could not imagine classing an entire group of men, some of whom really desire a spiritual life, that way, just because they go to gay bars.

I have been severely criticized by some gay religious people for the degree of sexuality in my writing; that I have mixed sexuality and spirituality, which D. H. Lawrence did, beautifully, embarrasses them. I feel that Lawrence is really my antecedent, along with Whitman—both of them great writers of the body and spirit. A lot of people want to dismiss me as a pornographer, and I accept that label, just like John Preston did, but it really says more about their values than my own.

UM: Perhaps it’s the human need for categorizing (nature or nurture?) that leads to exclusion, elitism, a distorted moral order. Faith can be such an abstract for so many, perhaps they feel that “narrowing the field” is comfortable, predictable. So much in fact, they adopt it as philosophy, and feel some sort of resolve. How did Jack Nichols view religion? Do you think he would have come to the same conclusions?

PB: Jack viewed religion very negatively—he was very proud of being virtually a life-long atheist, even though he organized one of the first organizations to work toward gay liberation, San Francisco’s Panel on Religion and the Homosexual, several years before Stonewall. But Jack was also very much a child of the 60s and 70s, when having a “meta-story,” a larger story in which to fit your life and which you could use to connect with other people, was very important. He found this story in the gay story, the story of leaving home, finding peers and love, finding an identity. For many people, unfortunately, this meta-story has become a religious one, bounded by narrow religious strictures. So we have the strange story of younger gay people who are more conservative, more given to religious doubts and conflicts, than kids were in my generation, who were discovering their own gay story and actively rebelling against society to make that story work.

UM: It would seem that Jack was one of those individuals who didn’t need religion to find his purpose, to affect positive change in society. Do you see conservatism growing in the young queer generation? If so, what might that mean for activism, for the gay rights movement?

PB: Very much. I used to be puzzled by it, when I met men who were 25 and more conservative than I was several decades earlier. I now see it as the usual thing of forgetting the past and also not wanting to deal with the real problems of the present, but escaping into a fantasy of the past, of the “golden 1950s,” for instance, when it seemed that everything was Leave It to Beaver, Moms were Moms and Dads were Dads. I’m not sure what this means for the gay movement—except that not every kid or young person feels this way, and eventually younger people do realize that they have a stake in the movement. What that stake is, they’ll have to find out through life experience.

UM: You edited Come Out! from 1969 to 1971. How was it editing the world’s first gay liberation newspaper?

PB: Extremely exciting, and not easy because of all the factionalism of radical gay politics during this period. There was often huge tension between, say, the women on the newspaper staff and the men (at one point, most of the women dropped off the paper, leaving only two women who remained), the street queens (or street transvestites, as they liked to be called then), and the Third World caucus (what would now be called minority people), who at one point decided that they wanted to take over the paper, but would do nothing as far as producing or selling it. It was a retrenched stance, what we used to call a “non-negotiable demand,” and one of the tactics of radicals during this period.

The exciting thing was that we were doing something that had literally never been done before: to produce an openly queer paper that was sold on the street, that was politically radical, that was not driven by ads or commerce, and that could say anything we needed to say without worry of sponsors, advertisers, etc. We had some extremely valuable articles, position papers, news breaks, and pictures. The paper is now archived at the NY Public Library and many other archiving libraries. It had huge influence. We printed, I believe, about 6,000 copies per issue (which were sold in bookstores, movement centers, and on the streets for 25 cents a copy; every issue was read by about 4-6 people, which meant that it’s hand-over distribution was about 25,000, and articles in it were reprinted constantly in other underground or movement papers.

At one point the paper started being published out of my apartment (with my phone number listed in it), so it was subject to surveillance by various law enforcement groups. I remember getting a call from a man who claimed to be working for the NY City Police Dept. who asked me if I knew where the paper was printed. I told him no. He asked me if I knew who published the paper; “No.” He asked me several other questions, and I answered “No.” Finally he said, “I guess I’m not going to get very far with you, am I?” I said, “Yes.”

UM: How can we today press on long and hard enough to gain the momentum necessary to create equality where it doesn’t exist?

PB: I think we can press on to win only if we understand what we can win: an acceptance of the validity of LGBT lives, affections, and families. This is a much bigger realm than simply sexual freedom, or seeing “gayness” as a commodity, or a series of codes and passwords. It means that gay kids will not have to be afraid, that older gay people can feel protected and not completely vulnerable, that everyone from guppies to leather guys to transgendered people can feel safe at work and at home. It is a very tall order, and I feel that we are only beginning to see that.

UM: It seems that streams of oppression have followed through to your work, specifically in the fast-paced ‘be productive or die’ society depicted in your novel Carnal Sacraments. In your opinion, have these streams swelled in size or become trickles in the twenty-first century city?

PB: I think they are basically different, these streams of oppression, but not terribly changed. They are based, to me, on human aggression and how it expresses itself. I think this aggression is often articulated or modified through space, that is, territory. When you have the huge spaces and territories of America at various times, aggression becomes freer to express itself, exert itself violently, and then fizzle, like in the “Wild West.” But when space is at a premium, it becomes more intense, as it did in Europe prior to World War II. As human population expands and crowding becomes more intense, so will aggression.

That of course is one way of looking at it. You have, for instance, the constant inhumane racism of America in the 19th century and then into the 20th in regard to blacks and Native American populations. This was routinized aggression. Then you have the inhuman aggression against Jews, gypsies, gays, and other people of the Third Reich: the constant, giant horror of it.

UM: Would you say you have a utopian or dystopian view of the future?

PB: At this point, I think I have neither, except that I feel human beings are capable of the most heinous acts, have a natural proclivity toward fascism, and will oppress the weak: that to me is human nature. So it is important for us to fight this natural proclivity toward fascism, to try to prevent, in a valorous way, heinous acts, and to aid the weak. I guess that is a call for old-fashioned chivalry, but I am a total sucker for chivalry, especially in men. On the other hand, I also believe that human beings are capable of the most heroic, most amazing, most angelic activities of creation and nurturing. These acts often go unnoticed, or unheralded, but are in the nature of so many people. The Jews have a saying, which I love, that the entire universe is born on the shoulders of 10 men, and no one knows who those men are. So you never can tell which stranger on the street will be one of those men.

In a likewise way, I do believe in the presence of angels, on an everyday basis. The bodhisattvas, the people who bring balance, beauty, truth, and charity to the world. So I guess if I believe in them, I cannot be too dystopian.