Author(s): Perry Brass

Relationships

A book about surviving your gay life in today's culture and, more importantly, how to create rewarding relationships and a strengthening inner life. "Everybody has a philosophy, in this ancient and noble sense of the word. But few writers have Mr. Brass's credentials. Author of numerous works of poetry and science fiction, he's also been involved with gay liberation and health institutions since their inception. So he knows a little something about survival, and it shows. Mr. Brass's lovely phrase for the special contributions we make is "the gay work." The gay work involves, for example, open friendliess to strangers, in contrast to the paranoid insularity of general urban experience and the ever-beleagered Great American Family. The gay work includes "celebrating male beauty," which in Mr. Brass's vision, is somewhat closer to understanding Whitman's poetry than to subscribing to the Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue I may find so much of this book appealing because its author is my peer in age. But is it possible it's also because he's wise? Maybe its because he suggests queerness might authentically have something to do with living by your own rules, not fulfilling either a clinical or political set of criteria. How to Survive Your Own Gay Life is a book that looks forward, not backward." -- Bernard Welt writing in Lambda Book Report, November, 1998