BAMMER & ME and I

"The South went from hating blacks to hating us!" Mike Balaban interviews me for his podcast Bammer & Me.

I have done many interviews in the last several years, but they usually center on my life as an activist in the early formative years of the modern gay (or as we now say, “LGBTQ”) movement. I talk about my involvement with the radical and influential Gay Liberation Front; with the founding of the Gay Men’s Health Project Clinic, the first clinic specifically for gay men on the East Coast, in 1972; about the approach of the AIDS crisis and our community’s reaction to it—but I rarely get to speak about my growing up in the violent, racially segregated South, about my parents and their influence on me, about my leaving home at 17 and being almost completely out by that point, in 1965—about the intense tribalism of being queer in the early 1970s, that soon gave way to disco and AIDS (I’m not claiming a relationship—disco did NOT cause HIV!), and about my life as a writer and artist.

In Mike’s interview I get to talk about the full

tapestry of my life, from “porn to poetry,” from queer science fiction to “The Manly Art of Seduction,” from HIV to Modern Dance.

I hope you will get a chance to look at it, and share it with friends. Let me know what you think of it, and if you have any questions for me.

Perry Brass is the president of the Gay Liberation Front Foundation and can be reached through his website perrybrass.com. His classic science fiction novel ALBERT OR THE BOOK OF MAN, published in 1995, predicted that by the year 2025, the White Christian Party would take over America, the “New Conservatism” would sweep in, outlawing abortion and divorce, and gay men and lesbians would be forced onto “gay reserves,” like Manhattan and Provincetown. You can still read it and see how close his predictions for our not-very-Brave New World have come.