The Harvest: A Novel - Softcover

Brass, Perry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 096271237X ISBN 13: 9780962712371

Publisher: Belhue Pr, 1997

Synopsis

In the future, one Corporation ("the Corp") will rule America. Religion, reduced to greeting card slogans for the "Godthing," will become an arm of public relations. Food, shelter, and health, will be stressed as an old elite class rises again behind a mask of "universal" opportunity. Wealth will be invested in the production of vaccos: lab-produced (human) "Corporate cadavers," raised on isolated ranches as living sources of organ and tissue transplants. Drugged on numbing "euphorics," vaccos are harvested regularly for a waiting list of patients. One extraordinary vacco, using whatever intelligence has been cloned in him, a valuable "Corp property" known as Hart256043, will escape. At an underground bar specializing in illicit sex and drugs, he meets Edgar Devereaux: successful Corp designer, adopted son of wealthy Joshua Devereaux, member of the Corp Board. But Devereaux has a secret. He was born Chris Turner, a lower-class car thief, hustler, and juvenile delinquent, and he can never shake his roots or a desire to retaste his wild youth. In an atmosphere of tension, violence, and repression, Chris and Hart will bond and discover within each other a compassion and a completeness totally outside "Corp" life. Edgar will reject Joshua's lifestyle, and join with Hart to do anything-including kill-to save the vacco's life. And Hart, one of the most appealing characters to appear in contemporary fiction, will find in Chris Turner the humanity he needs ultimately to survive.

About this title

About the Author

By the time he was twenty-one, Perry Brass had-after a year of college, at the age of 17-hitchhiked from Savannah, GA, where he grew up, to San Francisco, where as an attractive young man he lived an openly gay life. There he was courted by Barbary Coast drag queens, hustlers, sailors, roving Catholic priests and YMCA instructors. He smoked Gaulois in Paris and kief in Paul Bowles's Tangier casbahs. He'd been an enfant terrible in New York's shark-infested advertising waters. Finally-in the shock waves of the Stonewall riots-he discovered gay liberation. He edited the Gay Liberation Front's Come Out!, the world's first gay liberation newspaper. In 1972, with two friends, he founded the Gay Men's Health Project Clinic, the first health clinic for gay men on the East Coast, which, ten years before the current health crisis, advocated the use of condoms for gay men-as well as for making gay health a priority for the community. His early poetry and essays, some of the most influential in the opening years of the gay movement, were included in The Male Muse (the first public anthology of gay poetry), Angels of the Lyre, The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, Gay Roots, Gay Liberation (from Rolling Stone Press), and Out of the Closets, later re-released by NYU Press. Recently, his work has appeared in The Bad Boy Book of Erotic Poetry, Grave Passions: Tales of the Gay Supernatural, and The Columbia University Anthology of Gay Literature. His 1985 play Night Chills, one of the first dramas to deal with the AIDS crisis, won the Jane Chambers International Gay Playwriting Contest. His musical collaborations have included composer Chris DeBlasio's haunting setting of "All The Way Through Evening," a five-song cycle based on Brass's poems that has become the most performed contemporary song cycle in the world. Brass/DeBlasio's song "Walt Whitman in 1989" was spotlighted in the AIDS Quilt Songbook CD (Harmonia Mundi France), and on Heartbeats (Minnesota Public Radio) and Gay American Composers (CRI Records). Other collaborations include Ricky Ian Gordon's setting of "The Angel Voices of Men," commissioned for The New York City Gay Men's Chorus's "Stonewall 25" Carnegie Hall appearance; Fred Hersch's "Brass Suite"; "Five 'Russian' Lyrics," with Chris Berg, commissioned by Positive Music; and "Waltzes For Men," set by Craig Carnahan (for the Dick Cable Musical Trust), for the NYCGMC's June-1996 Lincoln Center performances. His first book Sex-charge, a collection of poems (Belhue Press, 1991), and Mirage, his second book, a science fiction thriller, were both nominated in the same year for Lambda Literary Awards. Circles, the sequel to Mirage, was described by the San Francisco Bay Times as "a shot of adrenaline to the creative centers of the brain." Out There, Stories of Private Desire, Horror, And The Afterlife pulls the gay story into riveting suspense. Albert or The Book Of Man, the third book in the "Mirage trilogy," was called by New York's Men's Style magazine "a complete imagining of a whole world." Works and Other 'Smoky George' Stories (Expanded Edition), combines "classic" 1970s gay erotica with poetry and essays. His novel, The Harvest, a tale of gay futurism introducingvaccos (cloned, a laboratory-bred humans, raised as sources of organ, tissue, and body-parts), was nominated for a third Lambda Literary Award. His newest book is How to Survive Your Own Gay Life, a "Swiss Army knife" for gay male survival-sexual, psychological, spiritual, and physical-everywhere.

From the Back Cover

"The only thing I was reacting to was Hart. A warm wind brought his smell back to me and for a moment I stopped being a Devereaux. Chris Turner, alive and happy with himself, was back. . . . From stealing cars to bashing in my old boyfriend who'd been a cop. Who could say what would happen next, but I was happy. For the first time in years, I felt something I could describe as happiness. There wasn't a drop of loneliness in me." How much would you pay for happiness? To start with, how about your basic identity? Then your need to find love? Your name? Your parents? Would you finally kill? In a future world where happiness is guaranteed-but at the price of human life, Christopher Turner has asked himself this question many times. One all-powerful Corporation now runs America. It guarantees health, happiness, and prosperity, but at the destruction of individuality and privacy. And with the sacrifice of vaccos. "Corporate cadavers." Laboratory-produced human analogues, used for vitally needed organ, tissue, and body part transplants, whose precisely timed lives will end in a surgical procedure known as "the harvest." Chris Turner, once a teenage thief, hustler, and renegade, now known at Edgar Morgan Devereaux, successful housing designer and adopted son of a wealthy Corporate leader, will find such a vacco, Hart 256043, desperately running for his life. Together, Hart and Chris will bond, and do everything possible for their mutual survival-and Chris's ultimate happiness.

Edition details

• Publisher: Belhue Pr
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 096271237X
• ISBN 13: 9780962712371
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216