Synopsis
ALBERT, or THE BOOK OF MAN How could any book be so prescient? So ahead of its time? The year is 2025―our moment. Right now! And the White Christian Party has taken over America. It is looking for a scapegoat and finds it in queer men and lesbians. The whole country has been divided between GAY RESERVES, areas where queer people can live relatively free lives, marry, raise kids, and make decisions for themselves, and White Christian areas, where the White Christian Party rules. There Jesus or a perverted image of him, is King, and as the head of the WCP, Brother Bob Dobson, says: "HATE IN THE NAME OF JESUS IS BETTER THAN LOVE IN THE NAME OF ANYONE ELSE!" ALBERT was published in 1994, thirty years ago, when it seemed like the present political set up of Red and Blue states―of the rise of a demagogue like Donald Trump and a vindictive conservative Supreme Court; of draconian prohibitions against abortion, birth control, the rights of trans people, the rights of African Americans, immigrants, and other marginalized people―none of this was on the horizon yet. But Perry Brass saw it, and put it in this amazing book that is both interplanetary science fiction, present-day political realities, and an emtionally-charged gay love story. ALBERT is the story of two worlds―our own, in the midst of political and cultural turmoil―and Ki, a tiny pristine planet, besieged by tribal war and the threat of overpopulation, where gay men mate for life, are able to reproduce, and can transcend space and time. Albert, the endangered son of a Same-Sex male couple on Ki, will be reborn on Earth where the terrifying, White Christian Party has taken over America. Traveling through a nation split between fundamentalist strongholds and gay reserves, Albert will find the Earth mate who will claim his heart―and allow him to return to Ki and reclaim leadership of the planet. Mesmerizing and truthful, ALBERT is the story of two men ―and two worlds―finally merging in these amazing chronicles of The Book Of Man.
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 AIDS, 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 openly gay anthology of gay poetry), <I>Angels of the Lyre<I>, <I>The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse<I>, <I>Gay Liberation<I> (from Rolling Stone Press), and <I>Out of the Closets<I>, later re-released by NYU Press. Recently, his work has appeared in <I>The Bad Boy Book of Erotic Poetry<I>,,<I> Grave Passions: Tales of the Gay Supernatural<I>,, and <I>,The Columbia University Anthology of Gay Literature<I>,. His 1985 play <I>,Night Chills<I>,, 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. Perry Brass is a member of The Publishing Triangle and BMI, and lives in New York City. An accomplished reader and exponent on gender and gay-related topics, he is available for public appearances.
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