Synopsis
Nominated for a 1992 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Science Fiction, Mirage is a bold new gay science fiction thriller by the acclaimed writer Perry Brass. On the tribal planet Ki, two men-in the spirit of an ancient pact-have been promised to each other for a lifetime. But a savage attack and a blood-chilling murder break this promise, and force them to seek another world where imbalance and lies form Reality. This is the planet known as Earth, a world they will ultimately use and escape. Mirage is the story of Greeland, a hunter from primitive, tribal Ki and his love for Enkidu, the friend promised to him for a lifetime. On Ki, men who on Earth would be labeled "gay" are promised to each for a lifetime of sexual exclusivity and loyalty unto death. Living in tribal enclaves led by elder tribesmen, these men possess an amazing third testicle, called the "Egg of the Eye." The Egg extends their lifespans, allows them to read each other's thoughts, and produces the sweet, sought-after "Seed of the Egg." However, one thing the Egg will never allow them to do is to lie. But a brutal attack on Enkidu and Greeland, by Ert, a handsome leader of the "Off-Sexers," the heterosexuals of planet Ki who live in a constant state of feudal warefare-and his bloodchilling murder in their defense-break this promise and force Greeland and Enkidu to escape through the properties of the "Egg of the Eye," whereby men like themselves can finally dissolve the limitations of time, space-and tiny, constricting Ki itself. Greeland are directed towards Earth, where they assume the bodies and identities of handsome, blonde Wright Smith, originally from a Michigan farm, and his lover, darker Alan Kostenbaum, from New York, both undeniably different from these visitors. On Earth Greeland and Enkidu encounter racism, violent homophobia-with one of the best accounts of a senseless homophobic attack in recent fiction-AIDS, and the decline of urban life. They also experience the strange agonies and thrills of two separate identities fighting and eventually merging within one body.
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.
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