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Summer, 1965. At 17, after a disastrous, threat-laden year at the University of Georgia, in the small town of Athens, Georgia, Perry Brass, knowing he was gay, decided to hitchhike to San Francisco. Thus begins a “boy’s adventure” story like you’ve never read.
From Chapter One
I was seventeen years old and on a quest. To find myself and to find love, although I had very little idea what either of them were. The only thing I was positive of was that what I was—the deepest central core of me—was forbidden. The year was 1965. Lyndon Johnson was president; John F. Kennedy had been killed two years earlier when I was a senior in high school, and the country was still roiling from the specters of racial integration, rock ‘n’ roll, teenage sex, and other threatening forms of Commie “subversion,” including the one that I knew in truth contained myself: I was attracted to boys.
I was born in the Deep South, in Savannah, Georgia, and grew up there in this polite, beautiful, azalea-filled coastal city where people like me were routinely murdered if they didn’t kill themselves.
I had tried to do that at fifteen. The summer of 1963, driven to it by constant bullying at school with a hate-filled whispering campaign in the halls; and at home, by my mother, Helen Landy Brass, a once tall, strikingly beautiful woman who had looked like a 1940s movie star. Later, as an often-violent, paranoid schizophrenic, she had been subjected to repeated electro-convulsive shock treatments administered in tandem with various highly addictive prescription drugs; the result—for several years she had been determined to destroy me. I was the whipping boy, the stand-in, for all of her terrors and mental problems, and the final problem: We were both queer. She a secret, totally self-hating lesbian, a fact that I would not come to grips with for several more years, and I . . . both of us were cowering deep inside that labyrinth of shame that people in Southern towns erect to keep the black-and-white monstrosities of their own fears hidden.
"In his memoir, 'A Real Life,' Perry Brass memorializes a visually and emotionally compelling historic record of gay life in the 1960s. His vivid details of an emerging gay awareness leading to activism provides the reader with the struggles of a young man making a life for himself that is both relatable and moving. Brass provides an important narrative for enthusiasts and historians of life pre-Stonewall."
Ken Lustbader, Co-Director, NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project
