PERRY BRASS
- August Bernadicou
- Mar 19
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 1
NEW YORK CITY GAY LIBERATION FRONT, CALLEN-LORDE COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTER, AUTHOR
We love Perry Brass, and you know we do. For over five years, we have done numerous events with him and have given him lots of press. He is featured in The LGBTQ History Project more than anyone else, appearing in over ten features and podcasts. Not only has he changed the world, but he is also a very nice man. While many older gay men retire to Palm Springs, California, Perry has stayed actively engaged and continues to use his energy constructively. He keeps liberating the world. For some, the revolution has not stopped! He is the leading force behind the Gay Liberation Front Foundation, a nonprofit that seeks to “provide an understanding of the centrality of the Gay Liberation Front.” Amen! You know we have been ahead of that curve.
Perry Brass was an early member of the New York City Gay Liberation Front, the pioneering gay activist group organized after the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion. Shortly after he dove headfirst into the Gay Liberation Front, he co-edited their magazine, Come Out!, which gave a face to downtrodden LGBTQ people. Later that year, Gay Liberation Fronts popped up worldwide, and radical queers began fighting for the equal rights they knew they deserved. Can you imagine being one of the first gay activists in the world? In 1972, he co-founded the Gay Men's Health Project Clinic, the first clinic for gay men on the East Coast. The Gay Men’s Health Project Clinic encouraged safe sex 15 years before the AIDS epidemic and remains invaluable to HIV/AIDS prevention, surviving as New York City’s Callen-Lorde Community Health Center. He is a published author and has penned over 20 books. In 2016, true to his radical self, he was banned from Facebook.
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
"The thing that prepared me for being gay was growing up Jewish and Southern. I describe myself as coming from a hybrid of four parts: I grew up Southern, Jewish, gay, and impoverished. My father died when I was 11 years old, and our family was just thrown into abject poverty. We ended up in a public housing project where we were the only Jewish family. I was constantly harassed and beaten up. I was a total outsider.
I was a small kid. Very often, the other Jewish kids would protect me from the kids who bullied me—I was very grateful for that. They also understood how I was growing up in poverty. They were usually nice to me. So, that was very good.
The most difficult thing was growing up with my mother. My mother was never able to work, and I never quite understood this. She was prone to, I guess you would call them, fits of depression where she announced in the morning, “I’m feeling a little depressed today.” This meant she would end up going into these situations where, for hours on end, she would start screaming, throwing things, and crying. I would have to help her through these horrible periods.
My sister would just leave the house. She simply couldn't take it. My sister is two years younger than I am. She and my mother had a terrible relationship with each other, and my sister ended up leaving home at 14. She put herself, voluntarily, into a home for abandoned girls.
My mother had been this really beautiful woman. Both of my parents were very attractive. My father was a handsome guy with beautiful blue eyes and curly hair. He looked kind of like Hungarian-American actor and filmmaker Cornel Wilde, and my mother was a tall, Jewish woman who looked kind of like Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America.
Coming from this background of two attractive parents, I didn't understand all the secrets going on in my family. Finally, years later, I realized what the secrets were. The secrets were that my mother was a closeted lesbian and a violent, paranoid schizophrenic. She eventually came out. She never wanted to be married and was basically forced into it by the mores of the South. She got married when she was 22 years old. I was born when she was 23. She had these secrets that she had to keep, and they caused this huge tension and violence in her life.
I did not know about the last secret at all. I did not know that she had been diagnosed as schizophrenic until after her death. At her funeral, one of her brothers let that cat out of the bag. Suddenly, I realized she had been deeply disturbed. She was barely able to be a mother. Basically, from about age 12, I raised myself—my sister and I both raised ourselves —and I learned to think for myself. I became extremely independent. That was very helpful growing up gay in Georgia. I realized, certainly by the time I was 12, maybe by the time I was 8 or 9, that there are two realities in the world. There is the reality of the world as it wants to appear and the reality of the world as it really is.
The world as it really was, in the South, was a world in which white people were way above Black people, and no queers existed. They were just these sorts of people you made fun of and hated—you learned to hate them.
I guess the turning point in my life in the South, certainly, was when I was 15. I tried to kill myself. My mother and I reached a point where we were at total war with each other, and I knew that I was going to be gay.
The Gay Liberation Front was very much a person-to-person organization in the fact that we very quickly divided the GLF into consciousness raising groups. Each CR group had about eight people in it. There were guys' CR groups, women's CR groups, and then a couple of mixed CR groups. If you had eight people in a CR group, it meant that if you had to get something out, you would have these eight people, and they would talk to, let's say, each one would talk to five people. You'd have 40 people to deal with, to talk to, or they'd talk to maybe 10 people. You'd have 80 people to talk to.
Anyway, as far as organization, we didn't have the internet. We had almost no media except underground papers, and, fortunately, they were flourishing. I used to say that we did a lot of organizing between the sheets. We would go out to bars and leaflet. People, because you were involved with gay liberation, a lot of people in New York were interested in what we were doing. There wasn't as much pushback in New York as I gather there was in San Francisco and Berkeley, especially in Berkeley.
You had people who were too repressed to come to us, but sometimes we would go to them. We did these amazing things. We started doing political organizing at the baths. We figured, this is a way to get guys who are not going to be coming to a meeting, who are often in the closet, but they want to know what we're doing. We'd do political organizing in the baths, we'd do it in the bars, we'd do it outside the bars. It was very much a physical connection with people.
I have the reflection that I have always had with my GLF sisters and brothers, which is this: what we went through together was so formative to our lives that we'll never forget it. It just pierces our hearts, and that's the message we want to bring out to the world. I mean, liberating ourselves and liberating the world was what it was all about, and it still pierces our hearts.”
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The LGBTQ History Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit preserving the lives and legacies of LGBTQ+ activists from the first wave of gay liberation through oral histories, archives, and the QueerCore Podcast.
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