The William A. Percy Foundation is pleased to announce author and activist Perry Brass as recipient of the 2025 Foundation’s Charley Shively Prize for Gay Liberation.
Poet, playwright, editor, and activist, Perry Brass stands as an important and enduring voice emerging from the American gay liberation movement, giving expression to gay experience over five decades. His life and work bridge the pre-Stonewall years of secrecy and overt oppression for homosexuals, through the burst of late 1960s / early 1970s activism, and continuing fight for sexual freedom, reasonable laws, and cultural visibility. That he was a good friend of Charley makes the award even more apt!
Born in 1947 in Savannah, Georgia, Perry Brass has described his childhood as “Southern, Jewish, economically impoverished, and (very much) gay.” By the time he was nine or ten, he already knew he was attracted to boys, at a time when such feelings were not only taboo but dangerous. Openly gay life in the South during the 1950s and early 1960s was marked by silence, fear, and the constant threat of violence.
After his father died when he was 11, financial hardship intensified at home. Following a difficult year at the University of Georgia, Brass made a life-altering decision: in 1965, at age 17, he left home and hitch-hiked to San Francisco.
After a brief stay in California, Brass moved to New York City in 1966, where he immersed himself in the city’s counterculture and emerging gay community. He began writing gay poetry, short stories, and essays at a time when few publishers were willing to touch such work. He once feared that no one would ever publish what he was writing.
In a 2009 piece for OutHistory (“Coming Out Into Come Out, 1969-1972″), Perry notes that suicide was not uncommon for gay teenagers in the 1960s – he himself made an attempt at 15. But growing courage to face his feelings helped him turn over a new leaf. At 16, Perry, says, he “came out sexually” – “that is, a man went after young totally inexperienced me, and I agreed to it. (Understatement: I flipped over the idea.) … I went to bed with a man and liked it a lot.” Soon, Perry wrote, “I was ready to take on the world.”
Once in New York, the Gay Liberation Front’s newspaper served as an outlet for his writings. This was a radical act, Perry recalled:
A gay newspaper! […] You have no idea what that meant back in 1969. Only three years earlier, the New York Mattachine Society officially challenged a law on the Alcoholic Beverage Commission’s (the ABC’s) books stating that any barkeeper who “knowingly served an alcoholic beverage to a homosexual” could have his license revoked. The swinging Sixties just did not swing for gay people. Aside from certain snide and artsy circles, you do not breathe the word “homosexual” without either doing personal or career harm to yourself. “Gay” and “queer” were words used in jokes, catcalls, insults, and gossip. They destroyed show business careers, and I was joining the staff of an openly gay, politically leftist newspaper.
In late 1969, Perry joined the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), one of the crucibles of post-Stonewall movement. From his Hell’s Kitchen apartment, he co-edited Come Out!, among the early gay liberation newspapers, and perhaps the first. Helping to shape the voice of early post-Stonewall activism, his work combined politics, culture, and personal experience.
In 1972, Perry co-founded the Gay Men’s Health Project Clinic, the first community-run health clinic for gay men on the East Coast. Created long before the AIDS crisis brought gay health into public focus, the clinic still exists today as the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, and was one of the first models of self-help and mutual aid in LGBT health.
Alongside his activism, Perry Brass has built an extraordinary literary career. He has published 23 books, and appeared in more than 35 literary anthologies, including some of the very first collections of gay poetry and fiction. These include The Gay Liberation Book, The Male Muse, Out of the Closets, and The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse.
His body of work spans poetry, science fiction, novels, essays, memoir, and self-help – all unified by a belief that gay identity involves both desire and spirituality. His work attempts to bring the entire life cycle of gay men into focus, including his latest book A Life Without Money (2024) which talks about “ageing, and love, and sex, and music and magic,” and “the moment when you become alive to your own life.”
His novels Albert, or The Book of Man, and King of Angels, imagine gay lives under conservative repression and during the AIDS epidemic. His contribution to the self-help bookshelf – How to Survive Your Own Gay Life – offered wisdom and guidance on emotional survival and maturity. In 1984, he wrote the play Night Chills – one of the first dramatic works about the AIDS crisis – which won the Jane Chambers International Gay Playwriting Award. Brass’s plays and musical collaborations – many of them among the earliest artistic responses to AIDS – expanded gay storytelling into theater and music.
Brass describes his memoir – A Real Life – as like “Mark Twain with drag queens,” telling the story of leaving home at 17 and joining a network of often homeless gay youth who relied on each other for support.
Brass has been a six-time Lambda Literary Award finalist and a Ferro-Grumley Award finalist. Over the years, he also helped organize LGBTQ literary events: he became a founding coordinator of the New York Rainbow Book Fair, now the largest gay book festival in the United States. In recent years, he has served as president of the Gay Liberation Front Foundation, an organization preserving the history of the GLF and Stonewall era. Beyond literature, Perry has been featured in documentaries and archives.
Today, he remains active as a writer, speaker, and cultural critic. He writes regularly for outlets such as The Huffington Post (now HuffPost), covering topics like Reagan’s desire, Islam and compulsory heterosexuality, and the #MeToo movement. In 2013, he recounted his experience of Boy Scouts (Confessions of a Gay Boy Scout), where he experienced his first crush on a boy at 11 years old. In 2017, he favorably reviewed The War on Sex (edited by David M. Halperin and Trevor Hoppe), appreciating how the book details America’s increasingly hostility to sexual diversity and intrusions into private life.
Living in the Bronx with his husband of almost five decades, he continues to write essays, maintain a Substack newsletter, and engage publicly with questions of sexuality, freedom, and identity. His life’s work reflects a commitment to telling the truth about gay lives – where they come from, what they endure, and how they survive and flourish.