Fiction

• Carnal Sacraments: A Historical Novel of the Future (2007)
  In the last quarter of the 21st century, Jeffrey Cooper, an Alabama-raised, executive design star living in Americanized Germany, has made a Faustian pact with the huge global economic system running the world. The system will keep him young and razor-sharp, as long as he can stay on top of do his job and keep profits high. But stress from work and the congested, hyper-competitive life around him is killing Jeffrey. Can he keep his stress level a secret from the system itself, his co-workers, and even his own seductive, "Daddyish" German therapist who has told him that, when all else fails, there are “angels” who can save him, and often we don’t know who they are?
  
  But one will appear in Jeffrey’s life. At first, he seems to be the Devil himself, offering every kind of excitement, even offering Jeffrey back his own lost soul—but will this younger, mysterious and attractive man end up killing Jeffrey, or saving him?
  
  In Carnal Sacraments, Perry Brass has created a parable of our time and the future, of an emerging international business culture based on war, and of intense sexuality as a key to religious experience and personal salvation. Author of The Harvest, Warlock, and Angel Lust, Perry Brass continues his exploration of the joining of sexuality, consciousness, and spirituality in this poignant and mature novel.

• The Substance of God: A Spiritual Thriller (2003) --  Finalist, 2003 Lambda Literary Award for Science/Fiction/Fantasy/Horror
  What would you do with the Substance of God, a constantly regenerating, "self-cloning" material originating from Creation? The Substance can bring the dead back to life, but has a willful "mind" of its own. Dr. Leonard Miller, a gay bio-researcher secretly addicted to "kinky" sex, learned this after he was found mysteriously murdered in his laboratory while working alone on the Substance. Once brought back to life, Miller must find out who infiltrated his lab to kill him, how long will he have to live again—and, exactly, where does life end and any Hereafter begin?  ¶Miller’s story takes him from the underground sex scenes of New York to the steamy all-male baths of Istanbul. It will deal with the longing for God in a techno-driven world; with the deep, persistent attractions of religious fundamentalism; and with the fundamentals of "outsider" sexuality, as both spiritual ritual and cosmic release. And Miller, the unbelieving, hard-core scientist, will be driven himself to ask one more question: Is our often-censored urge towards sex and our great, undeniable urge towards a union with God . . . the same urge?

• Sex-Charge (2001)

• Warlock: A Novel of Possession (2001)
  Allen Barrow, a shy bank clerk, dresses out of discount stores and has a small penis that embarrasses him. One night at a noisy, popular bathhouse in Manhattan he meets Destry Powars-commanding, vulgar, seductive, successful-who pulls Allen into his orbit and won't let go. Destry lives in a closed, moneyed world that Allen can only glimpse through the smoky windows of popular media and tabloids. From generations of impoverished drifters, Powars has been chosen to learn a secret language based on force, deception, and nerve. But who chose him-and what does he really want from Allen? What are Mr. Powars's dark powers? These are the mysteries that Allen will uncover in Warlock, a novel that is as paralyzing in its suspense as it is voluptuously erotic.

• Angel Lust: An Erotic Novel of Time Travel --  Finalist, 2000 Lambda Literary Award for Science/Fiction/Fantasy/Horror
  Angel Lust combines the mystical atmosphere we see in Ann Rice's classics of dark eroticism with Brass's more open, full-throttle gay sexuality. What makes this book different from other gay "erotic" novels of fantasy is that the characters are totally real. Despite being angels, despite the element of Time travel, Bert and Tommy, the two angels who have been together since eternity, could be your neighbors. They worry about making a living, about their landlord throwing them out, and about the day-to-day struggles that all humans have. Although they have powers far beyond most of us (for instance, they can revive the dead), they understand that their human side can get them into trouble, both with the law and their own deeper feelings, just like anyone else.

  Although this is a relatively short book, it offers an array of plot devices to keep you guessing, and some of the most erotic scenes ever written. Brass never uses sex gratuitously, but always to advance to plot. If you are looking for an erotic novel at least one full millennium beyond the usual "here-we-go-again" material, this is the book for you. If this is your first Perry Brass book, you'll want to go back and read his other novels, especially his science fiction trilogy. But if you are already a fan of his work, then you know what kind of thrilling ride you have in store, and you'll want to stick with it until you turn the last page.

• The Harvest: A Novel (1997) - Finalist, 1998 Lambda Literary Award for Science/Fiction/Fantasy/Horror
  In the future, one Corporation ("the Corp") will rule America. Religion, reduced to greeting card slogans for the "Godthing," will become an arm of public relations. Food, shelter, and health, will be stressed as an old elite class rises again behind a mask of "universal" opportunity. Wealth will be invested in the production of vaccos: lab-produced (human) "Corporate cadavers," raised on isolated ranches as living sources of organ and tissue transplants. Drugged on numbing "euphorics," vaccos are harvested regularly for a waiting list of patients. One extraordinary vacco, using whatever intelligence has been cloned in him, a valuable "Corp property" known as Hart256043, will escape. At an underground bar specializing in illicit sex and drugs, he meets Edgar Devereaux: successful Corp designer, adopted son of wealthy Joshua Devereaux, member of the Corp Board. But Devereaux has a secret. He was born Chris Turner, a lower-class car thief, hustler, and juvenile delinquent, and he can never shake his roots or a desire to retaste his wild youth. In an atmosphere of tension, violence, and repression, Chris and Hart will bond and discover within each other a compassion and a completeness totally outside "Corp" life. Edgar will reject Joshua's lifestyle, and join with Hart to do anything-including kill-to save the vacco's life. And Hart, one of the most appealing characters to appear in contemporary fiction, will find in Chris Turner the humanity he needs ultimately to survive.

• The Lover of My Soul: A Search for Ecstasy and Wisdom (1997) with Tom Laine, ed. and Vince Gabrielly (Photographer)

• Out There: Stories of Private Desires, Horror and the Afterlife (1994)

• Works and Other "Smoky George" Stories (1992)
  Works and Other Smoky George Stories is a collection of gay short stories that reads like a novel with many different episodes. What ties it all together is the voice of "Smoky George," the narrator. Smoky is sexually adventurous but socially shy. He is the sort who doesn't kiss and tell, but if prodded enough will tell. In these stories he does tell. Many of the stories take place in unusual settings, such as a hunting camp in the Adirondacks, a steamer in the Pacific, the bayous of Louisiana, a farm in Ohio and the more usual settings of Manhattan and New Orleans' steamy, sensual French Quarter. What makes "Works and Other Smoky George Stories" different from other books of gay short stories is that one) they are often outrageously funny as well as outrageously sexy; and two) they combine all the classic elements of men's stories-tension, plot, character, and Indiana-Jones-type adventures, with a dose of old-fashioned class and a whamo-dollop of sex. What Brass wanted to do when writing the Smoky tales was to get gay stories out of what he called the "ghetto of confessional writing," in other words, stories about sad young men who have problems with their mothers, and write the kind of rip-roaring, action adventures he loved as a kid; with a lot of gay-positive, sex-positive attitudes in them as well. So the models for these stories were for the most part "classic stories." As he put it, if Somerset Maugham had written modern gay stories, he would have written these stories, and some editors have compared the narrator who goes by the name "Smoky George" to Maugham himself. In this expanded edition of Works, the author, who for years was better known as a poet, has also included a selection of his steamy, always controversial poetry, and an essay called " "Maybe We Should Keep the 'Porn' in Pornography."

Chronicles of the Planet Ki

1. Mirage -- Finalist, 1991 Lambda Literary Award for Science/Fiction/Fantasy/Horror (Gay Men's)

2. Circles: A Novel (2001)
   Like a wet dream hitchhiking through a nightmare -- Circles is the phenomenal sequel to Perry Brass' groundbreaking gay science fiction thriller Mirage.
   
   Consider this:

   • You're closeted Nick Lawrence, happily married to a wealthy woman in Beverly Hills. Suddenly your life has been taken over by an alien force-and the secret you've worked so hard to maintain is exploding in your face. Your only ally is a strange, old man from a distant planet, who threatens to kill you. What's next?

   • You're the young, blue-eyed Republican vice president of the United States secretly trying to win over the hidden wealth and power of gay America, while promoting your own agenda of "family values." Whom will you enlist for help?

   • You're a gay Russian mathematician who's discovered an organic substance that can pass through time, space, and other beings.  What do you do when you discover that this substance has taken over you?
      

   Circles returns to tiny Ki, a primitive, violent planet where Same-Sex love is a part of the balance of life. There Enkidu, once the promised mate of the ambitious hunter Greeland, has become the most hunted man on the planet. His only way out is to escape to Earth, alone, and there in a riot-scarred Los Angeles, take on the identity and body of another man. There he will find a partner who will do anything for him, including kill-and there he will attempt to save the lives of those he loves, including the tortured, handsome man whose body and fate he now owns.
   
   Circles is both graphic and mystical. It brings to life some of the most unforgettable characters ever put into a contemporary novel. Advancing the chronicles of the extraordinary planet Ki, Circles will also advance the cause of gay fiction out of its narrow focus and into the world-embracing landscape of our era. Circles will become a powerful key to the evolution of gender studies and the expanding gay consciousness of the 21st Century, whose effects are already being seen, culturally and politically, today.

3. Albert, Or the Book of Man (1995) with Tom Laine, ed.
   Albert, or The Book of Man is the third book in the chronicles of the planet Ki, which have already produced the classic gay science fiction thriller Mirage -nominated for a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Science Fiction-and its powerful successor Circles. Albert is even more incendiary and exciting than its predessors. Although it is a continuation of the story of tribal Ki, it deals with new characters and can be read separately. Albert casts its shadow into the future of life on Earth-America. The year 2025, when the country is even more polarized than present and the ultra-conservative White Christian Party has taken over. The country is now scored into rigid "WCP zones" and "gay reserves," those few places where gays and lesbians can live openly and under their own fragile rule. Into this world Albert must seek refuge, after Ki has been taken over by the forces of a renegade warlord, Anvil, and Woosh, the sinister leader of the tribe of the Blue Monkeys. Who exactly is Albert? The long-hoped-for son of a pair of Kivian Same-Sex men and an unknown mother, as a child Albert was raised in the midst of deceit, war, and murder. As an adult, he separated himself from the intrigues of his planet. After the death of his royal father, Enkidu, who has become the Lord of Ki, Albert must pay the price of keeping this distance. Using his powerful third testicle, "the Egg of the Eye," Albert will be reborn on Earth, the son of a "virgin" lesbian mother and an unknown father. Rising from the waters in the gay reserve of Provincetown, Albert will become the center of a whirlpool of personal and political struggles: he will grow to be a man in only four years, find himself passionately loved by his Earth father, and then find the mate who will take his heart away as Albert plots to get his mate back to Ki and attempts to rule life on this strangest of small planets. Albert is the gay Everyman at the crossroads of two planets and two centuries. Like all of us, he is attempting to find his own story, his roots, and to define himself and the tribe he comes from. Albert is indeed the story of Man, and the latest part of the story of Ki, where Same-Sex men mate for life, where power defines love and sex, and where the merciful Sisters of Ki attempt to keep life in balance. As in any great work of Extra-Reality fiction, Albert is a mirror into our own world and presents for us a true picture of ourselves, our nightmares, and our most colorful fantasies.

Non-fiction

• How to Survive Your Own Gay Life: An Adult Guide to Love, Sex, and Relationships (1998) with Tom Laine, ed.
  From three time Lambda Literary Award nominee Perry Brass, comes a fully-loaded Swiss Army knife for Gay Survival. In this indispensable book, Perry Brass starts out with the basics: how to meet men now. (It's easier than you think!) How to have a relationship with one man (or several) that is both emotionally nourishing and sexually satisfying. How to deal with financial problems in a relationship (with an eye-opening section on "kept" men and what keeps them that way). How to survive (and counter) anti-gay violence on the street, at work, or at home. And how to arrive at a core group of feelings and beliefs that will keep you going in a difficult, often hostile and misleading time. Brass is totally honest. He is not a therapist, psychiatrist, or sociologist. Instead, after thirty years of writing about the "gay wars"-starting with "liberation" right after Stonewall, going into AIDS, and now in our present Age of Gay Consumerism-he realizes that he has had the kind of passionate, lasting adult relationships with gay men that have sustained him and that many men are looking for. If you are as puzzled as so many people are about where the gay world is going, and if you're also angry at the cold, abrasiveness that we often experience in it, then How to Survive Your Own Gay Life is for you. Because, after all, it's your life and nobody else's.

• Survival Kit: A Complete Guidance Manual for Gay Men (1988)

See also:

• Smash the Church, Smash the State!: The Early Years of Gay Liberation (2009), Tommi Avicolli Mecca, ed. -- Nominated for an American Library Association Award
  This anthology by former members of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) captures the history and spirit of the revolutionary time just after Stonewall, when thousands came out of the closet to claim their sexuality, and when queer resistance coalesced into a turbulent, joyous liberation movement—one whose lasting influence would ultimately inform and profoundly shape the LGBT community of today.
  
  Personal essays explore the philosophy and culture of the stridently anti-assimilationist GLF: the actions, demonstrations, and marches; views on marriage, religion, and gender; the drugs, orgies, and communes; and GLF’s relationship to the hippies, the Black Panthers, the straight Left, the women’s movement, civil rights, and the antiwar struggle.
  
  The collection includes contributions from Barbara Ruth, Cei Bell, Mark Segal, Martha Shelley, Nikos Diaman, Paola Bacchetta, Perry Brass, Susan Stryker, and Tom Ammiano.

• Identity Envy: Wanting to Be Who We're Not (2007), Jim Tushinski and Jim Van Buskirk, eds.
  Creative nonfiction by queer writers.