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.
Originally from Savannah, Georgia, Perry Brass grew up, in the nineteen fifties and sixties, in equal parts Southern, Jewish, economically impoverished, and very much gay. To escape the South's violent homophobia, he hitchhiked at age 17 from Savannah to San Francisco--an adventure, he recalls, that was "like Mark Twain with drag queens." As a young man he worked as a male artist's model, on the floor of an aircraft factory, and, in the "Mad Men" period of anything-goes-advertising, in Madison Avenue art departments.
He's published 15 books and been a finalist six times in 3 categories (poetry; gay science fiction and fantasy; spirituality and religion) for Lambda Literary Awards, as well as winning numerous awards for his poetry, plays, fiction, and other writings. His work is unique in that it combines frank depictions of human sexuality, deep spiritual values, political acumen and insight, and often outrageous humor. This has given him a small but devoted readership that doesn't pigeonhole itself or his writing.
He has been involved in the gay rights movement since November of 1969, soon after the Stonewall Rebellion, when he co-edited "Come Out!," the world's first gay liberation newspaper.
Later, in 1972, with two friends he started the Gay Men's Health Project Clinic, the first clinic for gay men on the East Coast, still surviving as New York's Callen-Lourde Clinic. In 1984, his play "Night Chills," one of the first plays to deal with the AIDS crisis, won a Jane Chambers International Gay Playwriting Award.
As a poet, Brass's collaborations with composers include the words for the much-performed "All the Way Through Evening," a haunting cycle of five songs evoking the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic, set by the late young Chris DeBlasio; "The Angel Voices of Men" set by Ricky Ian Gordon, commissioned by the Dick Cable Fund for the New York City Gay Men's Chorus which premiered it at Carnegie Hall and featured it on its "Gay Century Songbook" CD; "Three Brass Songs," with famed composer-pianist Fred Hersch; and "The Restless Yearning Towards My Self," with New York City Opera composer Paula Kimper.
He is currently treasurer of the Greater New York Independent Publishers Association, and Co-Director of New York's Rainbow Book Fair, the only book fair and cultural conference in the U.S. solely devoted to the books of LGBT authors and publishers. He directs the publication of books through Belhue Press, an independent gay press.
Perry Brass is an accomplished reader and an internationally recognized voice on gender subjects, gay relationships, and the history and literature of the movement towards glbt equality. He lives in the Riverdale section of "da Bronx" with his partner of 28 years, but can cross bridges to other parts of America without a passport.
