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My Coming Out: Perry Brass

October 11, 2006

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chat_brass_320x240.jpgPerry Brass is the author of fiction (Warlock, The Substance of God) and non-fiction (How to Survive Your Own Gay Life). He regularly muses about art, literature and politics at perrybrass.com.

It was my first job in New York, as a messenger for a small graphic arts studio located in the East 50s, off Lexington Avenue. It was 1966. I was nineteen and pretty much unmistakably gay.

The “boys” in the bullpen, young working-class lads trying defensively to squeeze into the always suspect, high-tension advertising world referred to me as “the faggot.” I got even by dropping their ruling pens into cans of rubber cement.

I was attending Cooper Union at night, and barely making enough money to eat. My supervisor was a pudgy kid with bad skin a few years older than me. We liked to go down to 42nd Street on weekends and make fun of the queers. One day, he looked straight at me and said, “Well, at least I don’t suck cock the way you do.”

I looked back at him and said, “Really? I guess you’ve found some new way to do it. I bet you’re good at it.”

His mouth dropped. He left the room. A couple of days later I was fired. But the two owners of the studio liked me and because I was a nice Southern Jewish kid, so they got me my next job, with a better salary at an agency.

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