Publisher's Synopsis
"In June of 1965, after a year of hazing and persecution at the University of Georgia in Athens, seventeen-year-old Perry Brass hitchhiked from his native Savannah to San Francisco, beginning a year of adventures he called, "Like Mark Twain with drag queens." Often dead broke, he encountered a world of homeless gay kids like himself, boy hustlers and the men who frequented them, as well as tormented married men, female impersonators, and ruthless cops. In this poignant book, Brass has been able to recapture a very different time, when being gay was illegal, but gay teens were starting to seek a life together on their way to the liberation that would come only later after Stonewall. Gay youth rarely have an easy time of it, but A Real Life is a keyhole into being an openly gay teen, on his own, in the painfully difficult period before Gay Liberation. Perry Brass is the author of nineteen books of fiction and non-fiction, ranging from poe
