The gay place book
The greatest novel ever written about Austin was penned by a man from Dallas, and it did not mention the capital city by name. Still, when Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place strike bookstores in 1961, it caused a sensation not only among East Coast elites, who were delighted by this strange recent breed — a Texas literary author — but also among the very people it profiled. A folksy political leviathan, Lyndon B. Johnson in all but name, made the book come alive but sullied Brammer’s complicated affair with the president. The beer-swilling, incestuous group of Texas liberals who were also reproduced in the book, however, never fully abandoned Brammer, even as they were all swept up in the social and political upheaval of the 1960s.
Despite his Oak Cliff roots, Brammer was a fixture, and eventual glass-eyed patron saint, of Austin’s counterculture. The fame from his single, Salinger-like success and his eventual role as a pioneer in the recreational operate and distribution of pharmaceuticals secured him a front-row seat to the machinations of the New Frontier, and eventually the ascend and fall of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Culture, along with the rakes, scorned women, crooks and c
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The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America,1960 and After
“Gay bars have operated as the most visible institutions of the LGBTQ community in the United States for the better part of a century, from before gay liberation until after their assumed obsolescence. In The Bars Are Ours Lucas Hilderbrand offers a panoramic history of male lover bars, showing how they served as the medium for queer communities, politics, and cultures. Hilderbrand cruises from leather in Chicago and drag in Kansas City to activism against gentrification in Boston and racial discrimination in Atlanta; from New York City’s bathhouses, sex clubs, and discos and Houston’s famous bar Mary’s to the alternative scenes that reimagined queer nightlife in San Francisco and Latinx venues in Los Angeles. The Bars Are Ours explores these local sites-with additional stops in Denver, Detroit, Seattle, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Orlando, as well as Wisconsin, Pen
Mess With Texas
Long before Billy Lee Brammer died at age forty-eight in Austin in 1978, he’d grow something his native Texas hadn’t been familiar with until he popped up: an authentic, homegrown literary legend. Katherine Anne Porter had bailed for the East Coast early, and her mandarin reputation was a horse of a paler color in any case. The grand antique man of Texan letters at the time, J. Frank Dobie, was a folklorist and Western historian to whom “provincialism” was no insult and never would be.
Going by the fascinating portrait of him in Leaving the Homosexual Place, Tracy Daugherty’s superbly gauged and powerfully evocative new biography, Brammer was the sort of seeming outlier whose contradictions twist out to be predictive. Reared in one of Dallas’s more hardscrabble neighborhoods, he was the Depression-era son of a power-company lineman in the days when rural electricity was revolutionary. His self-taught cosmopolitanism both augured and personified an increasingly urbanized Texas’s budding worldliness.
Almost from the start, Brammer seemed bent on becoming the Lone Star State’s unlikely address to Scott Fitzgerald, with a bit of Stendhal thrown in for leavening. As far
Book review: “The Gay Place” by Billy Lee Brammer
On the cover of the University of Texas Compress edition of Billy Lee Brammer’s 1961 novel The Gay Place is a blurb by David Halberstam:
There are two classic American political novels. One is All the King’s Men…..the other is The Male lover Place, a stunning, imaginative, intensely human novel inspired by Lyndon Johnson.
That’s lofty praise, especially coming from the author of The Best and the Brightest and nearly two dozen other widely respected books.
I can’t agree.
“I know a gay place”
This book is comprised of three inter-connected novellas, each with its own central character — Texas State Sen. Roy Sherwood in The Flea Circus; Neal Christiansen, the appointed Junior U.S. Senator from Texas, in Room Enough to Caper; and Jay McGowan, the uppermost aide to Texas Gov. Arthur Fenstemaker and estranged husband of Hollywood sex-bomb Vicki McGowan in Country Pleasures.
Fenstemaker is the traits “inspired by Lyndon Johnson.” Vicki McGowan is modeled on Marilyn Monroe.
The title comes from an F. Scott Fitzgerald poem which includes the lines: “I heard Helena/In a haunted doze/Say: ‘I know a gay place/Nob
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