"For years," says author Perry Brass, "men-especially younger men-kept coming to me with questions. 'How do I meet the kind of men I really want to spend time with?' 'How do you keep a relationship going for more than-three years?' And, my favorite, 'Just how good do you have to be in bed to keep a man interested?' "Those questions puzzled me. First, I'd never had that much of a problem meeting men. I am as shy-or shyer!-than anyone. But I'm interested in other people, and find that usually they have as much to say to me as I do to them. Also, I seem to be better at what I'd call 'intimate' relationships than casual ones. I don't have a Rollodex of bar friends, but have enjoyed a close intimacy with a number of men. I believe in passion. In falling in love. And what I began to believe in was the importance of 'adult' gay relationships." For many men, Brass says in his new book, How to Survive Your Own Gay Life, An Adult Guide to Love, Sex, and Relationships, adult gay relationships seem contradictory. They're too used to thinking of themselves as "gay kids." Or "regular" guys who will not allow the problems or satisfactions of an adult emotional life to get to them. In his new book, Brass begins with the idea that gay adulthood is work-and worth it. Not to experience it means to live in an ever more bruising, commercialized gay world. A Never-Neverland that counts on gay men as needy consumers who'll never grow up. "Many gay men," Perry Brass writes, "are stuck between childlessness and childishness. It is a dead-end that has become for them what the 'gay world' is about." In chapters like, "I Used to Be a Queer, Now I'm a Gay Consumer," he talks about the effects gay marketers have had on our community, and why so little of this enriches it psychologically or spiritually. He also writes about surviving and countering anti-gay violence-on the street, at home, or in the workplace. And about conflicts-emotional, sexual, and financial-in relationships, and resolving them. But just as important, he talks about the gay tribe, a vital connecting force gay men have to contact each other physically and spiritually. Coming between the "Sex Panic!" argument and the new "Gay Conservatives," Brass makes a call for a compassionate and embracing gay tribalism, one that has a place in it for all gay men, regardless of age, physical appearance, openness of sexuality, or past wounds. At the center of the Tribe, he defines what he calls "the gay work," so important to the well-being of gay men. "Gay men have been doing this for centuries." Included in the work is our role as healers, spiritualists, archivists, nurses, "sisters," speakers of the truth, and explorers of a unique place in the human psyche. It is there that we come, face to face, with the elusive personage of the Male Companion, the nurturing Father/Brother figure that gay men are drawn to in their deepest personal stories, relationships, and prayers. As for the last question: "How good do you have to be in bed to keep a man interested?" Brass says, "The real answer is how interested are you?" Becoming interested, learning to realize those lost intentions that keep gay men away from each other-these are some of the keys to adult living and relationships that this writer presents. In these demanding, perplexing times, How to Survive Your Own Gay Life is the Swiss Army knife gay men have been looking for.