Owen Levy

REVIEW
Echo Magazine,
Phoenix, Arizona
by Ken Furtado

A Brother's Touch
20th Anniversary Edition

A "cult novel" when it was first published, in 1982, A Brother's Touch takes place in New York City during the tumultuous birth of the gay rights movement. It's the story of Angus, a straight man, and his Odyssey in New York's gay underworld as he searches for information about the death of his younger brother, Earl.
Better known as "Chicken," beautiful and fragile Earl was all of 17 when his body was discovered, stuffed into an oil barrel left on a deserted pier in
New York's infamous gay cruising area. A hustler and a drug addict, Chicken was loved by pretty much everyone who knew him--a small circle of johns, petty criminals, drag queens, pimps and fellow hustlers. But the police could not have cared less about his death, and about whether it was accident or foul play.
Enter Angus. Nearly twice Earl's age and separated from his wife and children, Angus drives from his upstate New York home to claim his brother's
body; he is so unsettled by the callous indifference of the police, that he resolves to learn more about who Chicken was, and how he came to die so young and so tragically. A list of names and phone numbers found stuffed into the toe of one of Chicken's boots gives Angus plenty of places to start looking, and he refuses to become disgusted or deterred by his quest, and by what he learns.
A Brother's Touch has plenty of colorful characters and is written with almost a reporter's eye for detail and place. It should prove as fascinating for readers for whom the 1970s are ancient history as it is for readers who can recall them, with their heady mixture of the potency of sex and nascent political power.

. When originally published in 1982 the first novel won a favorable review in The New York Times--the first mass market paperback critiqued in the influential daily, and at the time one of very few gay-themed novels reviewed in the mainstream media. The national publicity sent books flying out of stores and into a successive printing. The day the Times review ran the book literally sold out around the country. Besides the U.S., the book sold well internationally, especially in Germany, Great Britain, Canada and the Netherlands.

· The mass market paperback sold for less that $3 when it first appeared in print but now commands as much as 25 times that amount at out-of-print booksellers on-and off-line. The 20th Anniversary edition makes the book available to a new generation of readers.

· The novel is a perennial on reading lists for young adults, gay study programs and appears on lists of books considered controversial. It is catalogued in gay literature collections at major universities, community centers and libraries.

· One year after publication an independent Minneapolis-based bookseller christened his new shop A Brother's Touch. The store recently celebrated its 19th anniversary. A Houston Texas bookseller wrote the publishers saying that the book was the fastest selling novel they had ever stocked.

· Author Levy thinks its important to keep in mind that A Brother's Touch is an historical novel. "It focuses on the first heady days of gay liberation in the early 1970's, right after Stonewall, when gays started getting organized in a more public way," says Levy, a Stonewall survivor. "But it’s primarily the story of a throwaway, an unwanted child and the people he touched during his short life."
Further Levy states, "More than one young reader has come up to me and said 'That could have been my story!'"

"...sensitive and compassionate... Mr. Levy writes with the dispassionate view of a good reporter."
---The New York Times


"A Brother's Touch is an entertaining book...Mr. Levy has an ability to present his case without passing too much judgment--and that is refreshing!
---Boston Gaytimes


"...[Levy] displays a reportorial eye and a sensitive touch that raises passages of his novel above formulaic constructions.... With acid clarity he etches a portrait of committed gay liberationists who undermine their struggle for equality with petty jealousy and factionalism."
---The Advocate


"Some of the most strongly felt writing in the book describes the minor epiphany Angus experiences after a bloody climatic scene at the pier. Exchanging a brotherly embrace with a gay man, Angus suddenly becomes 'conscious of never letting his tender feelings show.... So much of his life tied to emotions he didn't understand.'...This 'brother's touch' lies at the...center of Levy's story."
---Philadelphia Gay News


...a look at the very seamy side of our lives."
---The New York Native


"A Brother's Touch is quite downbeat, scruffy, and non upwardly mobile: it's a cautionary tale."
---Gay Community News (Boston)


"From the first day--[A Brother's Touch] has been our weekly best seller. Far outselling any book that we have carried in the past.... All [the readers] that returned to the shop--had nothing but good to say about it."
---Wilde 'N' Stein Books, Houston Texas (in a letter to the publisher)

Angus had lost track of his younger brother through the years. He'ds been too busy trying to clear the jungles of Vietnam out of his brain. And now Earl is dead, his body found on the Manhattan waterfront, in one of the West Village's notorious cruising areas.

Recent photos of Earl before he died show a sweet, laughing face, surrounded by the feathery blond curls of a cherub. His diary reveals a life on the street, a needle in his arm, his body wracked with drugs paid for by men wanting love in return.

Angus's grim journey into his brother's brief troubled life leads him to a dark corner of society he never knew existed, and the dark corners of his own soul he wishes he could forget.

When originally published, A Brother's Touch was lauded and condemned. Now 20 years after its first printing, this timeless story is more vital and readable than ever.