The gay place billy lee brammer

Long before Billy Lee Brammer died at age forty-eight in Austin in 1978, he’d become something his native Texas hadn’t been familiar with until he popped up: an genuine, homegrown literary legend. Katherine Anne Porter had bailed for the East Coast early, and her mandarin reputation was a horse of a paler dye in any case. The grand elderly 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 modern biography, Brammer was the sort of seeming outlier whose contradictions turn 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 answer to Scott Fitzgerald, with a bit of Stendhal thrown in for leavening. As far