Fashion Flashback: Brad Gooch

Fashion Reverie looks back at the career of novelist Brad Gooch. With the 1988 publication of Brad Gooch’s bestselling Scary Kisses, a fictional novel that examined the drug-infested terrain of 80s New York City from fashion runways to the latter-day art world of Andy Warhol, Gooch established himself as a writer that his pulse on the gritty underbelly of the New York Arts world that was previously seen as glamorous.

Next week, Brad Gooch’s book Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art and the 70s and the 80s will hit bookstands. Smash Cut details Brad Gooch’s libertine life in the late70s and into the 80s with his boyfriend Howard Brookner and his life as a fashion model with Wilhelmina. “Gooch richly recollects his experiences as a model in Italy—describing his time in Milan as “feeling blindfolded and spun about three times”—and Paris, though the bulk of the narrative revolves around Gooch’s decade-long relationship with Brookner, a filmmaker, explains the Publishers Weekly in a recent article.

Brad Gooch now holds a doctorate degree in literature from Columbia University and teaches English at William Paterson University. However, prior to his academic career Gooch was a male model with editorial campaigns with Chanel’s men’s fragrance, Allure, as well as walking in major shows in Paris, Milan, and New York

Toward the end of his modeling career, Gooch penned Scary Kisses. Scary Kisses was the first book of its kind that looked at the world of male modeling with all its glamour juxtaposed against drugs, sex, and exploitation.

Brad Gooch’s other books have included Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, Hall and Oates, Billy Idol, Zombie 00, Dating the Greek Gods, Finding the Boyfriend Within, Jailbait and Other Stories, The Golden Age of Promiscuity, and City Poet: The Life of Times of Frank O’Hara.

—William S. Gooch