Though Billy Lee Brammer’s novel The Gay Place is a work of fiction, it remains one of the most revealing accounts of Texas politics ever written. The Gay Place, which takes its title from a poem by F. Scott Fitzgerald, was published in 1961 to great acclaim. The novel paints a vivid picture of the compromises, strategy, and horse-trading that we call politics. Brammer based the characters on people and places he knew in 1950s Austin.