Brontez Purnell has been a multi-hyphenate creative force since most of today’s influencer-mover-maker-organizers were still singing along to Dora the Explorer. A renowned zine maker, post-modernist dancer, electroclash musician, Oakland daddy, and overall punk legend, Purnell first arrived in the Bay Area, his adopted home, in 2001. He was 18 then, having freshly fled from the tiny Alabama town of Triana, spurred on by a flourishing zeal for fucking shit up à la Riot Grrrl, the underground feminist movement he would later credit with saving his life.
Once out west, Purnell wasted no time establishing himself as a producer of genre-bending writing, art, performance, and more. He wrote and edited the zine Fag School, performed with the band Gravy Train!!!!, and started an eponymous dance company. 20 years into his career, he is, as one critic put it, “a living archive of the Bay’s queer and punk scenes.”
Whether through movement, the written word, or just by screaming his head off, Purnell’s art has always been obsessed with the ache of isolation and the ecstasy of bodily communion — themes that would carry into his first two independently published novels, Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger (2015) and Since I Laid My Burden Down (2017). This year, he’s following them up with his first book published major press, 100 Boyfriends, out now from FSG x MSD.
100 Boyfriends, with its meticulous attention to the sights, smells, textures, glories, and terrors of queer sex, continues the divine smuttiness of Purnell’s earlier writings. Billed as a “novel-in-verse,” the text is a three act series of sex-centered vignettes. And as you drift between characters, points of view, and even literary forms, reading 100 Boyfriends comes about as close as any literary experience can to one of the book’s primary subjects: cruising. In one moment, a character likens his former flings to gum “you chew hours after the flavor leaves and that you accidentally swallow.” In the next, we’re reading a detailed analysis of what another character hilariously calls “gay face” (“like they had all been male cheerleaders in high school and it had fucked up their lives forever: ‘READY?! OK!’”). There’s really no way to prepare oneself for what lies on each new page.
And why should you? Purnell is unconcerned with narratives that lead you from A to B to C. “I don’t care for a journey,” one character, an author, explains. “I’m just making a map; something that says you are HERE.” Purnell’s fiction, accordingly, submerges you in the consciousness of his predominantly broke, Black, and queer protagonists. There’s lots to love — and learn — by simply letting oneself be taken along for the ride.
We asked Bryan Washington, author of the 2020 novel Memorial and a fellow writer whose studied, sensual depictions of queer, interracial love have awed critics, to speak with Purnell about his latest work. In an email conversation, the two authors discuss humor as a means of creating emotionally layered textual worlds, misbegotten dreams of gay prophethood, and Purnell’s joyous experience of birthing a beautiful 4.8 ounce, 192-page baby. — Wren Sanders
Most importantly, to start, how are you? How are you hanging in there? How has the publication process been over these last few months (hopefully not too hellish)?
Oh, it’s chill. I mostly smoke a lot of pot these days and like to go back to bed around 2 (PM, NOT AM MIND YOU). I wear pajamas to the grocery store now. I literally just lost three chapters of my next book. Every time I see the book out at places I’m like, “oh shit, I’m not pregnant anymore — I like giving birth.”
Was there a particular voice in the book that felt especially difficult to conjure? And was there one that felt more familiar than the others?
They are all difficult to conjure, essentially. They reign (rain?) down on your head like spirits and some of them are bloodier than others — there are just some stories that are inherently harder than others to translate. Like sometimes when you’re explaining a dream you had and of course there’s like 20 million narratives going in that space but for whatever reason when explaining it you pick the narrative that’s the most clear and loudest to you. That’s how I conjure my stories ultimately.
