Brontez Purnell is a flaming powerhouse of creativity: writer, dancer, singer, filmmaker. Impressively restless and productive. His latest outing is this bold, sassy, sexy roulette wheel of a book in which he celebrates the marginal, the promiscuous, the lovelorn, the endlessly horny, hookers and hook-ups, fuck buddies and fuck-ups. I read it first in a linear fashion, but you could just as well pick random pages, like tracks on a record.
“What are the mechanics of desire?” he asks, in a book as gorgeously promiscuous as the lives it describes. At times it reads like a diary or a letter, at other times it put me in mind of James Purdy’s blunt elegance. Purnell writes sex exceptionally well and the book has a big heart full of warmth and forgiveness for all the fuck-ups and misdemeanors it recounts. Boyfriend, in this context, is not so much a relational or romantic descriptor as it is – somewhat paradoxically, perhaps – a marker of transience, and as such loaded with irony. Who can name 100 boyfriends? At what point does a fuck buddy become a boyfriend? Can a guy paying you for sex be called a boyfriend? The blurring here is deliberate and provocative and Purnell’s prose is razor-sharp, the book rich with hard-won insight. His candor is vertiginous, often humorous, but never cruel. The book defies categorization in the best way, truly queer, yet at the same time, it stands within a tradition established and maintained by the likes of Allen Ginsberg, John Rechy, Samuel Delany, and Renaud Camus of writing about urban queer networks or sexual subcultures. In an interview with Vulture magazine, Purnell said, “It’s really about how, every time you date someone, you’re left with a ghost of someone, and that person’s left with the ghost of someone, and we’re all just carrying around the baggage of everyone’s relationships, even when we deal with each other. There’s this line in the book that goes: ‘Between two men, there can be a hundred ghosts in the room.’ It’s about dealing with the residual effects of entanglement. |
Alongside the brazen escapades, such as having drunken sex in the street, are excoriating moments of tenderness and queer love, another kind of intimacy found along the way in the search for intimacy.
Danez Smith, “I love this slut of a book”. I think you will, too.
100 BOYFRIENDS BY BRONTEZ PURNELL https://www.cipherpress.co.uk/
Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children’s book, and the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Writers’ Award for Fiction, he was named one of the 32 Black Male Writers of Our Time by The New York Times Magazine. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, a co-founder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School, and the director of several short films, music videos, and the documentary Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock. He lives in Oakland, California.
Review by Jonathan KempQueerguru London Contributing Editor Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative writing at Middlesex University. He is the author of two novels – London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015) – and the short-story collection Twentysix. (2011, all published by Myriad Editions). Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male (2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of Desire (2015, both Punctum Books).
Labels: 2021, book review, Brontez Purnell, Cypher Press, Jonathan Kemp
