self-published
Brontez Purnell: Night of 100 Boyfriends
August 2021
Three weeks ago, I ambled over to a communal outdoor bench at MoMA PS1 to park my sweaty city suit and absorb a selection of live readings from Brontez Purnell’s newest literary feat, 100 Boyfriends. “Book of the year,” responded a few absent friends after I posted photographs of the reading to social media. Purnell’s 180-page catalog is a culmination of untroubled sexual episodes and half-collapsed encounters. The book’s stories carry readers through a montage of bored blowjobs, elementary school dalliances, bathroom mall rendezvous, and a cluster of trysts with both financially-insecure hustlers and guileless Johns (whoever said Daddies were immune from earnest, child-like behavior?). Proof of insecurity: “Where is my ninety dollars?!” rattled off rapper Khalif Diouf from an excerpt titled, “Hooker Boys (Part Two).” Standing tall behind a canary yellow microphone, Diouf held court for a few short minutes reciting dialogue between an aggrieved trick and a clueless client. “I almost had the nerve to say that if I were to pay for sex, he (though a lovely person) wouldn’t be my first pick.” But, what does it matter anyway? As a married man with a wife and two kids once told my friend before going down on him, “It’s just blood.”
An Evening of 100 Boyfriends, curated by the Whiting Award-winning Purnell, showcased the author’s ability to conjure up larger-than-life characters. The readers, all performers, included cabaret performer Mx Justin Vivian Bond, performance artist Elliot Reed, writer/porn star Ty Mitchell, and Savannah Knoop of JT LeRoy fame, amongst several others. It seemed appropriate, if not charming, to see Purnell’s congregation had coalesced on the grounds of a Romanesque Revival schoolhouse turned contemporary art institution. Long overdue was a public education on the expectations, demands, and exhaustion of what’s optimistic about certain intimate entanglements. From the sidelines puttered a bespectacled Jackson Howard, Purnell’s editor from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “So glad you came--we’re, unfortunately, missing a few lovers tonight,” Howard whispered in my ear before floating off toward a group that included novelist Fiona Alison Duncan. Chatter amongst distracted listeners nearby, the likes of poet Shiv Kotecha and figurative painters Nash Glynn and Ian Faden, clarified Howard’s vague disclosure; one or two readers that evening were absent due to a COVID-19 scare.
After months of social deprivation and ennui, it was a convenient time, I thought, to show up, to be brave. Purnell and his ensemble of characters appeared to think so, too, as Purnell’s readers recited select passages from 100 Boyfriends and schooled an eager crowd on the thralls of desire and humiliation. The reading was a curious communion for both the religiously codependent and recently inconvenienced, like a literary workshop for the aspiring Boyfriend in all of us. Frustration in sex, like in literature, is expected. “Sex complicates the ordinary, because, even when it isn’t collaborative,” writes the late Lauren Berlant, “it forces the rational/critical subject to become disorganized for a bit.” Narrative convention teaches us that desire breeds disaster. Purnell’s protagonist illustrates this; with the impersonality of a man who confesses he is, “the worst mix of willfully nonjudgmental and horny,” there’s a limitless supply of disaster to drink up.
“‘Your writing is great—do you want to be famous?” teased Ty Mitchell, larping as a literary agent on stage before morphing back into the unnamed protagonist. “I was young at the time and believed anything an older, handsome man told me.” And, while I still suspect, “(A book is a request for love),” as the French novelist and photographer Herve Guibert once admitted, there’s a reason his sentiment is bracketed off as an afterthought. Point, shoot, and click. It might be a total disaster to demand literature in the absence of love. I’m learning as Purnell’s protagonist does, that optimism tends to be cruel. How many times have I spent cozying up to writers during boozy dinner parties and ketamine-fueled afters urging them to pretty please give birth to their first book? At my request for a red-haired darling to make the literary leap early last spring, she smiled and replied, “Johnny, you’re too pure.” A book, imagine! Again, I’m learning. Unrequited desire tends to border on an obsession with unearthly idealism.
For the religiously codependent, the heart is a cardiovascular muscle that requires organized exercise and daily reassurance to beat a healthy 100,000 times a day. For the recently inconvenienced, the heart is a blood-filled vessel that can strengthen by avoiding disaster and disorganization. “Patterns reoccur for comfort,” I overheard a former fling in the crowd explain. Before wishing me hello, he turned to his 100th boyfriend and reassured him, “Sweetheart, I love you—.” At what point, I wonder, does the heart break up into a metaphor? Because with the heart, as with literature and with sex, it never really is just blood.