100 Boyfriends

"Brontez Purnell's 100 Boyfriends is a symphony of sex, trouble and wisdom--as if the composer had sex with each member of the orchestra by way of getting it right. An electric prismatic genre-defying punk literary flight, Purnell is twirling here-- I loved every page. --Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

An irrerverent, sensitive, and inimitable look at gay dysfunction through the eyes of a cult hero

It's like that saying, 'Where god closes a door, he opens a window, ' but in this particular case the window was on the fifth floor and the house was on fire.

Transgressive, foulmouthed, and devastatingly funny, Brontez Purnell's 100 Boyfriends is a revelatory spiral into the imperfect lives of queer men desperately fighting--and often losing--the urge to self-sabotage. His characters solicit sex on their lunch breaks, expose themselves to racist neighbors, sleep with their coworker's husbands, rub Preparation H on their hungover eyes, and, in an uproarious epilogue, take a punk band on a disastrous tour of Europe. They also travel to claim inheritances, push past personal trauma, and cultivate community while living on the margins of a white supremacist, heteronormative society.

Armed with a deadpan wit that finds humor in even the lowest of nadirs, Brontez Purnell--a widely acclaimed underground writer, filmmaker, musician, and performance artist--writes with the peerless zeal, insight, and horniness of a gay punk messiah. From dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama, Purnell indexes desire, desperation, race, and loneliness with a startling blend of levity and vulnerability. Together, the slice-of-life tales that writhe within 100 Boyfriends are a singular and uncompromising vision of an unexposed queer underbelly. Holding them together is the vision of an iconoclastic storyteller, as fearless as he is human.