“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.
Release date:
February 2, 2021
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Print pages:
192
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I WOKE UP ALARMED. I didn’t know where I was at first. It was that feeling of waking up someplace foreign and being like, “What the fuck?!” But then you look to the left and you’re like, “Oh, wait, that handsome guy.”
It’s comforting to wake up with someone this attractive, and I’m sure he was thinking the same thing, but I also couldn’t go back to sleep because his sun-spanked disco ball was flashing high beams all over the room.
His body was covered in them; even the cast on his leg was spotted with light.
Now, I had come in his room the afternoon before. His roommate was having an after-kiki at their house. She was shit-faced and said, “Let’s meet my roommate, y’all are probably gonna fuck.”
We got high as fuck and covered every subject from nu jazz to childhood trauma.
I got in his bed and he motioned me closer and put me in a bear hug; I was taken aback because it had been a very long time since someone had touched me like this, let alone a really hot person in a cast.
“I’m going to leave you guys alone a second,” my friend said, cocaine ring on her nose. He pulled me in tighter and I pulled off my glasses. His arms around me, I felt my dick get hard and went with the first action in my head.
“I should probably go now,” I said.
“I’ll be here all night,” he said.
I made it home but—Oh shit. I left my glasses.
“Come back, please—now,” he said when I called to see if they were there.
I was quickly back in his arms and this time he was on painkillers. He pushed my head down. I know for a fact that the night before, when I was in the midst of a cocaine and vodka–induced tirade, I explained that I don’t like sucking dick. But I guess he changed my mind. I heard his voice. It was like an angel sighing. Or maybe like a dude on painkillers getting a blow job? All these vowel-dominant (though otherwise unintelligible) moaning sounds, punctuated with “yeah,” “more,” and “that feels good, dude.” After half an hour or so, I left to attend a reading on the other side of town.
“Come back after?” he asked.
“Again?” I said, beginning to feel like someone actually needed me.
“Yes, again,” he answered.
I went home and rinsed my ass out and then went to the reading and beelined to his door, to my knees, straddled over him.
“Get it in there,” he said, followed by more vowel-dominant (yet otherwise unintelligible) moaning.
After he came, I dismounted and asked if he wanted to eat fried chicken. “Yes. Whiskey, too,” he demanded.
Painkillers and whiskey—I liked his style.
“You’re my boyfriend now—go get the food.”
“I’m broke, and I don’t feel like walking, plus it’s cold outside and the fog just rolled in,” I said, thinking that I had just successfully sidestepped my first duty as a fake boyfriend.
“Look in the closet, take the vintage blue Patagonia jacket—you can have it, in fact. My debit card is in my wallet. Take it, the PIN is five-six-nine-eight, then go to the basement and grab my bike. It’s the chrome Bianchi Pista … and hurry the fuck up,” he said, giggling.
I followed all his orders and was cruising down the street in his jacket, on his bike, with his money. I was gagged over the bike, as I am a vintage-bike junkie and Bianchi doesn’t even make chrome Pistas anymore—I was gliding through the foggy nighttime feeling like the Silver Surfer, only on a bike.
The fried chicken place was a ten-minute ride away but first things first: How much money did this fool have in his checking account?
I stopped at the ATM and typed in his PIN, five-six-nine-eight, and pressed Balance: $80,690.78. Like wait, what the fuck?! After the transaction ended, I put the card back in the machine again and did it all over to make sure I had seen it right—and I had.
I pedaled onward to the restaurant, thinking in my head, Like, what the fuck does that dude DO?
A litany of questions sprang to mind. Why does he live in that crappy room? Why does he live in that crappy apartment? If I stole twenty bucks from his account would he even notice or be bummed? Like, did he break his leg skiing in Tahoe or doing some other rich people shit? And most importantly, Should I try to marry him?
I could not recall the last time my bank account or the bank account of anyone I knew closely held more than, say, four thousand bucks—and this was his checking, no less. What the fuck did his savings look like?
I quickly put it out of my head because thinking about money is gross and also the variables seemed too vast. You can’t make any guesstimates about someone else’s life without knowing them, and honestly I didn’t know my fake boyfriend at all.
I biked past a storefront and caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the glass window. I looked like boyfriend material, or at the very least like some asshole who graduated from some WASP-ass college on the East Coast. But I knew I was an impostor underneath, which also turned me on because crime is sexy. But this was his expensive vintage Patagonia, his expensive vintage Bianchi, and his debit card. Dear god, was this how he felt every day? Like a capable, normal adult?
The woman at the restaurant who took my order asked for my ID when I presented his debit card, and I said, cool as a cucumber, “Oh, it’s not my card, it’s my boyfriend’s, he broke his leg and I have to do, like, everything for him now.” She didn’t even blink before she let me sign the check. Did she notice how much I was glowing inside when I said “my boyfriend”? Fake or not, something about saying “my boyfriend” just felt good.
I biked the food back to his apartment.
I did not steal twenty dollars from his well-endowed-ass bank account.
I made it back to his house and soon after, the night got blurry. Morning was crisp yet hungover.
I had stared at him so long he actually opened his eyes; about three beats later I asked, “Does this mean we’re boyfriends now?”
“Yes, exactly,” he said, cracking the fuck up.
I kissed him on the lips and got dressed quickly so that I could be late for work.
“I like boys that are broken like you—you’re dependent and can’t get away,” I teased.
He rolled his eyes, like, so hard. “What are you gonna do when my leg heals?”
“Fuck if I know, break it again?” I said, trying to hold a straight face.
Just then, whatever bastard cloud that was covering the sun lifted, and light shined through the window brighter than before. It hit the disco ball, and bright specks of light were everywhere again.
There was the superstitious part of me that wanted to take it as a sign—This guy, this guy will be my new boyfriend—but immediately something in my head said, Probably not.
I went with my second instinct and turned to leave.
“I’ll be here all day. Will you come back to me, please?” he asked, looking me dead in the eye.
“Yes. I’ll come back whenever you want me to,” I said, and left.
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