* * *
MADRID, SPAIN—The show here is chill. A radiator (or something) explodes in the back room and the tour manager’s computer gets wet. Roadie lover boy gets his bag stolen, and I hook up with a man from Shanghai. I do not remember where we stayed.
* * *
BARCELONA, SPAIN—Either the show in Barcelona got canceled or we had a true day off, I cannot remember. Either way we all split up. Drummer and bass player go to a hardcore show and the German tour manager lady goes to a friend’s house so she can get away from the sausage party that is the tour van. Roadie lover boy and I go wild in Barcelona; we go hunting for bathhouses so we can fuck people all night. We end up at the beach and then the fashion warehouse of some random guy we meet. They take turns fucking me on the couch there; we all wash up in the sink after. We later go to a bar with a back room and roadie lover boy stays and charms everyone in the bar while I go to the back room to fuck. I meet a Colombian man and fuck him and mention to him that my partner (roadie lover boy) is from Colombia, too. We all go back to his house and I am made to wait in the lobby while they fuck upstairs. Roadie lover boy comes down after with a smile on his face. He says he could feel my cum in the man while he was fucking him and that made him feel even closer to me. We kiss. We go to a rave to meet up with some friends from San Francisco who happen to be at a club DJing that night. A huge thirteen-person brawl between security and some club goers erupts outside and we leave en route to a bathhouse. Outside the bathhouse a couple of shady characters are waiting. They come and grab me—not violently but sensually, as if they are flirting. Really, they are stealing my phone from my pocket. Roadie lover boy and I stay in the bathhouse until 8:00 a.m.
* * *
LYON, FRANCE—This place is stunning. We play a show on a houseboat and the opening band is killer. The city has steep steps everywhere and a French boy tries to take me away after the show. I decline because roadie lover boy is leaving back to Colombia soon and I want to be with him. We end up staying in Lyon for two days.
* * *
TOULOUSE, FRANCE—This show is full of French mod Daddies on vintage Vespas and I literally have a boner the whole time. Roadie lover boy leaves because he has to get back to Colombia; he is staying with extended family in Paris first. We say that we will love each other forever and then kiss goodbye.
* * *
MARSEILLE, FRANCE—Show is canceled.
* * *
TÜBINGEN, GERMANY—The show here is at a squat called Epplehaus Jugendzentrum. It’s punk as fuck. The opening band is three German guys who have this, like, Mexican-themed band. It’s so fucking offensive. It’s literally them doing a German-sounding Speedy Gonzales impersonation the entire set. I think one of them even puts on a sombrero. The drummer of our band, who is part Mexican, mind you, looks at me as I am looking at him and our jaws both drop. Like, why is this happening? After the show, I get fucked in a bathroom at the squat by a student boy and then I get fucked by a Middle Eastern guy I follow home. The bass player and I find a Slayer sweatshirt at the show and spend the entire rest of the tour fighting over it. The bass player eventually wins.
* * *
FREIBURG, GERMANY—I remember passing through the Black Forest in Germany. The tour manager is threatening to stop and do a séance, because the Black Forest is a romantic site of witchcraft in German lore, and I really want to join. All I remember from this show is the DJ playing the Raincoats and me rimming a boy in a bathroom.
* * *
PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC—This is the farthest east I’ve been in my life. I can’t get a feel for this city and we are only there for the night. The tour manager is getting hit on by a girl who brags about drinking her period blood for health, and a man shows up who says he’s been in love with our band for years. We stay in a hostel that night that is so creepy I can’t deal. There is a dead rat in the kitchen but from the looks of it, it seems like the rat wasn’t even poisoned—it seems like it had simply just given up on life because this hostel was so bleak. We leave the next day and get stopped by the cops for having Polish license plates.
* * *
KASSEL, GERMANY—This town is all rock. I’m excited to see so many people show up. I don’t have the slightest fucking clue how they really know about us, but I will take it. The venue owners light a couch on fire outside the venue and the fire department shows up. Besides the couch fire, all I remember after the show is going home with a handsome German writer whose roommate wouldn’t stop making out with me. It was fun and the next morning he says to me, “You and me will meet twice in this life,” right before I close the door to the tour van.
* * *
BERLIN, GERMANY—I basically hate touring. It’s all long rides and waiting for hours in clubs. But of course, it also beats staying at home all the time, so nevertheless, I persist. We meet up with our European booker at his flat in Berlin and play the show in a neighborhood called Gesundbrunnen. We wait for hours at the venue, play, and immediately drive fourteen hours back to Amsterdam to catch our flights in time for Dubai.
* * *
DUBAI, U.A.E.—So these two rad ladies who throw an indie-rock party in Dubai got wind that my band was in Europe and offered to fly us over to Dubai and pay us good and put us up in a luxury hotel for three days with separate rooms. I felt like a member of Mötley Crüe but also was heeding the warnings of all my friends to be really careful in Dubai. We land and take a shuttle to customs and the bass player lets out a fart so far-reaching in its gnar-i-tude that this other woman and I on the shuttle almost hurl and the bass player starts giggling. We are in customs and everyone gets groped and strip-searched except me and I am rather bitter about it. We play at an Irish pub (???) and it’s a huge bar. There’re so many drunk English people I’m slightly taken aback by how many British immigrants in Dubai dress like those assholes from Jersey Shore—I really, really don’t get it. We play the show and I use an amp that was autographed and used for recording by Nile Rodgers. The crowd is wild and I am unlearning all the lies they taught us about the scene here. Everyone’s wasted: dykes are making out with each other, and some dude throws up in the fountain outside. This Nigerian bouncer is staring at my ass like he wants to stab it with his dick and I get goose bumps.
The next day we are taken to the souks across the river and it’s a shit show. The bass player and I are both wearing dashikis and the Emirati store owners are yelling from their shops, “AH, HAKUNA MATATA!!” and also “HEY, OBAMA!”; not being able to decide if this is racism or an ill attempt at intersectional camaraderie we both just smile. One shop owner grabs me in a headlock and takes me into his store and demands I buy something. I don’t know if it is customary to bargain with the shop owners so I just ask the price (willing to pay whatever) and he stares at me cold and says nothing (’cause basically, like every other man in my life, bowing to his word is still getting me nowhere). The party promoters take us out for food and my bass player orders a camel burger—I don’t think to ask how it tastes because I don’t want to know. The promoters hear that I am from the Deep South (of the United States) and take me to an American restaurant that actually has spot-on soul food. I am shook. The next day we fly back to Amsterdam.
* * *
AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS—We were supposed to continue another two weeks in Scandinavia but all the shows fall through. We change our tickets and spend three days in Amsterdam. I go that night to a fetish bar with a piss-play area in the back and bunks for fucking. An older Iranian man strips me naked and ties me to a bunker pole and binds my wrists and ankles together. He lays me on my side in the bunkers and takes off his belt and whips me hard across my bare ass while he is fucking my mouth. He climaxes over my face and unties me and begs to meet me again and I giggle. I go home with a Dutch man who explains he is suffering from depression. I leave his home in the morning and spend literally two days in the bathhouse downtown. Eventually we fly home to San Francisco and we are all completely broke.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my mother, Annie Jewel, for passing the gift of the pen; my sister, Danielle, for being my fiercest protector; and my nephews for reminding me that my job as an older brother will never be done. I would like to thank my wife, Sophia Wang, for the years of limitless support and guidance. Special thanks to my special friend Ryanaustin Dennis for showing me how all love can work. Thank you to my bandmates, Sean Teves and Ezra Rabin (the Younger Lovers). Kenyon Farrow for being a constant ear to listen and shoulder to cry on. Michelle Tea for mentorship, guidance, and really believing in me. Channing Joseph for my hilariously tumultuous time at SF Weekly (lol). Justin Torres for reading my first zine, Fag School, and saying to me, “You have a spark.” Mike Albo for letting me fanboy this long. Kathleen Hanna for the years of patience, support, and inspiration. And Janelle Hessig for dragging me on tour and always being down for a road trip.
To all my New York City Brother Lovers: Zac Ching, David DeWitt, Adam Rhodes, Adam Baran, and Nicholas Teixeira. To all my Los Angeles Brother Lovers: Darren Kinoshita, Seth Bogart, Eric Shum, Mike Hoffman, Jack Shamama, and Bradford Nordeen. To all my San Francisco / Oakland Brother Lovers: Gary Gregorson, Jesse Carlo Parsons, Zac Benfield, Sean Dickerson, Ethan Mitchell, and Ben Brown. Shout-out to the special women in my life: Schentell Nunn, Xandra Ibarra, Paulina Lara, and Kenya Robinson.
I would also like to thank the UC Berkeley MFA Art Practice department. (GO BEARS!) Faris Al-Shathir for giving me the opportunity to finish the first pass at 100 Boyfriends as part of the BOFFO artist residency on Fire Island. Jennifer Baumgardner of Dottir Press for taking a chance on me and publishing my children’s book. Bob Burnside for being a magical wizard mentor. Malcom Gregory Scott for being a magical wizard mentor.
I want to extend loads of love to everyone at MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux for rocking with this joint. Also a special thanks to everyone at the Whiting Foundation—what a difference an award makes! Thanks to Jamia Wilson and Jisu Kim at the Feminist Press (my alma mater). A super deep and special thanks to Julia Masnik—my formidable agent and rad mom, who took a chance on me. A special thanks to all my ex-boyfriends and future ex-boyfriends—may our love rest in peace. And last (but never least), my editor and beautiful friend Jackson Howard for helping me conjure up the Devil with this book.
ALSO BY BRONTEZ PURNELL
Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger
Since I Laid My Burden Down
The Nightlife of Jacuzzi Gaskett (author; illustrated by Elise R. Peterson)
PRAISE FOR 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. In this electric, prismatic, genre-defying punk literary flight, Purnell is twirling—I loved every page.”
—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“Brontez Purnell has such seemingly casual genius that at times you forget you’re reading a book and are transported to some couch/bus/basement where the drugs are really good and your friend is really funny, maybe your weird closeted cousin is on HarlemHookups in the corner, and all of a sudden your friend says some fucking Sappho-ass, weird-ass, brilliant-ass bullshit. I love this slut of a book, it’s a slut-ass maker. 100 Boyfriends or no new boyfriends at all, Purnell’s autofiction / memoir / whatever the hell this marvelously sad and intoxicating book is shook me up good with its honesty and blunt-to-face endings, the jokes and stories I didn’t know we were allowed to tell outside of circles of faggots and misfits. But this book is in those circles, makes you tea, and steals for you; it invites us in, but would we mind shutting the hell up ’cause it’s a little hungover? The light is coming through the windows so clear.”
—Danez Smith, author of Homie
“Each story in 100 Boyfriends is a minor eclipse: stunning in scope, technically blinding, and entirely miraculous. I laughed and I cried and I laughed until I cried—Brontez Purnell is a marvel.”
—Bryan Washington, author of Memorial
“In the vast history of the universe there is only one Brontez Purnell, and thank god we get him. From cruising to crushes, cumming to closure, 100 Boyfriends is a mandatory read for the funny-sexy lit freaks among us—a candy box of Euro boys and Daddies, blue pills and satanic exes—all told in an addictively delicious voice by a writer who is somehow both wildly cool and self-deprecatingly humble at the same time.”
—Melissa Broder, author of The Pisces
“No one writes like Brontez Purnell. It’s not just that he is hilariously irreverent, which he is, but that he reserves reverence for that which is deserving. 100 Boyfriends is like a good lover, by turns vulgar and vulnerable, dirty and desperate, and always grinding toward magic.”
—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals
“Scathingly lucid, filthily pure, this is the most astute, witty, acid-tongued, and emotionally generous book about relationships—from one-night stands to internet no-no’s to ill-conceived crushes to long-term loves, requited and otherwise—I’ve read. Painfully knowing yet never jaded, 100 Boyfriends dissects, explodes, lambastes, and revels in the ugly beauty of imperfect intimacies with prose that consistently puts its finger on the bleeding pulse of contemporary desire. An unforgettable ode to the heart that beats inside every longing body.”
—Maryse Meijer, author of The Seventh Mansion and Rag
“The stories in 100 Boyfriends took me on a journey: They made me laugh. They made me gasp. They made me feel. Brontez Purnell is a vibrant literary voice you won’t soon forget. I love this book.”
—De’Shawn Charles Winslow, author of In West Mills
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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 Award for Fiction, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers for Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, the cofounder 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, most recently, the documentary Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock. Born in Triana, Alabama, he has lived in Oakland, California, for more than a decade. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
ACT I: ARMY OF LOVERS
In the Morning
Hooker Boys (Part One)
Inherited Winter Coat
The Boyfriends
Damn a Lover Comes Home to Die
Boyfriend #666 / The Satanist
Ed’s Name Written in Pencil
ACT II: 100-PAGE BREAKUP LETTER
Letter of Resignation
Meandering (Part One)
The Boyfriends (Interpretations)
This Day and Many More
Hooker Boys (Part Two)
Boyfriend #19 / The White Boy with Dreadlocks
Early Retirement
ACT III: NO NEW BOYFRIENDS
Manifesto: No New Boyfriends
Moonlight Tops and the Cold War
Repeater
Mountain Boys
Boyfriend #100 / The Agent
Meandering (Part Two)
Hooker Boys (Part Three)
Mr. Raleigh vs. the Gym
The Boyfriends (Continued)
Do They E
xist If No One’s Watching?
EPILOGUE: ROCK ’N’ ROLL IS DEAD TO ME—A EUROPEAN TOUR DIARY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALSO BY BRONTEZ PURNELL
PRAISE FOR 100 BOYFRIENDS
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
MCD × FSG Originals
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2021 by Brontez Purnell
All rights reserved
First edition, 2021
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-374-72247-0
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected]
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