Winner of the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Longlisted for the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize. One of Buzzfeed's Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2021, NBC's 10 Most Notable LGBTQ Books of 2021, and Pink News' Best LGBTQ Books of 2021."This hurricane of delirious, lonely, lewd tales is a taxonomy and grand unified...

Transgressive, foulmouthed, and wildly funny 100 Boyfriends is a filthy, unforgettable, and brutally profound ode to messy queer love. From one-night stands to recurring lovers, Brontez Purnell's characters expose themselves to racist neighbours, date Satanists, and drink their way out of trouble, all the while fighting - and often losing - the urge to self-sabotage. Drawing us into a community of glorious misfits living on the margins of a white supremacist, heteronormative society, Purne...

One of Electric Literature's Best Nonfiction Books of 2024. One of them.'s Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2024. A finalist for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction."This book is brutal and brutally honest, but still perversely addictive because Brontez Purnell is a performer in the truest sense. Reading Ten Bridges I've Burnt, I felt tucked-in with him, along for the intimate ride, and paused only once to write down a ...

In Ten Bridges I've Burnt, Brontez Purnell - the bard of the underloved and overlooked - turns his gaze inward. A storyteller with a musical eye for the absurdity of his own existence, he is peerless in his ability to find the levity within the stormiest of crises. Here, in his first collection of genre-defying verse, Purnell reflects on his peripatetic life, whose ups and downs have nothing on the turmoil within. 'The most high-risk homosexual behavior I engage in,' Purnell writes, 'is si...

Brontez is a raw tongue of flame blazing through all the blatant fakery and insincere bullshit of today’s gay/music/human scene. This audacious non-memoir burnt the hair off the back of my neck and had me rolling with glee.” -S.F. Bay GuardianA dirty cult-classic put out in a small batch by an underground publisher (Rudos and Rubes) in 2015, Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger recounts the life of an artist and old school homosexual” who bears a big ...

An uninhibited portrait of growing up gay in 1980s Alabama: exploring art and sex with "more layered insight than the page count should allow" (Hanif Abdurraqib, MTV News).DeShawn lives a high, creative, and promiscuous life in San Francisco. But when he's called back to his cramped Alabama hometown for his uncle's funeral, he's hit by flashbacks of handsome, doomed neighbors and sweltering Sunday services. Amidst prickly reminders of his childhood, DeShawn ponders ...

When DeShawn hears news of his uncle's death, his riotous big-city life in San Francisco is abruptly put on hold while he travels back to his Alabama hometown for the funeral. While there, he's hit by flashbacks of growing up queer and black in the '80s South, of a youth filled with strong women, bewildered boys, and messed up queers. Wading through prickly reminders of his childhood, of sweltering Sundays, church, family, and the men he once knew, Deshawn reconnects with his old self and ...

Überbordend, unverschämt und urkomisch – Brontez Purnell erzählt vom keineswegs perfekten Leben junger Männer in einer Welt, die von ihnen nichts wissen will, weil sie arm, schwarz und schwul sind. Auf der Suche nach Zugehörigkeit taumeln sie halb- bis volltrunken durch die Minenfelder romantischer Missgeschicke. Doch ganz gleich, wohin es sie dabei verschlägt, ob in schmutzige Lagerhallen oder gentrifizierte Bars, in dysfunktionale Wohngemeinschaften oder die Einöden Alabamas: Noch in den...

A remarkable time capsule of Simi Valley, 1979, written before the author would become one of LA’s most influential artists of subsequent decades.When Sean DeLear died prematurely in Vienna in 2017, his friends discovered—among other treasures—an extensive diary kept at the age of fourteen. Still living with his Christian parents in the notoriously racist Los Angeles suburb of Simi Valley, Sean wrote almost every day about crushes and hustling, waterbeds, blackmail...

A landmark collection of poems by Bambi Lake, the beloved (and bad-mouthed) icon of San Francisco’s counterculture.Bambi Lake was a trans chanteuse performer, provocateur, and countercultural darling of the ‘70s, and subsequent decades. “The Glamorous Life follows me around,” she wrote, and sang about in her ballad “The Golden Age of Hustlers” (later popularized by Justin Vivian Bond). Her life in San Francisco—including being on the fringes of the Cockettes, and a...

DeShawn genießt sein lustvolles und kreatives Leben als Künstler in San Francisco. Doch als er sich zur Beerdigung seines Onkels auf den Weg in seine Heimat Alabama macht, beginnt er eine Reise in die eigene Vergangenheit: In Rückblicken auf seine Kindheit und Jugend, sein sexuelles Erwachen und seine verflossenen Liebhaber entsteht das Bild eines Erwachsenwerdens, das zwischen energischen Frauen und verunsicherten Jungs, zwischen Südstaaten-Tunten und Westküsten-Punks, zwischen Gottesdien...