Synopses & Reviews
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 theory of the boyfriend, in every tense." Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
"I loved this book — raunchy, irreverent, deliberate, sexy, angry, and tender, in its own way." Roxane Gay
An irrerverent, sensitive, and inimitable look at gay dysfunction through the eyes of a cult hero
Transgressive, foulmouthed, and brutally funny, Brontez Purnell's 100 Boyfriends is a revelatory spiral into the imperfect lives of queer men desperately fighting the urge to self-sabotage. As they tiptoe through minefields of romantic, substance-fueled misadventure — from dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama — Purnell's characters strive for belonging in a world that dismisses them for being Black, broke, and queer. In spite of it — or perhaps because of it — they shine.
Armed with a deadpan wit, Purnell finds humor in even the darkest of nadirs with the peerless zeal, insight, and horniness of a gay punk messiah. Together, the slice-of-life tales that writhe within 100 Boyfriends are an inimitable tour of an unexposed queer underbelly. Holding them together is the vision of an iconoclastic storyteller, as fearless as he is human.
Review
"This stunning collection of vignettes from artist, punk rocker, and Whiting Award winner Purnell forms a delightfully crass, kaleidoscopic worldview….Purnell brilliantly immerses the reader in Black, queer desire with humor, self-awareness, and just the right amount of vulgarity." Publishers Weekly
Review
"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
Review
"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 deprecatingly humble at the same time." Melissa Broder, author of The Pisces and So Sad Today
About the Author
Brontez Purnell is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children's book, the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down, and, most recently, 100 Boyfriends, which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction, was longlisted for the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and was named an Editors' Choice by the New York Times Book Review. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Writers' Award for Fiction and the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Robert Rauschenberg Award, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, a 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 the documentary Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock. Born in Triana, Alabama, he's lived in Oakland, California, for more than a decade.