Contemporary Authors

• Since I Laid My Burden Down Feminist Press (New York, NY), 2017

• Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger - 2017 The Feminist Press at CUNY, New York
• The Cruising Diaries - 2014 Gimme Action, Oakland

• KQED - https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2015/10/23/alive-and-well-and-right-where-he-wants-to-be/

  Brontez Purnell: Alive, Well and Right Where He Wants to Be

  By Mike Seely
  OCTOBER 23, 2015
  SHARE
  Brontez Purnell is an indie zine maker, trained dancer and queer punk rocker who’s fronted Bay Area bands like Gravy Train!!! and the Younger Lovers.

  No, let’s try that again. Brontez Purnell is an utterly fearless indie zine maker, trained dancer and queer punk rocker who’s fronted Bay Area bands like Gravy Train!!! and the Younger Lovers.

  Inhibition, trepidation, self-suppression . . . these concepts are not part of Purnell’s emotional lexicon. As a result, it’s hard to look away when he’s performing, and hard to stop reading what he pours out across the pages.

  Brontez grew up gay in Triana, Alabama (population: 400), an experience he describes as “its own specific brand of horror.” There, he began to learn an important lesson: that making art to document one’s experience is also a very effective method for survival.

  Like so many who’ve navigated tough times in hard places, Purnell is very attached to and in awe of those who came before him. He’s “home” when playing Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland – pictures of his uncle J.J. Malone, who owned the club when Eli’s was a blues and soul mecca in the ’60s and ’70s, adorn a special photo shrine there.

  “As people of color, as artists, as counter-culturalists, so much of our history gets erased,” Brontez says. “There are times when you just despair.”

  Those are the times when he’ll call his mother in Alabama. “You’re a black gay male artist in California,” she’ll say. “Somebody prayed for your existence hundreds of years before you were even born.”

  No wonder he’s not afraid.

  If you want to hear more from Brontez, listen to The Cooler, a new podcast from KQED Pop.

• Feminist Press - https://www.feministpress.org/authors/brontez-purnell

  BRONTEZ PURNELL

  Brontez Purnell has been publishing, performing, and curating in the Bay Area for over ten years. He is author of the cult zine Fag School, frontman for his band The Younger Lovers, and founder and choreographer of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. Formerly a dancer with Gravy Train!!!, a queer electro indie band that gained national prominence in the mid-2000s, Purnell's other prominent artistic collaborations include his supporting role in the queer independent feature film, "I Want Your Love" (dir. Travis Mathews, 2012).

  He was a guest curator for the Berkeley Art Museum's L@TE program in 2012, awarded an invitation to the 2012 Radar Lab queer arts summer residency, honored by Out Magazine's 2012 Hot 100 List and 2013 Most Eligible Bachelors List, and most recently won the 2014 SF Bay Guardian's Goldie for Performance/Music.

• East Bay Express - https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/brontez-purnells-new-illustrated-sex-memoir/Content?oid=4059099

  QUOTED: "There was a time between 28 and 30 when I didn't drink, and I was just dating—well 'dating' is an optimistic term—these creepy dudes because sobriety made the sex addict thing kick in. ... The content is pretty heavy. I don't want people to expect cute, clean sex stories like in Cruising Diaries."

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  SEPTEMBER 03, 2014 ARTS & CULTURE » CULTURE SPY

  The Only Riot Boy
  Brontez Purnell's new illustrated sex memoir involves a long-awaited collaboration between two transgressive local artists
  By Sam Lefebvre @Lefebvre_Sam
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  BERT JOHNSON - Brontez Purnell.
  BERT JOHNSON
  Brontez Purnell.

  Coming of age in the early 2000s, Brontez Purnell found most gay sex memoirs to be tremendously dull. He didn't relate to steely, all-powerful accounts from 1970s gay porn stars, or to the self-serious, ruminative works from self-appointed heirs to the floral crown of French novelist Jean Genet. So, Purnell decided to write about his own sexual experiences. He adopted a frank and humorous tone and published radically honest anecdotes as "cruising reviews" in a zine dubbed Fag School. "I went on about what was hard, what was creepy, and what went wrong," he said.

  Until early last year, Fag School was a distant memory for the local musician, dancer, and writer. Since photocopying the first issue thirteen years ago, he's toured the country as the front/hype man for Gravy Train!!!! and the leader of The Younger Lovers, appeared on the cover of the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the Express, ranked on Out Magazine's annual "Hot List," programmed performance art at the Berkeley Art Museum, and recently co-starred in the independent film I Want Your Love.

  But, in early 2013, Purnell pulled out the Fag School files for Janelle Hessig. The local cartoonist, musician, and filmmaker approached Purnell about illustrating his old cruising reviews. She had decided to follow through on an old pact: his words, her pictures, released in a book as the inaugural title of a new publishing imprint, Gimme Action. The collaboration was long in the making — and it explodes on the page.

  Entitled The Cruising Diaries, Purnell's first book compiles 21 brazenly honest accounts of sexual escapades and misadventures (culled from more than fifty) originally published in Fag School, each one accompanied by Hessig's candid and unflinching illustrations. Purnell recalls sex with ghosts, cops, and various other lovers in Berkeley bathhouses, West Oakland warehouses, co-op strip clubs, East Oakland taco trucks, and ballet class, too. The writing is playful, hilarious, and incisive, embedding commentary on class and power dynamics within the sordid details. The content is unrestrained, expressing nuanced connoisseurship of bodily functions and fetishistic proclivities, but Purnell's work is best distinguished by his unfiltered, direct tone. His voice and mannerisms leap dramatically from his person to the page, defying a repressive Southern upbringing.

  Purnell grew up in Triana, Alabama. In the 1990s, he fell in with a network, built by touring punk bands, fanzine writers, and pen-wielding malcontents in other small towns in order to escape the stiflingly conservative social climate. When Hessig traveled through Chattanooga in 2000, Purnell couldn't wait to meet her, although he already felt acquainted. "I had been listening to her band, Panty Raid," he remembered, "and I knew her as 'Janelle,' the girl on the cover of the Bratmobile record, because I was really into riot grrrl." In a testament to pre-internet connectivity, Purnell and Hessig's respective orbits already overlapped.

  Hessig created a zine called Tales of Blarg while enrolled at Pinole High School in 1990. A 924 Gilman Street devotee versed in the region's scrappy fanzines, such as Maximum Rocknroll, Absolutely Zippo, and Cometbus, Hessig also gravitated toward publications that punks considered trite. "I read all of the time," she said, "even things that weren't cool, like Sassy magazine or Mad." Her work satirized subcultures via lowbrow humor, wrapping meaningful transgressions in an accessible form.

  Though deeply enmeshed with artists in the Bay Area and Pacific Northwest, Hessig decided to move to the South. "At a certain point, everywhere I went, I just fucking knew everybody," she recalled. She moved to Asheville, North Carolina and then New Orleans, bringing her close to Purnell. The last page of Cruising Diaries features an illustration, based on a New Orleans Halloween outing from 2001, of the two on a bike. Purnell appears in his signature party garb — jogging shorts, headband, sneakers, high socks, that's it — while Hessig dons a Burt Reynolds costume. Hessig soon returned to the Bay and Purnell followed.

  "I've always had an instinct to protect [Purnell], and I completely failed," remembered Hessig with a smirk. In 2001, he settled in a warehouse in East Oakland and became a local party fixture. His riotous exhibitionism led to a role in the garish, queer electro outfit Gravy Train!!!!, for which his primary duties were to shed his clothes, sweat, and rally the crowd. "During that period, I was having my first adolescence," he said. "Growing up so isolated and away from everything, I didn't get the experience of being a young, wild kid."

  Fag School's cruising reviews chronicled the colorful details of Purnell's belated adolescence. "There were a lot of gay punks writing about sex, but it was always this dense text. Nothing was funny or engaging and I didn't see the type of zines that spoke to me," Purnell said. His unapologetic style emerged on the page intact — bold, loud, and sometimes misunderstood. "A lot of people who aren't that insightful would write him off as novel because he's funny and fun and he takes his clothes off at parties," said Hessig. "But they miss the point of his intelligence."

  Layla Gibbon, a local writer and musician, agreed. When Gibbon became coordinator at Maximum Rocknroll in 2008, she sought out Purnell as a columnist immediately. "He's the only riot boy," she said, championing the political substance and conviction in Purnell's work. "As someone who was involved with riot grrrl in the early 1990s, there were a lot of these weird fans who worshipped at the altar of certain icons, rather than seeing them as inspiration to do their own thing. ... [Purnell] got the idea of riot grrrl as liberation that could be obnoxious, transgressive, and fun. His work embodies that," she continued.

  Of course, Purnell's literary interests have evolved since Fag School. "The novel I'm writing now is called 100 Boyfriends and it's completely devoid of humor," he said. "Most people don't suspect it but I'm a pretty dark bitch." Purnell is also completing a memoir, tentatively titled Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Was Bigger?, which focuses on a period of his life following the experiences documented in Fag School. "There was a time between 28 and 30 when I didn't drink, and I was just dating — well 'dating' is an optimistic term — these creepy dudes because sobriety made the sex addict thing kick in," he explained. "The content is pretty heavy. I don't want people to expect cute, clean sex stories like in Cruising Diaries."

  The release event for Cruising Diaries — a free BBQ, dance party, and reading held at 1-2-3-4 Go! Records (420 40th St. #5, Oakland) this Saturday, September 6 — will keep things cute. "I'm making an interactive painting that's like a carnival cut-out, so you can put your face in it and be on your own date with [Purnell]," explained Hessig. "There will be a glory hole, too. I'm not sure who'll use it — but I'm sanding it just in case."

  Contact the author of this piece, send a letter to the editor, like us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

• Out - https://www.out.com/entertainment/art-books/2014/12/02/brontez-purnell-cruising-diaries-joys-writing-about-sex

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  ENTERTAINMENTART & BOOKS
  Brontez Purnell On the Joys of Writing About Sex
  With The Cruising Diaries, the creative artist finds the humanity in tricking

  BY KENYON FARROW
  TUE, 2014-12-02 17:00
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  Cruising Cover WEB

  We have reached a strange moment in gay politics. With recent films such as The Normal Heart and the documentary How to Survive a Plague, there’s a strange commemoration and valorizing of the AIDS movement. Whatever you think of these films individually, or the history they tell, part of the reason they managed to get so much attention and accolades is the spike in marriage equality. The excesses of gay male sexual culture is safely tucked away in history, for audiences who already think the riotous sex, and the deaths, have ended. In popular culture, all of the gay fucking happens not in glory holes and back rooms, but under the canopy of the nuptial bed.

  Then, there’s Brontez Purnell. The black punk (in both senses of the word) musician and dancer/choreographer turned-author has made a point of using his own sex life to paint a very vivid portrait of a sex life in the San Francisco Bay Area now. His new illustrated book, The Cruising Diaries (with illustrations by Janelle Hessig), continues Purnell’s tradition of DIY literary and performing art that’s filled with bubble-bursting honesty.

  Because he’s a star and was touring in Montreal with the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, I emailed him a set of questions about The Cruising Diaries.

  Kenyon Farrow: One of the first YouTube videos I saw of you was you reading from the “Cruising Reviews” of your zine Fag School I was all at once, grossed out, turned on, and enraged. Now, you've continued your legacy of pushing the boundaries of good taste. Who am I kidding: There's no good taste in this. It is ratchet from top to bottom. What made you compile these sexcapades into your new project and first book, The Cruising Diaries?

  Brontez Purnell: Well, my friend Janelle Hessig and I had been talking about doing something like this for, like, years, and finally, she called me up one day and was like “I have the money to publish it, let’s do it!” When I first started doing my old zine Fag School (like, 300 years ago), in the back of my mind, I always knew I wanted to compile it into an anthology. I have to say, I wasn’t as prolific with Fag School as I hoped I would be (four issues in ten years–HA!), but I will say I’m happy with how The Cruising Diaries turned out. As far as how the “Cruising Reviews” in the original Fag School zine became a thing, for the first issue of Fag School, I was interviewing Alvin Orloff (a cool punk writer from San Francisco), and he had put out a punk memoir about his time being a fag in New York in the early ’80s, called Gutter Boys, and I was interviewing him, and he said something really interesting–that if you want to write a memoir, you better do it as its happening, because in twenty years who knows what the hell you’ll remember? With that bit of advice (and some other key elements), I put the “Cruising Reviews” in the first issue of Fag School.

  What I find refreshing about this collection (besides the scratch-n-sniff butt hole scented paper Cruising Diaries is published on), is that it’s hard to find this kind of smut these days. Like, most of the work being published by gay men has lost this sense of immediacy, this brutal honesty about sex, and the kind of sex we’re having, especially in the era of gay respectability. Were you worried about the reaction to the book?

  To be honest, yeah. But I knew that The Cruising Diaries, despite being about sex, comes from such an innocent place–i.e., one gay/queer boy’s sexual awakening–that I knew that only the most sour of fucks would hate on it for real. And it’s something that I felt a lot of people would look at and immediately relate to, you know? Like, who doesn’t trick?

  What’s been the most interesting, or horrifying, reaction to the book thus far?

  I’ve gotten some sideways shade from some jealous fags who have made some sideways comments about how its cheap to write about sex, or how anybody could have done a book like that, but I’m all like, “Boo, bitch, anybody didn’t do it–I did it! How you like me now?!” But I’m into art that’s human. It’s so relatable! Plus, I feel like when most guys write about sex, it’s either flowery and total bullshit, or they want to paint themselves as the ultimate indestructible stud. I like writing in a way that can sometimes be dark yet still be generous to the human condition–which is what I think is lacking in the genre, you know? But I have to say, I’ve mostly gotten a lot of love from it.

  Brontez Cruising Collage
  Part of the experience of the book is the illustrations. Did you know you were going to illustrate each story when you decided to publish the book? What was the process of working with Janelle Hessig, the illustrator?
  I gave Janelle full reign. I had no idea what she was going to draw, and it still cracks me the fuck up to see where her mind went when she drew the pictures. The illustrations were her idea and a stroke of fucking genius. I think they make the book a lot more 3D in depth and intention. I had been a fan of Janelle’s drawings and her legend in general since I was a wee tween, but also, in the last couple of years her art has taken on this crazy new dimension, and it really, really, really blows me away. She’s also a really good friend. Lord knows, that woman has seen me through my bratty twenties and beyond, and I’m glad we still kick it. Have you seen her paintings!? Holy shit….

  Were there any “Cruising Reviews” that didn’t make it into the book?

  Oh, yeah! I forget how many stories there are in the Fag School, but I’d say there are twenty or so stories from the original Fag School that didn’t make it into The Cruising Diaries, but I compiled them in the Juvenilia section of my upcoming novella Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger?

  Speaking of which, I half expected to find my cruising review in the book. If you had to write a short cruising review of our first meeting–what would it be?

  It would start like, “DEAR DIARY–TODAY I MET THIS TRICK ON ADAM4ADAM THAT IM T O T A L L Y GONNA MARRY.” ♥

  So most of these were written a few years back. What would you say to your old self–the boy from Triana, Alabama, newly arrived in the big city and obviously sex-starved? Any reflections for that kid?

  Put on a condom—you fucking hippie, and go to college!

  What’s next on the roster?

  I’m making a short film with Naked Sword! (the same company that put out I Want Your Love, this movie I was in). I’m also putting out my first novella early next year and I’m currently writing my first novel 100 Boyfriends for the City Lights’ Sister Spit Imprint, which is due sometime in 2016. Also, I’m doing music and dance stuff. The usual!

  This article is reprinted with permission from Lambda Literary Foundation and LambdaLiterary.org, where it originally appeared. The Lambda Literary Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting LGBT literature.

  Tags: ART & BOOKS, BRONTEZ PURNELL
  LATEST VIDEOS ON OUT

• Art Practical - http://www.artpractical.com/column/endurance-tests-if-i-brontez-purnell/

  Endurance Tests
  If I, Brontez Purnell
  By Anna Martine Whitehead
  February 3, 2015
  “Endurance Tests” is an irregular column on current explorations of representation, the ethereal, and compulsiveness by black artists working in the field of performance. Across profiles and interviews, the column takes seriously the proposition of performance as a repeatable and assimilable text. “Endurance Tests” will examine contemporary performance-makers actively syncretizing the many implications of "blackness": illegality, contagion, maladaptivity, and a privileged relationship to cool.

  I almost began this column about Brontez Purnell with a poem. It went something like this:

  Brontez Purnell is a black choreographer. Brontez Purnell is a punk rocker. Brontez Purnell is a faggot. Brontez Purnell is an author. Brontez Purnell is an addict. Brontez Purnell is a club dancer. Brontez Purnell is gay-mous. Brontez Purnell is a poet. Brontez Purnell is broken. Brontez Purnell is a lover. Brontez Purnell is a mystic. Brontez Purnell is still here, bitches.

  It obviously needs some work, but you get the idea. I’m eager to gush about Purnell in verse precisely because it’s so hard to pin him down or pen him in. With several movie roles, a book, a handful of zines, at least three bands, and multiple dance projects under his belt, Purnell is in many ways the Twenty-First-Century Black Renaissance Fag. And, central to every Renaissance personality, Purnell always lets the project define his practice—which is also to say that he never lets the project define him. Regardless of the medium he’s working in, Purnell is never anything other than himself.

  Purnell’s output simultaneously exhibits a restlessness with current modes of cultural production. For example, at San Francisco’s 2013 FRESH Festival, Purnell and collaborator Sophia Wang presented a series of quotidian forms of movement with varying technical skill and virtuosity. Presented as dance-theater at a regional dance festival, the piece refused any gendered or racialized reading of it as some kind of courtship narrative. Instead, it offered a more horizontal and unexpected intimacy than “romance,” as the dancers shared space and then immediately repelled each other through their choreography. The simple production (no lights, no props, no music, street clothes for costumes) and identifiably colloquial choreography resulted in a piece that challenged its audience to think past heteronormative tropes in dance and the relationship narratives that almost obligatorily accompany duets. Wang and Purnell danced around and past one another, pushing the limits of the duet as a multi-performer relationship. “Contemporary dance [is] a limited language,” said Purnell during a conversation just before the 2014 FRESH Festival at Joe Goode Annex.1 “I get exhausted.” So he finds ways to reinvent.

  Still from performance at KUNST-STOFF. Oct 10th, 2015. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.
  Purnell moved to Oakland twelve years ago from Tennessee (by way of Huntsville, Alabama) and soon after joined the queer electroclash group Gravy Train!!!! as a dancer. At the same time, he was dancing with Collette Eloi’s contemporary Haitian dance ensemble, El Wah Movement, and self-publishing his zine Fag School, all while working his way through Laney College. Though the band has dispersed and Fag School is on hiatus, Purnell has a new band (The Younger Lovers), recently released The Cruising Diaries with Janelle Hessig (what the Comics Journal called “the funniest and filthiest book of the year”), and is choreographing a new piece, If I, John Henry, for the Black Choreographers Festival in February.2

  If I, John Henry is a retelling of the John Henry narrative for 2015. In Purnell’s version, John Henry is Ogun, the Orisha of war and metal work in Yoruba mythology. But Purnell is also John Henry—a black man who shares a home state with the mythic figure and whose father is a railroad worker. Purnell explains his “perfectly pagan piece” as an attempt to “take what we know and put it to new places.”3 Seeking a non-Christian parable that could speak to his own experience, Purnell kept wondering what “Ogun in 2015 America would look like. His iron tool would not be a machete—it would be a fucking gun.”

  It’s about manhood in general—but black manhood in particular, as a series of endless tasks.
  Purnell continues: “This is also about me being in a body-based practice in a world where it would be easier if I just worked at a computer. It’s all about enduring this life path. It’s about manhood in general—but black manhood in particular, as a series of endless tasks.” In this way, If I, John Henry works similarly to the original American folktale, thought to have been developed in song by black convicts as they labored on the railroad. The work song, which evolved into a more upbeat ballad and eventually an epic poem, follows a narrative with two possible implications. One is that John Henry was an inhumanly strong black man who took a challenge to carve through a mountain faster than a steam drill and, guided by a divine power, beat the steam drill and died a hero. Another version of the story situates the narrator in relationship to Henry as co-captive in a convict work group, laboring until death. In the lyrics of one iteration of this version, the singer demands the listener take his own hammer and carry it to the prison captain in order to “tell him I’m gone.” In this telling, “this old hammer killed John Henry, but it can’t kill me.”4 This version of the John Henry story offers a tragic warning of black masculinity’s impossible struggle against capitalism and industry. John Henry beats the engine, but he still dies a prisoner.

  These complex variations of the Henry story have overlaps with Purnell’s own narrative as a queer black artist working (i.e., performing) in a variety of social spaces. From black-on-black homophobic hate crimes in Uptown Oakland to fag-on-fag public shaming in the workplace, Purnell has dealt with more than his share of trials (critic Kenyon Farrow, who is also a close friend of Purnell’s, has noted Purnell’s ability to endure).5 But, as Purnell puts it, “[staying] at jobs six months longer than I should, for example…. These are times when a sense of endurance has failed me.”

  At the same time, Purnell is also aware that his drive to over-perform can be another form of perfectionism: “I always feel like I have these moments of: ‘Oh, shit, people are watching me—I better hurry up and give it to them.’” The intensity of “giv[ing] it to them” is made all the more so because Purnell frequently performs naked or semi-nude in spaces that are predominantly white, whether in terms of audience demographics or at a less outwardly visible institutional level. When considering the pressure to “give it to them,” Purnell says this can manifest as “me look[ing] like I’m always working in an improv structure even when I’m not…. Like I’m a stuck engine who ends up pausing more than I would like.” Understandably, then, for Purnell “the theme [of John Henry] is rich.”

  Still from performance at KUNST-STOFF. Jan 3, 2014. Photo by Yvonne M Porta.
  Personally, I worry about the ease with which Purnell might be consumed by white audiences: How will his determination to give it his all no matter who he is giving it to be transformed by a dynamic of performing and looking that can’t not be racialized? Will his art be taken on its own terms or viewed as a solution by program organizers and curators to the problem of how to present black creatives without investing in black life? At the same time, Purnell’s refusal to stop, his compulsion to keep making, to make spaces always work for him, to always keep it 100 percent Brontez for every performance, acknowledges those concerns while refusing to be straightjacketed by them. Against Purnell’s drive, his choice of John Henry as an avatar gives pause: John Henry is a parable of a black man whose refusal to stop is heroic and inspiring but also leads to his demise. I do not think that Purnell’s compulsion to “give it to them” will lead to such a morbid end; to the contrary, it helps his work stay strong. But if it is not the death ending that draws Purnell to John Henry, how might he understand the parable’s purpose and his relationship to the story?

  There is another set of versions of the John Henry ballad. These “rebel” versions focus less on the battle between Henry and the steam drill and devote more attention to Henry’s resistance to his brutal captain.6 In various recordings of this adaptation, Henry threatens the captain in his home, promises to fight the captain to his death, and even shoots the captain.7 It is this telling of the John Henry story, in which the hero is defiant as well as tireless, that seems to most accurately capture Purnell’s spirit. He is a hero for both his work ethic and his refusal to “let anyone beat [him] down.”8 This third Henry iteration further complicates our collective memory of Henry, who, through all the retellings of the tale, has come to represent many things to many people. In this way, Henry’s memory refuses regulation. It is this Henry—the steadfast hero, the indeterminable rebel—that Purnell—the writer, the choreographer, the dancer, the punk, the queer, the black kid from the country—embodies in If I, John Henry.

  Brontez Purnell will be performing If I, John Henry at the Black Choreographers Festival on February 21, 2015, at Dance Mission Theater, in San Francisco.

  Notes
  Brontez Purnell, Interview with Anna Martine Whitehead, Phone interview (December 28, 2014).
  Rob Clough, “Reviews: The Cruising Diaries,” The Comics Journal (August 27, 2014).
  Brontez Purnell, Interview with Anna Martine Whitehead.
  As noted in Guy B. Johnson, John Henry: Tracking Down A Negro Legend (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 72.
  Kenyon Farrow, “In Defense of Brontez,” originally on Farrow’s blog. https://inciteblog.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/in-defense-of-brontez%E2%80%94and-the-rest-of-us-too-proud-or-too-trashy-to-go-down-without-a-fight/
  The folk ballad John Henry exists in countless iterations throughout the United States and beyond. Only some of these versions have been recorded by artists as disparate as the early twentieth-century folk singer Bill Cornett and the punk band the Ex. I have found helpful amateur historian James Hauser’s collection of versions—in which he distinguishes “rebel versions” of the song as those John Henry recordings that more deeply explored labor, racism, and resistance. James Hauser, John Henry: The Rebel Versions, (January, 2015), https://sites.google.com/site/johnhenrytherebelversions/home.
  Ibid.
  Memphis Slim, “John Henry” on Memphis Slim and the Real Honky Tonk (New York: Folkways Records FG 3535), 1968.

• Mary: a Journal of New Writing - http://maryjournal.org/spring2017/reviews-and-interviews/interview-with-brontez-purnell/

  QUOTED: "So basically, it’s some collected stories from this zine I did back in the day—Fag School. My sister, Janelle, is a East Bay punk legend (though I met her when she was living in the Deep South). She and I wanted to collaborate on a book, so she had the idea of illustrating The Cruising Diaries as a way of giving the old Fag School stories a new life. It was put out on her publishing company, Gimmie Action."

  INTERVIEW WITH BRONTEZ PURNELL

  BY PAOLA VERGARA

  ABOUT BRONTEZ PURNELL

  Brontez Purnell is a Black gay punk rocker, choreographer, writer, and artist. One of his many musical ventures, The Younger Lovers, just released their newest LP titled Young Brothers, and there are rumors of a third book being released unto the world this summer, following such explosive publications as Cruising Diaries and Johnny Would You Love Me If…. The Brontez Purnell Dance Company premiered in New York following successful performances at Berkeley Art Museum, CounterPULSE, the Garage, Kunst-Stoff Arts, the Lab, and SOMArts. With such an impressive repertoire, it is no wonder that Purnell is known as a Renaissance Man of the Bay Area artistic scene.

  Purnell was happy to be interviewed by MARY: A Journal of New Writing, and in an ecstatic email exchange, was excited to reveal to us the secrets behind his prolific acts of creation.

  PV: What music did you listen to as a kid?

  BP: Oh my GAWD. So all over the place. Literally everything. Lol.

  PV: How did you find your way into the art world—the world of creation and performance? Was your family influential in that at all?

  BP: Yeah, I grew up singing in the choir. I also come from a long line of comedians—lots of dry humor in my family. I think my inclusion in the art world was a series of dares I followed through on and never looked back. It is still sometimes a mystery to me how it all happened.

  PV: You are a dancer, a musician, a writer, filmmaker, and “zinester”. What’s with the overachieving? But seriously speaking, have you found that certain things are easier to say through a certain medium rather than through others? For example, are there some things you can say through dance but not through your writing, and what are those things?

  BP: EXACTLY! I tend to explore the same themes in my work: loner themes, the unexpected, heartache, etc.. But I move them to different shelves in whatever medium I’m working in. Essentially, they are always distilled down into like this one “voice” I feel.

  PV: What has punk music done for you, and what have you done for it?

  BP: Punk rock ruined any chance I had of becoming a real adult. I think it also did this damaging thing of making me believe I can do anything I want, just because I feel like it. I have suffered for my hubris, I have to say. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve left a great mark on punk rock yet, but I would hope to one day.

  PV: Your first book, The Cruising Diaries. Where did it come from? Why incorporate illustrations?

  BP: So basically, it’s some collected stories from this zine I did back in the day—Fag School. My sister, Janelle, is a East Bay punk legend (though I met her when she was living in the Deep South). She and I wanted to collaborate on a book, so she had the idea of illustrating The Cruising Diaries as a way of giving the old Fag School stories a new life. It was put out on her publishing company, Gimmie Action.

  PV: Do you have any creative rituals or idiosyncrasies? Where do you work best, and what do you need before you start on a project?

  BP: I just work frantically with long pauses depending on whatever crisis is going on around me, and you better fucking believe there is ALWAYS a crisis. I basically just need money if I have a project, and everything else falls into place.

  PV: Sexuality plays a huge role in your art. Having read The Cruising Diaries and Johnny Would You Love Me If…., what is clearly portrayed is an honest reality of sexuality—the beautiful and the ugly. Why is this honesty important to you? Is there something else that’s more important?

  BP: I don’t know if it’s “important.” To quote some writing I saw in a Huggy Bear LP, “We are into the use of lies but never at the expense of the truth.” I have always taken that with me. I do think honesty is, perhaps, the best way to convey raw human feeling, though. I can’t really imagine what’s more important than that.

  PV: As you may know, this issue of the MARY concerns itself with the idea of activism. Do you consider yourself an activist?

  BP: I guess I could call myself a cultural activist. I’m also Black, and that, in and of itself, feels like a full time activist gig. And hell, that’s just making it to the train alone! Damn.

  PV: Do you feel like you have a direct responsibility as an artist to challenge people or make them think about things they’ve never considered before? Is that the job of the artist?

  BP: Not really. I think that responsibility lies with the audience. I mean, you can lead a horse to water for sure, but it’s up to them whether they will drink or not.

  PV: What do you want to be remembered for?

  BP: I don’t know yet. I’m still painting the picture!

  PV: Lastly: Can you recommend a good place for drinks in the East Bay?

  BP: My backyard! Come over and I’ll make Piña Coladas!!!!!

QUOTED: "A complex, sometimes overly frenetic, look at one man's experience of being black, queer, smart, soft, tough, artistic, and constantly in motion between rural and urban cultures."

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Print Marked Items
Purnell, Brontez: SINCE I LAID MY
BURDEN DOWN
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Purnell, Brontez SINCE I LAID MY BURDEN DOWN Feminist Press (Adult Fiction) $17.95 6, 13 ISBN:
978-1-55861-431-4
Sex, drugs, punk rock, and Sunday sermons. When DeShawn takes leave of his fast life in San Francisco
and returns to his rural Alabama hometown, he finds time to slow down and contemplate his past and the
many men--fathers, lovers, and friends--who have made him who he is. Purnell's debut novel (Johnny
Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger?, 2015, etc.) is structured as a series of flashbacks to
DeShawn's childhood and young adulthood, which is peopled with an abusive stepdad, a feuding mother
and grandmother, and kids who share his love of 1990s punk music, partying, and sexual experimentation.
Sex and self-fashioning are at the heart of this narrative, and the novel is refreshingly frank about desires
both normalized and taboo. DeShawn, whose queerness becomes obvious to his family and community
early on, must navigate sexual interactions with kids his own age and the leering adult clergy and teachers
whose own desires are warped into power trips (DeShawn "marveled at how much of his young adult life
was spent in a room getting spanked by a dirty old white man"). DeShawn's path of sexual discovery is
linked to his discovery of self, and as his story unfolds, questions of who, and how, to love become more
clearly articulated. DeShawn is a wild child, but he is also an uncle, a nephew, a son, and a community
member. Purnell treats his subjects with a heavy dose of dry humor, as when DeShawn's "fag-loving aunt"
gives him a handful of Klonopin after a funeral and tells him "Don't overdose, bitch." The novel's style is
messy, and DeShawn's inner dialogue doesn't always provide much depth. But DeShawn's story, like any
honest story, is a messy one and, for all its rough edges, entertaining. A complex, sometimes overly frenetic,
look at one man's experience of being black, queer, smart, soft, tough, artistic, and constantly in motion
between rural and urban cultures.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Purnell, Brontez: SINCE I LAID MY BURDEN DOWN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487668702/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=616393cc.
Accessed 20 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487668702

QUOTED: "a compelling portrait of a particular disaffected kind of gay youth caught between religion, culture, and desire."

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Since I Laid My Burden Down
Publishers Weekly.
264.16 (Apr. 17, 2017): p38.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Since I Laid My Burden Down
Brontez Purnell. Feminist, $17.95 trade paper (152p) ISBN 978-1-55861-431-4
Performance artist Purnell beautifully captures a personality through introspection and memory in this slim
novel. The thin plot centers on DeShawn, a gay black man approaching middle age, returning to small-town
Alabama after his uncle's death. He moves back in with his mother, a powerful and demanding Baptist
preacher with a shrinking congregation. DeShawn's daily encounters send him down nostalgic rabbit holes
about the men he has lost through death or other circumstances. He remembers his first lovers, the
neighborhood boy who molested him, his stepfather's rages, and other experiences of his deeply constrained
Southern upbringing in the 1980s. After fleeing to California at 18, DeShawn falls into an aimless string of
sexual encounters and a counterculture lifestyle. While these vignettes do not build up to a coherent
narrative, they are carefully drawn, occasionally very funny, and frequently affecting. The even-keeled,
almost deadpan way Purnell lays out these tragedies, failures, and losses and the casually explicit tone offer
a compelling portrait of a particular disaffected kind of gay youth caught between religion, culture, and
desire. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Since I Laid My Burden Down." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 38. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490820747/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cbd22d76.
Accessed 20 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490820747

• MTV
  http://www.mtv.com/news/3021634/brontez-purnell-burden-book-review/
  Word count: 1128

  QUOTED: "Because the book is so short and because the story is so wide, there are moments when the pacing gets frantic, and the dialogue becomes hard to track, and the narrative spins a little out of control. This isn’t a reflection on Purnell’s abilities, but more a question of space."
  "There is nothing taboo enough here to feel shameful, which seems very basic on its face, but ends up feeling empowering and potentially vital. The book is a slow stripping away of and distancing from shame."

  SUMMER READS
  THE TRUTH AT THE HEART OF BRONTEZ PURNELL’S SINCE I LAID MY BURDEN DOWN
  IN THE BAY AREA PUNK ROCKER’S NEW NOVEL, A MAN GOES HOME TO ALABAMA TO WRESTLE WITH HIS PAST

  HANIF WILLIS-ABDURRAQIB
  06/20/2017
  At the heart of Brontez Purnell’s debut novel, Since I Laid My Burden Down, is a homecoming. DeShawn, a gay, middle-aged black man living in San Francisco, has been summoned home to Alabama after the death of his uncle. The story is told in a series of nostalgic callbacks to DeShawn’s past that arrive as he navigates the world around him. While looking for a pen to write with, DeShawn finds a curling iron from the ’40s, which sends him in a memory spiral about his mother, and then his grandmother. The book is thin — it clocks in at just 166 pages — but because of the way its structure relies on fleshing out the past, it feels like several small books fit into one.

  The book is not autobiographical, but there are parallels: Purnell, himself, is from Alabama, and is currently based in the Bay Area, where he fronts power punk band The Younger Lovers. How much he drew from his own life for the book isn’t clear, but its relationship to place and history feels drawn from something deeper than simple fiction.

  The great conversation about race and punk rock is not always as intersectional as I’d like it to be, and I say this as someone who has, in the past, failed with my own vision of how wide the conversation spans. Purnell’s own lived experience as someone who is deeply immersed in punk, and who is also black, and also queer, isn’t the book's subject. Yet it feels like this lived experience informs the narrative in a way that is refreshing – in how the book reckons with fear, with isolation, with love and distance. There are enough fucked-up circumstances to go around; DeShawn reflects on a past with an abusive stepfather, and a grandmother and mother who couldn't stop feuding. But at the center of the book, as I read it, is a more mundane question of repurposing the self upon returning to a place long left.

  EVE BABITZ AND THE DREAM OF LOS ANGELES
  So often, blackness and black people in the American South are discussed and written about with a sense of vague and always-hovering danger. This makes sense, of course, given the history the region holds and, in some cases, refuses to let go of. Black writers from elsewhere in the country often write of our kin in some distant Southern landscape, without approaching any language of the landscape itself. To see the South written about by someone who has a history there isn’t automatically rewarding, but it is here. Purnell’s South feels gentle and welcoming, and the people inside it are whole, even if their stay in the book is brief. A character named Edna “greets DeShawn with the love of a second mother” and demands his presence so that she can make him catfish, her house filled with Glade PlugIns and paintings of black Jesus. Edna feels like more than just a faint, Southern caricature of a woman. She is a full-bodied person who, yes, just might happen to remind someone black of someone who once embraced them and cooked them something fried in the name of healing.

  Because it deals so heavily in memory, the book drifts from light moments to heavy ones. Memories of first loves and sexual encounters are juxtaposed with memories of abuse, survived and detailed by DeShawn. This doesn’t make the book difficult to read — perhaps just a little more difficult to confront. Mostly, the novel presents a roadmap of DeShawn as he is now by laying out who he was, in all its joy and contrasting misery. A big part of the narrative revolves around DeShawn arriving at his queerness early in life, and having it recognized by his family and community members — something that is both celebratory and treacherous in a community of people willing to take advantage of him at a young age. The conversation, underneath it all, seems to be one about sex as a lens through which to view the evolution of self. Purnell steers through this conversation gently, with more layered insight than the page count should allow.

  Because the book is so short and because the story is so wide, there are moments when the pacing gets frantic, and the dialogue becomes hard to track, and the narrative spins a little out of control. This isn’t a reflection on Purnell’s abilities, but more a question of space. The book almost certainly doesn’t need to be longer in order to reach its satisfying end. But with a novel this short, and a character this complex, there are bound to be spaces where DeShawn outkicks the space he’s living in. He is all at once reflective, funny, nuanced, challenging, gentle, and artistic. That’s a lot of work to happen in a single body.

  What I love most about this book, and about Purnell’s writing as a whole, is how it approaches the idea of desire. There is nothing taboo enough here to feel shameful, which seems very basic on its face, but ends up feeling empowering and potentially vital. The book is a slow stripping away of and distancing from shame — DeShawn from his own shame, and perhaps a reader coming along with him. The central question at the end of it all may be, in fact, a question about whether love is deserved — and if it is, who deserves it, and for what reason, and to what end. There are no definitive answers here. The book closes without the solving of its grand emotional puzzle. I think it is better this way — to not always see yourself in a character, but to see what that character is reaching for within themselves, and see if there might be something like it inside of you.

• Fiction Advocate
  http://fictionadvocate.com/2017/08/07/since-i-laid-my-burden-down-by-brontez-purnell/
  Word count: 2041

  QUOTED: "Purnell does not write beautiful sentences. What could have been gained by swearing off eloquence—immediacy, emotional impact, edge—is blunted by pages brimming with dull clichés. ... The book is scattered with empty placeholders."
  "As a novelist Purnell doesn’t have enough narrative skill or distance from his material to know what to leave out. A catalogue of anecdotes and masturbatory rumination, however lurid, does not make a novel. ... Isn’t the book itself a disorganized journal? All of the characters play the same role: revealing or explaining some aspect of the protagonist’s pitiable circumstances."

  BY DAN SHURLEY | AUGUST 7, 2017 · 7:00 AM ↓ Jump to Comments
  Since I Laid My Burden Down by Brontez Purnell

  FA review tag

  In an interview with a European journalist at the height of Nirvana’s fame, Kurt Cobain, in response to a question about his generation’s mythic indifference, offered instead an assured defense of punk rock and the vagaries of taste. “Punk rock should mean freedom, liking and accepting anything that you like, and playing anything you want, as sloppy as you want. As long as it’s good and it has passion.” This has always been my approach to reading. So I didn’t hesitate to put down Moby Dick (you could say I preferred not to finish it) and pick up the latest offering from Brontez Purnell, the Bay Area’s hardest working underground artist.

  It didn’t take long to recognize Brontez Purnell as the hero of Since I Laid My Burden Down, a thinly disguised memoir posing as a novel. I’d seen Purnell read from Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger at a bar in Oakland and left convinced I’d witnessed something vital and messy and above all honest. As a performer Purnell exudes an air of volatility that makes him memorable in a Bay Area tamed by gentrification and professionalism. At some point during the reading he did a split and threw his head back at an awkward angle, his face fixed in an eerily vapid expression. It was the kind of look I’d seen before on the face of a homeless guy beating off in the middle of the sidewalk in the Tenderloin. That’s when it clicked: this wasn’t some random public masturbator; this was the Brontez Purnell championed by Kathleen Hanna in the April 2016 issue of Bookforum. In the picture that ran with the article he’s striking a similar pose. That kind of consistency is social media gold, but Purnell didn’t give the impression of careful contrivance. He was all testosterone and wounded ego. It didn’t hurt that he was funny in a self-effacing way and projected his voice powerfully enough to be heard above the din of the bar without aid of a microphone.

  To my disappointment, few of the qualities that make Purnell a compelling performer come across in Burden. Purnell’s avatar DeShawn admits as much at the novel’s outset: “He couldn’t carry a tune to save his life, but he could project.” This is literally true of DeShawn: growing up in an Alabama backwater he was the leader of his church’s choir—not because he could sing, but because the church didn’t have a P.A. system and his voice was loud enough to reach the back pews. It’s also a metaphor for the DIY artist’s fierce determination to be heard, which the narrator is quick to point out despite it being obvious. The book is strewn with obvious metaphors that are needlessly explained.

  Purnell does not write beautiful sentences. What could have been gained by swearing off eloquence—immediacy, emotional impact, edge—is blunted by pages brimming with dull clichés. So much for the punk rock defense. The book is scattered with empty placeholders—DeShawn feels “a certain kind of way,” something happens in “this certain kind of way”—never to be filled in with more precise language. The crust of dead language adheres to the pages of this book as the dried cum of last night’s hook-up sticks to DeShawn’s skin.

  Like Purnell’s previous books, the organizing principle here is the hook-up, and the flashback to formative hook-ups, known in common parlance as the “spank bank.” The sex stories are funny because they’re sad. DeShawn tries and fails to fulfill his fantasy of getting gangbanged by an anonymous horde of men at a sex club in San Francisco. He has better luck mining his hometown in Alabama for sex: there’s the closeted underage church boy whose virginity he takes, and his formerly homophobic childhood bully—and really, who could resist such a satisfying reversal? Purnell has worked this kind of material—episodic, fleeting—to better effect in previous collections. As the narrative thrust of a novel it grows tiresome and limp.

  The most compelling scenes take place not in the bathhouse but in the black Baptist church, where DeShawn’s mother has usurped the old minister and is now leading the flock. This is a point of pride for DeShawn, who rebelled against his religious mother as a youth by hanging with Satan-worshipping white girls. Now he basks in the respectability of being the minister’s son. In one of the book’s only surprises, he imagines taking his place in the social order of the church. After all, he did show promise as a youth minister by virtue of his high degree of “emotional receptivity.” Or maybe it’s his penchant for drama, which he tells us he gets from his mother and grandfather.

  Of course an appetite for drama isn’t something you inherit, nor is being a “complete asshole at times,” but these are both traits DeShawn describes as heritable. He explains the family’s tendency to resolve conflicts with violence as “this hysterical disease in his family’s bloodline.” (It clearly has something to do with hard liquor.) Still, being back in the bosom of the family, surrounded by people who look like him and cope with life in the same (destructive) ways he does has the effect of naturalizing what to an outside observer would appear to be learned responses. Whenever I spend longer than two hours in my hometown I start to feel unmoored and rudderless, like I don’t have any control over my life or the way I am. This feeling is an artifact of a time in my adolescence when I couldn’t see things otherwise. For DeShawn this feeling manifests as hatred stemming from the childhood trauma of having to witness his mother being beaten and terrorized by his stepfather, Big Daddy. Big Daddy may have scarred DeShawn for life but he loves him anyway and mourns his death with uncharacteristic equanimity. The same goes for DeShawn’s biological father, who dies in shabby isolation in Harlem near the end of the book.

  Burden is about a person discovering things about himself as he goes along, things that ought to be obvious to a discerning reader, and for this reason it feels like talk therapy where the talk is for the benefit of the patient, not the audience. Depending on your sense of humor and appetite for pathos, you may find this talk entertaining. Remember, Purnell is a first-rate performer. Precious Hyman (a drag name DeShawn considers adopting) would have made an excellent star in one of Warhol’s Factory films. But as a novelist Purnell doesn’t have enough narrative skill or distance from his material to know what to leave out. A catalogue of anecdotes and masturbatory rumination, however lurid, does not make a novel. The scene where DeShawn looks for a pen to ‘journal’ threatens to spiral into a selfie feedback loop. Isn’t the book itself a disorganized journal? All of the characters play the same role: revealing or explaining some aspect of the protagonist’s pitiable circumstances.

  In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, W. Kamau Bell, a comic from Alabama who lives in Berkeley, joked about his white friends’ apprehensions about his plans to vacation in Alabama. “I have discovered that when you are black, saying ‘I’m headed to the South’ to someone, especially a white person who is not from the South, is like saying, ‘I’m headed to my own lynching and I decided to bring the rope just to make it easier on the Klansmen.’” Bell, whose shtick involves going places where “black people aren’t supposed to be” (like Klan gatherings), relishes this awkwardness, playing it up for comedic effect, ratings, and perhaps even national healing. Purnell’s relationship to the South is less canny and congenial than Bell’s would seem to be. According to DeShawn, he left home “mostly to score dick and try drugs.”

  Growing up nerdy and gay in 1980s Alabama, the Bay Area, symbolic site of gay liberation, beckoned and Purnell/DeShawn heeded its call, moving to Oakland on a whim with a few dollars in his pocket. Near the end of the book DeShawn has come to a place where he can see Alabama as something more than just a receding image in the rear-view mirror. Watching his cousins playing church he reflects on the continuity of black life in the South. “Nothing changes,” he thinks. Within the context of the passage it’s not clear if this is to be taken as a good thing or a bad thing. It’s complicated. He considers his lineage: great-grandson of a bluesman and a servant girl, grandson and son to subsequent generations of strong women and the charming scoundrels they loved, and it is here that he has a realization:

  He looked past the yard with his younger cousins playing church. He looked past the sunflowers and marigolds, the cotton field, the memories of dead kittens, and memory itself. This was Alabama. It shook him a bit. It was the first time in his life that he ever recalled this place feeling like home.

  This realization will come as a surprise to some. Like Bell’s misguided white friends, we wish for the liberated gay black man to stick to the safety of big coastal cities. But Alabama is home too, and Purnell has given us an authentic slice of life in a small Southern town, with the church (and its attendant undercurrent of queer desire) at the center. The sense of belonging DeShawn gets from his ancestral home—the place where he’s buried countless ex-lovers and family members—is different from the one his chosen community provides. And by the way, W. Kamau Bell would like you to know that Alabama has beaches.

  Speaking of beaches, in case you’re wondering, Burden is nothing like Moonlight. Both are shot through with everyday violence, but Purnell’s book is crass and shallow where Moonlight is lyrical and transcendent. The comparison is mostly demographic. Hanna’s association of Purnell with David Wojnarowicz, too, is a generous one. Purnell’s avatars are like characters out of The Waterfront Journals. They’re 4 a.m. bus terminal monologists pouring out their life stories for anyone awake enough to listen. But Wojnarowicz’ characters are creations of the writer. Brontez Purnell, on the other hand, is a character in search of an author. That is an important distinction.

  As for Brontez Purnell the youth choir leader and talented performer who’s lately taken up the pen, I have no doubt he’ll continue writing anything he wants, as sloppily as he wants. Or as DeShawn puts it as he’s being hauled off by the police for beating his coworker’s ass: “It had all been worth it.”

  Dan Shurley is the author of Collective Regeneration and Universal Love, a chapbook of short stories published by Nomadic Press. His criticism has appeared in The Collagist, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere around the web. He is an MFA candidate at the University of Florida in Gainseville.

• Lambda Literary
  https://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/07/13/since-lay-burden-brontez-purnell/
  Word count: 1128

  QUOTED: "The awe one experiences in encountering such distinct, complex characters compensates for challenges the book’s plotting present. Because the main character and the author share an affinity for punk, it’s tempting to look there for an adjective to describe the novel’s plotting (breakneck?). But the effect feels more accidental than deliberate, and the leaps in time disorient the reader."
  "Because Purnell seldom slows to dramatize events or order them, the novel feels less like a propulsive narrative than a vivid character study."

  ‘Since I Lay My Burden Down’ by Brontez Purnell
  Review by Frederick McKindra
  July 13, 2017

  In his debut novel Since I Laid My Burden Down, Brontez Purnell strings the narrative of his protagonist DeShawn–a black, gay punk living in Oakland–along the deaths of four men in his life. The novel opens with DeShawn fidgeting in the pew of the rural Alabama church he fled as a teen, back there to bury an uncle. Purnell lulls his audience by starting here, the familiar sight of a gay black boy wilting beneath the summer heat and the disparaging gazes of his Southern kinfolk. But DeShawn is actually here to take account of his own life, what has become of the restless boy he once was, before setting out for Northern California. The novel chronicles DeShawn’s life in Oakland, before returning to confront the male ghosts still haunting him in Alabama.

  The Southern life Purnell summons for DeShawn is neither magical nor gothic. Instead, it’s what the Delta actually is: heat and isolation and boredom, the kind that raises all kinds of idiosyncrasies to the surface, poverty, and neglect stripping people of their ability to judge, leaving the communities there desperate enough to receive all comers. In essence, the kind of place that could create a character like DeShawn, a country boy stripped of the black Southern vernacular one would expect, his sensibility more informed by the rock bands he once used to imagine himself away from this place.

  Through DeShawn’s acute eye, Purnell delivers unflinching assessments of the family’s feuding matriarchs, DeShawn’s mother and grandmother, and tender but ultimately dismissive glances at the men, those unfettered by the presumption of needing to offer any caregiving, and so who busy themselves taking leave, or performing stunts to arouse quick affection, or blunting their combustible emotions with whisky and cigarettes to death. The novel delivers a withering benediction for these men when it says, “DeShawn looked at the pantheon of men in his life–all the fathers, uncles, fuck buddies, fake boyfriends, whatever–and they all felt like a void. They appeared out of nowhere and disappeared the same way, a puff of smoke. He was learning how not to want.”

  With the biblical prodigal son story very much on DeShawn’s mind, only in the midst of his visit home does he realize that this trip will become a much-needed convalescence, a chance to inspect his old wounds, heal them, and diagram some vision of his future. He hangs on for months, takes a job at his mother’s church, leaving the reader wondering whether some part of him fears venturing out again.

  DeShawn has just the right vantage to detail the shortcomings of the people in his life, able to summon an indignation that indicates a moral clarity in him when assessing others. That becomes more difficult however when that gaze turns inward. There are ways a parent can fail a child, or a hero can fail a young boy. But DeShawn finds himself fixed in front of his grandmother’s air conditioning unit, unable to determine if anyone expects anything of him, or he of himself. At times even he blushes at the life he’s left on hold in Oakland, at other times he relays it with a disaffected cool. But there’s a fear reverberating through all of this, that as a smart, black, gay boy, he’s missing the script against which to measure his own life. He cannot even decide on what shame he should feel or whether some desire to change should have arisen. Not when the alternatives–making laps around the bathhouse, settling into a domestic life with a partner–all appear just as bleak. Purnell makes this point most pointedly when he writes, “DeShawn grew up disbelieving in men, and perhaps vis-a-vis grew up disbelieving in himself.”

  Purnell’s abiding affection for rural life allows him to mine so many unexpected black personalities throughout this slim novel, DeShawn himself, but also John, the former bully, turned raver, turned anime geek, who briefly performed as a drag queen, or DeShawn’s grandmother, pregnant by the age of fifteen, mother of twelve, but somehow possessed of a cool, intellectual wit. There are also well-drawn recursions, things to remind the reader that as sophisticated a person as DeShawn is, he too belongs to this world: DeShawn’s grandmother liking him best because he plays rock and roll like her own father, a traveling blues musician. Or the feminist streak DeShawn inherits from his household, the family having a long history of female independence resulting from their roles in rearing children and maintaining the household.

  The awe one experiences in encountering such distinct, complex characters compensates for challenges the book’s plotting present. Because the main character and the author share an affinity for punk, it’s tempting to look there for an adjective to describe the novel’s plotting (breakneck?). But the effect feels more accidental than deliberate, and the leaps in time disorient the reader. The novel lands somewhere near the quick cuts the author seems to favor, which does lend itself to the sudden revelations that arrest DeShawn throughout his story, and an attempt at a more traditional novel structure.

  Because Purnell seldom slows to dramatize events or order them, the novel feels less like a propulsive narrative than a vivid character study. Though the reader grows to trust DeShawn throughout the novel, the wisdom and perspective he claims by the novel’s end seem self-authored, rather than lessons he’s learned through drama the audience has seen. For that, these affirmations feel hopeful but also fragile.

  Which may be the book’s intent after all. Certainly the novel is more voice-driven than plot-driven, and the intent seems to be debuting this personage to the world. Given how rarely this person is seen in literature, that is often more than enough.

  Since I Lay My Burden Down
  By Brontez Purnell
  The Feminist Press
  Paperback, 9781558614314, 216 pp.
  June 2017

  RELATED POSTS:

• Shelf Awareness
  http://shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=3000#m36403
  Word count: 531

  QUOTED: "Since I Laid My Burden Down is a remarkable work of fiction, an invaluable addition to queer literature."

  Book Review

  Review: Since I Laid My Burden Down

  Since I Laid My Burden Down by Brontez Purnell (Amethyst Editions/Feminist Press, $17.95 trade paper, 208p., 9781558614314, June 13, 2017)

  Reconciliation doesn't come easy, and for DeShawn it's damn near impossible. So many of the men who touched him throughout his life have passed on. In Brontez Purnell's brazen debut novel, a tired Alabama man, freewheeling in the punk underground of San Francisco, returns home when his uncle dies. There his ghosts come back to haunt him with the heady energy they had when still alive.

  Since I Laid My Burden Down entwines past and present as DeShawn is repeatedly called upon to clean up the messes left by the deceased. Arnold was a gritty musician and lover who committed suicide. Jatius was an older childhood friend who did, too. DeShawn's stepfather was a violent man, a quality DeShawn finally understands in his 30s. Now, in the wake of another death, he does what he can to help his mother, preacher at the local Missionary Baptist church, and his grandmother, whose relationship with her daughter has been tense their whole lives. Theirs isn't an entirely unhappy family, but one strained by the burdens of prejudice and circumstance.

  Time and again DeShawn has tangled with white men and black men, men with troubled upbringings and those who paid him attention at just the right moment. The disparities of these rendezvous, though, have come into high relief with age--wisdom he's earned fair and square. When he ducks an old flame turned born-again Christian, DeShawn remembers how the white boy got meds and a therapist for screaming at his parents. "That's why he hated Skylar. When Skylar was a depressed teenager the world came running, but when DeShawn was depressed no one gave a shit."

  Race, sexuality, class, art, religion: little in this brief novel escapes Purnell's rapier wit. Immensely quotable and supremely enjoyable, his incendiary sense of humor flips the script on what might otherwise be a somber subject. DeShawn tells his mother that when he dies, he wants to be cremated. "Where do you want your ashes thrown?" she asks. "IN THE EYES OF MY ENEMIES!" he responds. As he grieves, he ruminates on the come and the comedown of loves lost, the hope and disappointment of lives ended too soon. But he skirts sentimentality. In fact, he rubs any nostalgic patina clean off his memories, until he's left with nothing but the cold, naked truth.

  Since I Laid My Burden Down is a remarkable work of fiction, an invaluable addition to queer literature. Though wounded--and reckless at times--DeShawn remains tenacious, proving that strength lies in how one chooses to live, as well as why one chooses to stay alive. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness

  Shelf Talker: Returning home to Alabama forces DeShawn to come to grips with the dead men who have shaped him in Brontez Purnell's outstanding and wicked first novel.

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• Mask Magazine
  http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-masculine-issue/life/on-brontez-purnell-since-i-laid-my-burden-down
  Word count: 1484

  QUOTED: "The book is a never careful, never courteous, but incredibly honest portrayal of a young man’s reconciliation with the past, one that could easily become the next queer cult classic."
  "Purnell allows the items in the box to be mysterious symbols of a tortured soul, a residue of loss, just as he allows all the characters in the book to be both good and evil. By the end of the novel, the reader is left with the sensation that no narrative can, or should, be wrapped in a bow and spoon fed. SILMBD isn’t a B-Rated gay Netflix special; it’s a scrutinous portrayal of a life both animated and dismantled by desire and retribution."

  “A Punch in the Face” On Brontez Purnell’s Since I Laid My Burden Down
  “An honest portrayal of a young man’s reconciliation with the past, possibly the next queer cult classic,” writes J.P. Tamang
  When W.E.B. Du Bois reviewed Wallace Thurman’s first novel, The Blacker the Berry (1929), he lamented the author’s “self-despising” attitude and unwillingness to portray black folk in a ubiquitously positive light. Thurman – whose work explored the Harlem Renaissance’s implicit homophobia and bias towards light skinned blacks – was often excluded from Du Bois’ vision of a Talented Tenth, calling into question the criteria through which artists are rendered worthwhile. In consuming material that is deemed #LGBTQ, I have often felt the need for a punch in the face to remember what I was supposed to feel from a gay experience filtered through mainstream media production houses. Brontez Purnell’s Since I Laid My Burden Down (Feminist Press, 2017) has, for me, been that punch in the face. The book is a call to reexamine some of the Harlem Renaissance’s inquiries into the psychic life of racism and the conundrum of conveying the experience of modern black life. At the same time, Purnell queers these themes with a crass, vernacular style, a surreal handling of temporal-narrative form, and a genre bending collusion of fiction and memoir.
  The unchecked homophobia of the past and present allows conceptualizations of the Harlem Renaissance that do not center the queerness of Langston Hughes, Ma Rainey, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Alain Locke, Richard Bruce Nugent, Angelina Weld Grimkè, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and so many others. It is that same implicit bias that has shaped a contemporary gay literary landscape saturated with coming out narratives, stories of longing between perfect, white bodies, and saccharine accounts of familial reconciliation. SILMBD is an antidote to the rigamarole of gay lit. Its world, replete with queers as broken as the narrator, allows the reader to cruise the scummy, sexy underbelly of the contemporary Bay Area and rural Alabama. At the same time, it complicates stereotypes of the African American bildungsroman through constructing a protagonist who invokes the spirit of Nirvana and girl goth witchery alongside the Christological imagery of purification of a soul lost to sin.

  At face value, this novel is a tale of homecoming and mourning. The middle-aged DeShawn must return to his backwoods roots to bury his uncle after spending several wild years in Oakland. As he encounters the artifacts of his troubled childhood he is immediately transported to a torrid, painful past where he relives harsh memories in flashbacks and nightmares. As he listens to the choir headmistress sing the spiritual he remembers from his baptism, the reader is plunged into the mind of DeShawn’s five-year-old self, precociously ruminating on how he doesn’t feel “as new as he thought he would.” Purnell foregrounds the entire novel with this kind of Proustian literary device in an attempt to destabilize any firm sense of temporal continuity. I’ve seen many authors attempt this stunt with varying success, but Purnell’s concise writing style allows the reader to concentrate on the content. The device of the mutable narrator appears in nearly every following chapter, replicating the temporal seizures characteristic of traumatic neuroses. In a bible supply shop, for example, DeShawn runs into a born-again Christian he used to fuck, pawing at a Jesus figurine. DeShawn describes the run-in as triggering a memory that chokes him, when suddenly the reader is transported to a past where the Jesus-freak has his fingers wrapped around DeShawn’s neck. To this effect, in SILMBD, memories have you, not the other way around. DeShawn often wakes on the kitchen floor from a drunken stupor, only to be seized again by the recollection of death, abuse, and its boggling interplay with sexual pleasure. What emerges by the end of the novel is not a simple tale of homecoming, but a a dysphoric collage that mimics the messiness of the events it describes.
  The death of the lover is the most prominent motif of the story. In the prologue the reader is immediately introduced to the headstone of DeShawn’s first, tween “boyfriend,” Jatius McClansey, before being teleported to the apartment where DeShawn is cleaning up the “old clothes, new needles, crack pipes, Lorca poetry and books by Bukowski” that become the glyphs of a love lost to suicide in Oakland. Throughout his journey, DeShawn clings to detachment as a tool to reconcile the fact that Jatius molested him before killing himself. Even the penultimate suicide story, that of his father, is told with Purnell’s characteristic ennui and vacant desire. This lends nicely to the author’s strongest asset as a writer: his dry one-liners. For example: “Sven was Swedish and charming in the same way an Ikea Appliance was charming: a cute, lightweight, energy-efficient, and very replaceable piece of Euro bullshit.” If the reader seeks a drawn out sensory experience of peoples and places, this is not the book. His style is a punchy morse code of “fuck,” “shit,” and “cock.” When we look past the cacophony of the style, what is left in relief is dramatic irony. As DeShawn returns home, he discovers Jatius’ brother has been living for years as a gay raver twink, cruising for dick in the Alabama fruit loop. His adult revenge, to fuck the brother of his molester, is at once satisfying and a tragic continuation of his compulsive sexual response to trauma.
  Purnell borrows much from post-war Southern literature, a genre often noted for its use of modernist narration devices and frankness about the body, death, and sex. The plot of SILMBD, for one, is essentially an analog of Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away (1960), a tale of a teenager leaving home for the naughtier metropolis, only to be drawn back to his backwoods roots to reconcile the death of his uncle. Purnell also utilizes the grotesque style O’Connor and her contemporaries popularized, in describing ancillary characters. In SILMBD, preachers embezzle from the church, court women, and get “so gnarly” with their bible thumping that they hack loogies in a holy fever; drunk trans women literally hang from the trees in rapture; church-goers toss their babies into the back pews as they become seized by the holy spirit; and Satanist children try to raise celebrities from the dead. Thematically, at at the center of Purnell’s work, and post-war Southern lit, is an investment in examining the way the past creates the present. Purnell’s enigmatic apothegm “Dead lovers never go away,” is thus a queerer echo of the most quoted phrase from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
  The book is a never careful, never courteous, but incredibly honest portrayal of a young man’s reconciliation with the past, one that could easily become the next queer cult classic. Purnell offers the queer canon an opportunity to turn away from moralistic portrayals of white men as purely perpetrators of discrimination and black men as one-dimensional victims of systemic violence. By the end of SILMBD, even Purnell’s childhood molester, Jatius McClansey is boiled down to the items in a box of affects Mrs. McClansey gives to DeShawn: “a paper with his handprint he made in kindergarten, a Tupac shirt, a class ring, and a picture from ninth grade homecoming.” Purnell allows the items in the box to be mysterious symbols of a tortured soul, a residue of loss, just as he allows all the characters in the book to be both good and evil. By the end of the novel, the reader is left with the sensation that no narrative can, or should, be wrapped in a bow and spoon fed. SILMBD isn’t a B-Rated gay Netflix special; it’s a scrutinous portrayal of a life both animated and dismantled by desire and retribution.
  Jptamang new
  J.P. Tamang hustled out of Portland, Northampton, and the Twin Cities from 2004 – 2012. He is currently a scholar and HIV activist in Minneapolis, MN.

• Slutist
  http://slutist.com/book-slut-sex-drugs-art-and-oakland-in-brontez-purnells-johnny-would-you-love-me-if/
  Word count: 1159

  QUOTED: "Brontez captures his own life as it comes up emetically in chunks of sexuality, ennui, and self-immolating frustration, but he also captures a slice of Oakland that is quietly diminishing and here only for the moment. Brontez is unabashed, and, unlike most of us, can admit that he just wants people to like him. Well, we do like Brontez, and as he says in his book, yeah, his stories are on fire. Get a slice of life in Oakland and life as Brontez."

  Book Slut: Sex, Drugs, Art and Oakland In Brontez Purnell’s Johnny Would You Love Me If…?

  PILAR REYES
  September 17, 2015
  Everyone in Oakland knows Brontez. If you don’t know Brontez, then you don’t really know Oakland, because he’s somewhat of a legend around these parts. From his days playing punk shows at The Gilman in the locally lauded, scantily clad, mostly pop outfit Gravy Train, to his recent notoriety with the Younger Lovers, his dance performances and many other artistic endeavors and incarnations of bands, Brontez has always been a man about town. But beyond his creative pursuits, what makes Brontez more scintillating and more engaging than your average scummy Oakland hipster artist wanna be is the ease with which Brontez is Brontez: a burning, brilliant, black boy in our streets.

  Now, if you don’t know Brontez personally, maybe I should back it up a little and explain what I mean when I say “Brontez.” Brontez is a loud mouthed gay boy from Alabama with punk rock day dreams and an insatiable yen to fuck. Brontez is usually drunk, and if you know him, you know that he’s always the life of the party. I guess it’s up to him whether or not the party is careening with jolly good times or riddled with bad coke trips and talking shit and starting fights. Everyone I know (or, rather everyone I have ever fucked) has a Brontez story (about how Brontez wants to bang them. In the words of Brontez: DUH BITCH). But, more importantly, Brontez has a story about everyone I know, and, thanks mostly to his commitment to consistent artistic output, some of those stories have been documented, written down, and published in his new novella Johnny Would You Love Me If…(My Dick Were Bigger?).

  In Johnny Would You Love Me If…, the fecklessness with which Brontez lives his life is revealed in a series of vignettes that congeal over topics that are all too familiar to those of us disenfranchised, underemployed, disaffected youth: trivial casual sex, our tepid jobs, STDs, should we use condoms?, being a misfit, poetry, married men, therapists, tour diaries, dance routines, poetry, magic, black outs, mom, broken hearts and hangovers. But Brontez tells these stories with the aplomb of someone who has gone to the dark side, realized he belonged there, and then got bored with the dark side and tried to find the dark side’s dark side. His prose is comfortable as he ambles through stories about anonymous bath house fuckery, indifferently discussing unprotected sex, and poo pooing the overly sensitive types who balk at his feigned nonchalance about being HIV positive.

  Brontez’s series of vignettes adds up to an image of life in the Bay Area that too many people have never seen and perhaps will never seen due to the demographic shift of the people out here. While Johnny Would You Love Me If… lacks a cohesive plot line, it reads with the scattered continuity that is reflective of the almost schizophrenic mind set of being a young artist trying love and live in this messy city of ours. To be young (or aging) in the Bay Area while trying to be an artist means that you are many things at once: a musician, a fucker, a lover, a dancer, a writer, a drunk, a criminal. Brontez even goes so far as to poke fun at people who see his lifestyle as something to fetishize, but with his book we all have the opportunity to look at this lifestyle and gawk at the pure artistry with which Brontez lives his life. It can be fascinating for some, and familiar for others.

  One of Brontez’s central themes is being HIV positive and having unprotected sex. While this can be a grim topic, Brontez manages to talk about it in a way that eschews the typical tragic trappings that the HIV epidemic was always painted with. Brontez is honest about his experience, lamenting the patronizing tone and condescending attitudes of people’s reaction to his status. He is honest about pretending to love people and pretending to care, but he revels in the heart break, examining every inch of the reality of not being loved back. He looks at long term relationships that have no emotion, and the fleeting ones like whirlwinds that always end with broken hearts. He expounds on vengeance, on jealousy, and not giving a fuck when it comes to his multitude of lovers. He lobs gems of wisdom into giggly stories that come off as comedy but pierce with wit. When it comes to bug chasing, Brontez gracefully lets us know that, “the bug chaser says ‘I’d rather have it so I can stop worrying about it.'” This is called extreme. Looking back (with glasses) at certain jacked decisions in the past, I think it’s also extreme to say “I wanna do hella sketchy shit and don’t want anything bad to happen.” Damn.

  Stories start out with the self-referential “I was an American Waiter bored at work” and end up in a self-critical expose of either heartless or too heart wrenching sex. His (very successful) stab at imitating the Southern Gothic style is exemplary of Brontez’s ability to blend well-structured, eloquent writing principles with his wry humor and sneering perspective on taboo subjects such as molestation and being the so-called “Satan worshipping California boy” in a family full of Alabama Christians. He expounds on the self loathing chagrin of writing class and his constant battles with his therapist who is full of grad school cliches. He addresses issues of class and race through a sexualized, drugged up lens that leaves the proselytizing (and often alienating) politics out of it. Brontez captures his own life as it comes up emetically in chunks of sexuality, ennui, and self-immolating frustration, but he also captures a slice of Oakland that is quietly diminishing and here only for the moment.

  Brontez is unabashed, and, unlike most of us, can admit that he just wants people to like him. Well, we do like Brontez, and as he says in his book, yeah, his stories are on fire. Get a slice of life in Oakland and life as Brontez and buy his book from Last Gasp.

• The Comics Journal
  http://www.tcj.com/reviews/the-cruising-diaries/
  Word count: 1050

  QUOTED: "What separates Purnell’s anecdotes from other sex diaries is his fierce intelligence, a lack of shame and an acidic and trenchant sense of humor about himself and those he comes into contact with. While these are id-powered stories, Purnell is also frequently reflective on his roots, his family and the culture around him, even if it’s in a sarcastic, dismissive manner."
  "This is a short but potent read that doesn’t outstay its welcome and brings the underground punk zine aesthetic to a larger audience."

  ← Kill My MotherBaby Bjornstrand →
  REVIEWS
  The Cruising Diaries
  Brontez Purnell & Janelle Hessig
  Gimme Action
  $10, 50 pages
  BUY IT NOW

  REVIEWED BY ROB CLOUGH AUG 27, 2014
  cruising-cover-WEBThe alternative comics scene has frequently been closely allied with the punk rock and zine scenes. That’s especially true of minicomics and other hand-made publications with low print runs. As long as there are enough young people and venues in an area to support a music scene, other forms of culture inevitably spring up around it. In this sense, the youth and DIY nature of punk has never died out. Instead, it simply gets passed down to new generations on a regular basis. The participatory nature of these scenes has always meant that newcomers with little skill but a great deal of enthusiasm found encouragement not only to start their own band or do their own zine, but to do both if they felt like it. The barriers from initial interest to actual production or performance are few, especially if there are readers or listeners around.

  While zines and minicomics are ideal for young artists, there are still plenty of artists who prove to be lifers. John Porcellino just reached his 25th anniversary with King-Cat Comics, for example. Brontez Purnell and Janelle Hessig are two more artists who have been publishing zines for quite some time. Hessig started publishing Tales of Blarg! back in 1991, was the subject of Riot Grrl band Bratmobile’s “The Real Janelle” (and appeared on the record’s cover), and has had her own bands like Panty Raid. Hessig wrote for Punk Planet and then got a degree in animation, and that sense of intellectual and artistic curiosity and adventurousness pervades her work. In her autobio stories, Hessig is clearly influenced by the manic style of Peter Bagge and she comes across like Lisa Leavenworth’s cooler but still frantic sister.

  blarg9Purnell is also a zinester (his best known being Fag School), musician (Panty Raid, Gravy Train!!!, and other bands), dancer, and writer. He’s written for Maximum Rock ‘n Roll and also works as a DJ. He’s been doing this for nearly fifteen years. Purnell and his old friend Hessig have combined to create what is hands-down the funniest and filthiest book of the year, The Cruising Diaries. Here’s an animated preview of the book. The format of the book is text from Purnell on the left-hand pages and an illustration (sometimes in comics form) from Hessig on the right-hand pages. Each anecdote concerns young Purnell’s anonymous sexual exploits “told in the style of anti-erotica.” Each encounter has a title; the first is called “Sweet Talker”, and it ends with the following three sentences: “I went to his house where he had pictures of his wife and kids everywhere and every solo-male jerk-off film ever. We spent three hours in the shower pissing on each other and he bought me a burrito later. PERFECT DATE.” This gives the reader a pretty good idea of what they’re in for: total honesty and a heaping of irreverence.

  Hessig’s accompanying illustration zeroed in on an earlier detail: the “sweet talker” wondering if Purnell’s shorts indicated that he was a real mailman. It’s an absurd pick-up line, but not for a kid like Purnell who had an opportunity for a better time than he would have had at a bar. Hessig adds a great deal of detail to some of the encounters; a blow-job in a bathroom stall is greatly livened up with the absurd character expressions and graffiti, for example. She’s also not afraid to go to gross-out images, like a man rejecting Purnell and showing him his genital-wart laden penis (“He made me say things I never thought I would (“Put it away!”)). The huge, leaky and wart-infested penis that she drew even has little scar lines on it, and it has its own thought balloon proclaiming, “Kill me.”

  shrooms-tcj
  Purnell shows zero restraint in what stories he chooses to tell, and this is to the reader’s benefit. Whether it’s being fucked by what he thinks is a ghost, blowing a homeless man behind a taco truck (and subsequently being told to lighten up about someone being homeless) and ranting about the stupidity of semen (“It smells like the inside of a dick”), or getting the urge to rip out a partner’s spine while fisting him on shrooms (a la Mortal Kombat), Purnell digs into his back pages with a great deal of glee. Hessig’s own unrestrained style makes her the perfect collaborator, and she knows just what elements of his stories will make the best single illustration.

  video-tcj
  What separates Purnell’s anecdotes from other sex diaries is his fierce intelligence, a lack of shame and an acidic and trenchant sense of humor about himself and those he comes into contact with. While these are id-powered stories, Purnell is also frequently reflective on his roots, his family and the culture around him, even if it’s in a sarcastic, dismissive manner. He even questions the role of ideology in the gay rights movement. In this book (which borrows its text liberally from his old zines), he concentrates on telling it like it was and doing so in as funny a fashion as possible. For artist and publisher Hessig, her job was to make it look even better, and she succeeded in spectacular fashion. This is a short but potent read that doesn’t outstay its welcome and brings the underground punk zine aesthetic to a larger audience.

  FILED UNDER: brontez purnell, janelle hessig

• Maximum Rock n Roll
  http://www.maximumrocknroll.com/brontez-purnell-and-janelle-hessig-present-the-cruising-diaries/
  Word count: 278

  Brontez Purnell and Janelle Hessig present The Cruising Diaries!

  July 4th, 2014 by Paul Curran
  cruising-cover-WEB

  Well, I don’t know where you’ve been hiding if you’ve never heard of Brontez — Bay Area scene celebrity, creator of the great Fag School zine, mastermind behind punk/power-pop (power-punk?) sensations Younger Lovers, and of course his stint as columnist in Maximum Rocknroll magazine!

  And Janelle Hessig‘s list of credentials is too long for the attention span of — well, me — but let me just name drop the essential Tales of Blarg zine, editor of MRR‘s classic Punk Comics Issues (not to mention her conributions to our Punk Comics Blog) and a zillion great bands like the Tourettes, Panty Raid, Baby Jail, and most recently the Wet Spots.

  Put these two hilarious and creative geniuses together and you know you have some next level wizard magic. Enter their upcoming collaborative book, The Cruising Diaries. Described as “a collection of writer/musician Brontez Purnell’s various sexual follies and misadventures around ’00s Oakland. Taco truck blowjobs, ‘shrooms, Santa – everything you could want from an illustrated sex memoir and much, much more,” you know this is going to be some laugh-out-loud madness like you’ve never seen before. Just check out this very NOT SUITABLE FOR WORK preview video:

  Pre-order the book from Janelle’s gimmeaction.com

  “ADULTS ONLY! (Eat shit, babies!)”

  And if you’re in the Bay Area on Sept. 12, 2014, don’t miss the book launch party and BBQ at Oakland’s 1-2-3-4 Go! Records.

  Share this post:

• Optical Sloth
  http://www.opticalsloth.com/?p=23060
  Word count: 397

  Purnell, Brontez & Hessig, Janelle – The Cruising Diaries
  JAN 1
  Posted by admin
  Website

  cruisingdiaries1

  The Cruising Diaries

  It’s a sad fact of my upbringing, but whenever I read a book like this I can’t help wishing that overly religious people were forced to read it. Not for punishment, but because I think it would help them understand humanity a bit more. Not that this book aspires to anything so lofty as all that, and you can tell the theme right from the title. These are the adventures in cruising from Brontez, told in full (and often hilarious) detail, and he has no interest in worrying about the delicate sensibilities of anybody. Which is great, as this book would have been ridiculous if it was censored. He writes a story of whatever happened on one side, and Janelle Hessig illustrates them on the other. The image of his drunken face, covered in cum and heading back out to a wedding, was my favorite, but there are lots to choose from. Subjects of these stories (and he’s nice enough to include a map of these encounters in the front) include his finally hooking up at a punk bar, getting fucked by Santa, the reality of a job working in a bathhouse, the family guy with all the warts on his dick, the straight guy and his trouble with condoms, all of the shit that guys with big dicks think they can get away with, getting fucked by a ghost, the homeless guy (and how it was bad to discriminate), the locker room guy, and fisting while on shrooms. And more, but I should leave some surprises for you. If you’re prone to fainting spells and fits of nervousness then maybe you shouldn’t read this, but for everybody else this book had me laughing plenty, those illustrations by Janelle made great stories even better and I even learned a few new terms which, considering all the gay friends I’ve had over the years, I didn’t think was even possible. Buy it and enjoy, is what I’m trying to tell you. $10

  cruisingdiaries2

  Posted on January 1, 2015, in Reviews and tagged Brontez Purnell, Janelle Hessig, The Cruising Diaries. Bookmark the permalink. Comments Off on Purnell, Brontez & Hessig, Janelle – The Cruising Diaries.

• Four Two Nine
  http://fourtwonine.com/2014/09/08/5048-brontez-purnell-and-janelle-hessig-collaborate-on-the-cruising-diaries/
  Word count: 345

  Brontez Purnell’s illustrated memoir of sexual misadventure
  CULTUREBY EVAMARIE ON SEP 8, 2014
  Last Saturday there was a book release party and BBQ at 1-2-3-4 Go! Records in Oakland. The occasion was the publication of The Cruising Diaries, Brontez Purnell’s comedic memoir of sexual misadventures, illustrated by Bay Area cartoonist Janelle Hassig.

  Purnell is best known as the founder of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, although he was also former frontman of the electro band Gravy Train!!!!, is current frontman of the punk band Younger Lovers, and was a columnist for Maximum Rock’n’Roll. His short stories were originally written for the zine Fag School, which Purnell created thirteen years ago. Upon revisiting his archives, Purnell decided to collaborate with Janelle Hassig on a book-length project.

  In 21 candid stories, Purnell describes his sexual exploits with ghosts and cops in places as diverse as East Oakland, taco trucks, and ballet class. His style throughout is gritty, explicit, and unapologetic.

  Having migrated to the Bay Area from the South in the early 2000’s Purnell found a community in Oakland with which to explore unabashed sexual experimentation and exhibitionism. Although there are cautionary tales, Purnell also wants to be clear that sex shouldn’t be taken so seriously. “There were a lot of gay punks writing about sex, but it was always this dense text. Nothing was funny or engaging and I didn’t see the type of zines that spoke to me,” Purnell said when discussing Fag School.

  Following The Cruising Diaries, Purnell plans to release a novel, 100 Boyfriends. He also has a second memoir in the works titled Johnny Would you Love Me If My Dick Was Bigger? which details the period during which he was producing Fag School. Both the novel and memoir-in-progress take a harder, darker approach. As Purnell told the East Bay Express, “Most people don’t suspect it but I’m a pretty dark bitch.”

  The Cruising Diaries is available for pre-order through gimmeaction.com

• Lambda Literary
  https://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/fiction/09/27/johnny-would-you-love-me-if-my-dick-were-bigger-by-brontez-purnell/
  Word count: 1434

  ‘Johnny Would You Love Me…(If My Dick Were Bigger)’ by Brontez Purnell
  Review by Theodore Kerr
  September 27, 2015

  Brontez Purnell isn’t one for withholding. On the first page of Johnny Would you Love… (Me If My Dick Were Bigger), the queer renaissance man of the Bay Area, establishes that he is punk as funk, puts the work in working class, and has no time for the sad navel-gazing of second wave faggotry currently in vogue: “…after years of repeated listening I finally allow myself to say it in my head: I fucking hate The Smiths.”

  But this does not mean Purnell is all hard edges. He is an open-hearted romantic whose desires for love, cock, and community give him–and the book–life. In a series of essays, notes, vignettes, choreographies, and an accumulation of writing prompts Purnell has produced a 126-page illustrative text of how loving freedom for yourself and those around you demands disruption, discomfort, and a lot of movement. Quoting a dance teacher he studied under, Purnell provides something of a possible mantra early in the book: “I don’t care how flexible you are or how well you can dance. I just want to see you move.”

  And move he does. One moment as a reader one can be rushing through a story about sex and poop or Solange trying to distance herself from him after he throws a white girl’s phone across the club, the next one may be catching one’s breath reflecting on an unexpectedly beautiful line. A personal favorite: “…if there really is a Hell all us gay boys are going for how carelessly we treat each other.”

  The breakneck pacing of the book can be seen as political, a reminder that there is no rest for those struggling to survive and create. Purnell has a lot he wants to share and along with that an eye for experiences that speak to larger truths. In a short piece about absorbing other people’s less than complimentary comments about his body after he appeared nude on the cover of a Bay Area paper, he shares that he dealt with it by getting high and going to Whole Foods. The micro view of this story is living on the Left Coast, even a self-described “ride or die bitch” like Brontez needs a kombucha once in awhile; the macro takeaway being: the where, when, and body we live in shapes how live. We can’t escape our context.

  This macro view is poignant when Purnell is writing about the modern travails of being a sexually active gay man. He introduces something I think, within the pharmacopornographic era we live in, will be a must-include convention within queer lit: the barebacking origin story, the point in a narrative when it is revealed how and when someone reconciles their desire for insertive anal sex without a condom.

  Confirming his romantic nature, Purnell’s bareback origin story is among the book’s most tender, honest, and, I think, relatable moments:

  I would one day look back to see what basically was going on was two boys, misfits of sorts, accessing masculinity through sex because raw sex was “how men do it,” alongside the fact that it felt good. I gave in to his demands ‘cause the thought of him not loving me or not wanting to have sex with me was scarier than any disease.

  This passage shook me out of the book and into a moment a few years ago when I was facilitating a conversation among young people living with HIV and others deemed most at risk. A young South Asian man who had been living with HIV for a few years recalled a feeling he used to want for himself, but able to articulate it only after some life experience: “I wanted to be vulnerable enough to get HIV.” It was the most silent of epic mic drops. In an era of prevention at all costs, the young man’s words were brazen and revelatory. It was a hovering thought I never had the boldness to let fully form. Feeling responsible for the table, I worried about how to proceed, but I needn’t, those around it hummed and nodded in agreement. As people who have queer sex, queer love, and even according to some, queer bodies; being vulnerable was an achievement of the highest order against the tyranny of rejection. To invite in even the idea of HIV–one of the boogiest of all boogiemen–was a blow to the shackles of oppression.

  This sense of the looming virus is something Purnell address in the book at the same moment he discloses. In a passage about bathhouses he writes,“[…] It was before I was positive and I felt like I was going to have to fight like hell to maintain my negative status ‘cause either I liked fun too much or had a death wish (it was hard to discern)…” He provides the story of AIDS he inherited (that it’s something inevitable that we invite into our lives through bad behavior) while doing the work too few others are doing: telling personal, embodied stories of AIDS now.

  There are many good bloggers and essayists writing about HIV for the web, academic journals, and other platforms but most often they are written by people like me–well meaning HIV negative folks. As an HIV+, black, queer, creative, cis-man with hips and ass he loves to have loved, Purnell working out his relationship with the virus and the collateral experiences it brings, on the page, is of vital importance.

  And as is his style, vitally messy.

  An essay entitled “The Politics of Bug Chasing” begins, “I joined the online barebacking site ‘cause I was out of ideas. The guy came over; he was on a 5 day speed binge. He looked me in the eyes and told me he was worried about me.” It ends, “But the ultimate question is, who’s more wrong?” In between is a summary of sorts of what occurs between Purnell and his new friend debating the reasons people find themselves living with HIV. It is an essay not for the faint of heart—nor the dogmatic. He is not writing to advance a theory an idea or even a defined point of view, although he delivers all three. He is writing to communicate, to share, to live.

  As someone invested in the ongoing response to AIDS, it is important I do not get stuck on the appearance of HIV in Purnell’s prose, but rather see his relationship to the virus as just one of many examples of Brontez’s power of uncanny self-reflection. Purnell lives always at risk of being seen as being “too much” by others while unapologetically being open to grace. Purnell’s way of being in the world shouldn’t be noteworthy, but in the face of normcore, trigger warnings, and call out culture, it is.

  A subtle beating heart at the center of many “women’s movies” over the last few years, be them blockbuster’s like Bridesmaids or art-house darlings like Francis Ha, is the questions of what do you do when your friends go straight? We see lovable outsider women–be they former dancers, or cupcake entrepreneurs–learning to transition from early adulthood ensconced in lovingly codependent pixie existences, to learning how to be slightly older women charting their own path, often having to adjust their expectations of life as they go. Along the way questions of friendships’ elasticity come up, how much can those who know us absorb our peculiarities until they abandon us.

  In his book, Purnell is serving us a similar ‘women’s’ story but with no Hollywood writers, casting agents, or even a satisfying ending. By asking, “Would you love me if….?” Purnell is not inquiring about the limits of love, he announcing his awareness that limits exist and snubbing his nose accordingly. He refuses to go straight, adjust his expectations, or refrain from being too much. Along the way, he has carved out a creative and hopefully satisfying life full of dance, writing, friendship, sex, adventure, and as it seems, love.

  Thank God he has been keeping notes.

  Johnny Would You Love Me ….(If My Dick Were Bigger)
  By Brontez Purnell
  Rudos and Rubes Publishing
  Paperback, 126 pp.
  August 2015