One of Electric Literature's Best Nonfiction Books of 2024. One of them.'s Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2024. A finalist for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction. "This book is brutal and brutally honest, but still perversely addictive because Brontez Purnell is a performer in the truest sense. Reading Ten Bridges I've Burnt, I felt tucked-in with him, along for the intimate ride, and paused only once to write down a part I’d been looking for my whole life." —Miranda July, author of All Fours From the beloved author of 100 Boyfriends, a wrenching, sexy, and exhilaratingly energetic memoir in verse. In Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, Brontez Purnell—the bard of the underloved and overlooked—turns his gaze inward. A storyteller with a musical eye for the absurdity of his own existence, he is peerless in his ability to find the levity within the stormiest of crises. Here, in his first collection of genre-defying verse, Purnell reflects on his peripatetic life, whose ups and downs have nothing on the turmoil within. “The most high-risk homosexual behavior I engage in,” Purnell writes, “is simply existing.” The thirty-eight autobiographical pieces pulsing in Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt find Purnell at his no-holds-barred best. He remembers a vicious brawl he participated in at a poetry conference and reckons with packaging his trauma for TV writers’ rooms; wrestles with the curses, and gifts, passed down from generations of family members; and chronicles, with breathless verve, a list of hell-raising misadventures and sexcapades. Through it all, he muses on everything from love and loneliness to capitalism and Blackness to jogging and the ethics of art, always with unpredictable clarity and movement. With the same balance of wit and wisdom that made 100 Boyfriends a sensation, Purnell unleashes another collection of boundary-pushing writing with Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, a book as original and thrilling as the author himself.

Winner of the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Longlisted for the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize. One of Buzzfeed's Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2021, NBC's 10 Most Notable LGBTQ Books of 2021, and Pink News' Best LGBTQ Books of 2021. "This hurricane of delirious, lonely, lewd tales is a taxonomy and grand unified theory of the boyfriend, in every tense." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times "I loved this book—raunchy, irreverent, deliberate, sexy, angry, and tender, in its own way." —Roxane Gay An irrerverent, sensitive, and inimitable look at gay dysfunction through the eyes of a cult hero Transgressive, foulmouthed, and brutally funny, Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends is a revelatory spiral into the imperfect lives of queer men desperately fighting the urge to self-sabotage. As they tiptoe through minefields of romantic, substance-fueled misadventure—from dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama—Purnell’s characters strive for belonging in a world that dismisses them for being Black, broke, and queer. In spite of it—or perhaps because of it—they shine. Armed with a deadpan wit, Purnell finds humor in even the darkest of nadirs with the peerless zeal, insight, and horniness of a gay punk messiah. Together, the slice-of-life tales that writhe within 100 Boyfriends are an inimitable tour of an unexposed queer underbelly. Holding them together is the vision of an iconoclastic storyteller, as fearless as he is human.

An uninhibited portrait of growing up gay in 1980s Alabama: exploring art and sex with "more layered insight than the page count should allow" (Hanif Abdurraqib, MTV News). DeShawn lives a high, creative, and promiscuous life in San Francisco. But when he's called back to his cramped Alabama hometown for his uncle's funeral, he's hit by flashbacks of handsome, doomed neighbors and sweltering Sunday services. Amidst prickly reminders of his childhood, DeShawn ponders family, church, and the men in his life, prompting the question: Who deserves love? A modern American classic, Since I Laid My Burden Down is a raw and searing look into the intersections of memory, Blackness, and queerness. "Performance artist Purnell beautifully captures a personality through introspection and memory in this slim novel . . . a compelling portrait of a particular disaffected kind of gay youth caught between religion, culture, and desire." — Publishers Weekly "It's a true novel, chaptered, and bound, that not only holds its own as queer literature, with its unapologetically misanthropic narrative, but also expands upon it." —San Francisco Chronicle "An antidote to the rigamarole of gay lit." —Mask Magazine "Slim yet potently realized, with a lot to ponder." —The Bay Area Reporter "Since I Laid My Burden Down has a fearless (sometimes reckless) humor as Brontez Purnell interrogates what it means to be black, male, queer; a son, an uncle, a lover; Southern, punk, and human. An emotional tightrope walk of a book and an important American story rarely, if ever, told." —Michelle Tea, author of Castle on the River Vistula

He's a slut. He's a nerd. He's a waiter, bored at work. This is his diary.

The Cruising Diaries is a queer coming of age memoir that's not for the faint of heart. Follow author and musician Brontez Purnell on a series of hilarious sexual misadventures through '00s Oakland. Outrageous tales of taco truck trysts and bathhouse Santas are accompanied by full-color illustrations in this glorious expanded edition.

DeShawn genießt sein lustvolles und kreatives Leben als Künstler in San Francisco. Doch als er sich zur Beerdigung seines Onkels auf den Weg in seine Heimat Alabama macht, beginnt er eine Reise in die eigene Vergangenheit: In Rückblicken auf seine Kindheit und Jugend, sein sexuelles Erwachen und seine verflossenen Liebhaber entsteht das Bild eines Erwachsenwerdens, das zwischen energischen Frauen und verunsicherten Jungs, zwischen Südstaaten-Tunten und Westküsten-Punks, zwischen Gottesdienst und Partydrogen oszilliert. Mit großer Eindringlichkeit, komisch und schonungslos direkt verwebt Brontez Purnell die sexuellen und künstlerischen Eskapaden seines Helden zu einer berührenden Coming-of-Age-Geschichte.

Special issue of Shotgun Seamstress zine discussing visual artists. Included within: an interview with Afro-Punk director James Spooner, a write-up on the art of Adee Roberson, a letter to Vaginal Creme Davis, praises for performance artist Kalup Linzy, an interview with video performance artist Jacob Gardens, and a poem by Lenelle Moise.