Brontez Purnell and the Ghosts of Exes Past – Vulture

Brontez Purnell, at 38 years old, is already something of a Bay Area legend. If you grew up in the recent Oakland punk scene, youve probably seen him play a show with his garage rock band the Younger Lovers. If you follow queer zine culture, you probably have at least a few copies of Purnells zineFag School, which hes been writing since the early aughts, or read one of the books hes put out with small publishers. You might have watched his art-house soft-core porn film100 Boyfriends Mixtape or seen him perform contemporary dance. But most people in Purnells world know him as Oaklands daddy something of a watchful protector over the gentrifying city, attuned to (but never too involved in) the affairs of the small scene. I literally represent the 0.0001 percent, says the artist, who grew up in Alabama. Black queer men that have been riding around on a bike in the California sunshine for almost 20 goddamned years.

On February 2, Purnell is releasing his first book with a major publisher, the MCD x FSG Originals imprint:100 Boyfriends, a novel composed of vignettes on love, sex, and Purnells love of love and sex. It fluctuates between first person and third person, the present and the past, prose and poetry, and reads like a series of 4 a.m. text messages received from a very smart and very messy friend when theres no way you can wait till morning to respond, What the fuck? Are you OK? Did you at least have fun? If Purnell is a living archive of the Bays queer and punk scenes in last two decades, 100 Boyfriendsis an autofiction anthology of drug-fueled warehouse dwellers, queer skate kids, and regretless heartbreakers.

I spoke to Purnell on one of the last warm days of Bay Area autumn,while we sat on the back deck of his Victorian house in Oakland. He shared how he conceives love for the page, what it was like to work on 100 Boyfriends,and why he just cant stop making art. Saam Niami

I was a zine kid in the 90s I started writing zines when I was about 14 years old. I never really felt that there was a hope or a life or a context for me down South. And so when I got to Oakland, I just felt for all the mistakes, all the crazy shit, everything that happened. It really was a breath of fresh air just to set foot on the soil. I was so developmentally regressed when I got here at 18, I essentially had to come and have my for-real teenage years life was so repressive in Alabama. My mother never really let me out of the house because I was too Black and punk and queer. She was afraid somebody was going to fucking kill me. So when I got here, I really had to just grow up in a really intense way. I had guides, but I didnt have any parents. I really had to rely on myself as a moral compass.

It was really fucking intense, but I wouldnt trade that shit for nothing in the world. Its all a patchwork quilt or a blanket: You remove any one thread, it dissembles the whole blanket. If I could talk to my younger self, I wouldnt go up in that kids face telling them what to do. Id just be like, Bitch, its going to be really fun and really hard. Go ahead.

There were so many wild, public displays of hedonism back then. If you did that shit these days, these kids would call you out on the internet so fast. But I wanted to be in that scene. We did these things because we were punk. Because we were crazy, radical queers. We came to these things because we were fucked up, because our parents were drug addicts or neglectful conservatives. We were trying to escape it and we let our trauma ricochet off of each other. But also, deep within it, there was a sense of love.

My book,100 Boyfriends,doesnt really deal with a hundred boys that just sounds like a horrible rom-com. Its really about how, every time you date someone, youre left with a ghost of someone, and that persons left with the ghost of someone, and were all just carrying around the baggage of everyones relationships, even when we deal with each other. Theres this line in the book that goes: Between two men, there can be a hundred ghosts in the room. Its about dealing with the residual effects of entanglement.

When I write about a real experience, it depends on where Im calibrating from because I have theater IQ. Maybe its all about the physical space a bedroom where you see every single squiggle mark on the ceiling. Whenever youve broken up with someone, what do you remember from that day? Do you remember if it was sunny? Do you remember cologne, perfume, or a smell, or a meal you ate? Or maybe you just strictly orient from an emotion you felt. There are lots of insertion points for memory. You can be as sacred or as secular as you want.

I think the older I have got, I dont approach relationships at all. I just exist and things happen. If you call that a fucking very earned weariness, then sure, you can say Ive changed. That gusto, that do-or-die love I have to be with this person. My heart and whole being is going to fucking break in two if I dont have this person I havent felt that way since my goddamned 20s. But then, you know,100 Boyfriendsis definitely more for, you know, old jaded whores. Its about the time after that first feeling has passed.

Ive never had this much parental intervention. When youre in the cut of DIY art for years, youre like, No ones supporting this. I got to do all this myself. I gotta make sure all this shit is doing it. But then when I got up in FSGs house, I was not ready because one page would have like 12 questions: Well, what do you mean by this? How do you mean this? Maybe we can say it this way. Blah, blah, blah. And Im like, Oh shit, this is what it means to professionalize now. Almost wasnt ready for that shit. But I think you should be able to approach any language and find where you vibe with it. Plus, who knows about ever getting this chance again? So, you know, I stuck with it.

I like zines and I like something episodic and periodical, which is why I still doFag School. I think its always good to go back every couple of years and reevaluate how you feel about something state what youve learned.

At the end of the day, my band, the Younger Lovers, has never been a heavily supported thing. Its a pop-punk band, but its too Black and too queer. Its something that I do as a labor of love. I think most people in Oakland would just remember it as the band that played for free at all the warehouses for years.

I would have to say the Younger Lovers is more of a global scene. When people are like, Oh, I love the Younger Lovers, its always some random person from the Philippines or some dude from France. Ive gotten more congratulatory remarks from people way outside the bubble than I ever did inside the bubble.

My problem with Oakland is just that it really can be a slacking-ass, beer-drinking town. Considering how much money we pay to live in this motherfucker, it makes sense that theres not a lot of support. Im not bitter or angry about it because, at the end of the day, I see what most garage rock bands have to do. If anyone wants to tour the Younger Lovers and sit me in a fucking Trump state, with me talking all the shit that I do, the only thing they gonna do is lynch my Black ass. So its probably better that I just make some music in a garage in Oakland and, you know, keep it moving.

If it had been up to me, I would have gotten all my rock-and-roll accolades at 24, and I would have gladly ODd at 26 and just left a beautiful corpse. But it wasnt up to me. God was like, No, your fat Black ass going to keep working forever and ever. Amen.

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Brontez Purnell and the Ghosts of Exes Past - Vulture