february1–14, 2021 | newyork 75BrontezPurnellPHOTOGRAPH: MELISSA DALE WOOD
lished by the underground press Rudos
and Rubes. 100 Boyfriends, his first book
with a major publisher, is more polished
and assured than his previous work, and,
like Johnny Would You Love Me, it draws
its DNA from Fag School’s “Cruising
Reviews.” Context matters, though: In the
zine, the cruising reviews could be wedged
between porn reviews and a photo-comic
of Purnell fucking his bandmate in a strip
entitled Young ’n’ Hung. The look was DIY
and dirty, the posture anti-Establishment.
Compared to the zine, 100 Boyfriends feels
gussied up, as though it put on a clean shirt
and good shoes before guests arrived.
100 Boyfriends front-loads its best
work into the first two acts, “Army of
Lovers” and “100-Page Breakup Letter.”
Purnell’s observations are at once lyrical
and familiar, like a perfect joke dropped
into a group text or whispered into a lover’s
ear. There’s boyfriend No. 19, the white
boy whose dreadlocks felt “like a nest of
spiders,” and the Satanist, boyfriend No.
666, whose “stroke game was at about
58 percent.” Then there’s the on-again,
off-again relationship in “Damn a Lover
Comes Home to Die.” The narrator’s man
is an addict who comes back to him only
when he’s coming down, and he can never
say no. In a gorgeous scene, the boyfriend
once again returns post-bender, and the
narrator changes him into freshly bought
Champion sweats—“because I want to
wrap him in expensive things”—and puts
a cold compress on his head, saying, “You
are going to behave yourself. You are going
to come back to me.”
While Purnell’s sensibility is queer-
core, his writing follows the oft-
unacknowledged literary subgenre of
cruising—a more contemporary, gay
variant of flânerie: the men who wander
for dick, from Jean Genet to David Wojn-
arowicz to Samuel R. Delany. The public
square winks with possibility. Gas sta-
tions become libidinal pump-and-dumps.
Bathrooms, bathhouses, truck stops, the-
aters, warehouses, and docks peel back to
reveal entire erotic ecosystems structured
around giving and getting orgasms. “The
great thing about anonymous sex is you
don’t bring your private life or personal
world,” said the late artist and poet John
Giorno, whose collection You Got to Burn
to Shine includes a story about exchang-
ing blow jobs with someone who turns
out to be Keith Haring in the toilets of the
Prince Street subway station. “No politics
or inhibiting concepts, no closed rules or
fixed responses. The great thing about
anonymous sex is spontaneity.”
Writing in this genre has usually held
a romantic view of cruising. Whether it
happened in pre-Giuliani Times Square(depicted in Delany’s masterful anthro-
pology Times Square Red, Times Square
Blue) or at the bar called the Magic Touch
in Jackson Heights (in José Esteban
Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia), the belief is
that public sex reorganizes the world in
a way that allows for a radical reconcep-
tion of desire. That tapping foot could
belong to a trucker or a senator. Delany
holds such spaces in awe and channels
their otherworldliness into his science fic-
tion. In his 1988 memoir, The Motion of
Light in Water, he remembers the night-
time orgies that would occur between the
tractor-trailers parked at the docks on
Christopher Street:At other times, to step between the waist-
high tires and make your way between the
smooth or ribbed walls was to invade a
space at a libidinal saturation impossible to
describe to someone who has not known it.
Any number of pornographic filmmakers,
gay and straight, have tried to portray
something like it—now for homosexual-
ity, now for heterosexuality—and failed
because what they were trying to show
was wild, abandoned, beyond the edge of
control, whereas the actuality of such a
situation, with thirty-five, fifty, a hundred
all-but-strangers is hugely ordered, highly
social, attentive, silent, and grounded in a
certain care, if not community.Purnell, who is 38, shares an affinity for
the old-school, pre-Grindr era of sex—but
with less utopian sentiment. He respects
a transcendent sluthood. And yet as 100Boyfriends goes on, the energy and care
that sustain its first two sections peter out
in its third, “No New Boyfriends,” which is
composed mostly of brief sketches of sexual
encounters. I found myself hungering for
Purnell to identify the blocks, whether
personal or sociological, that obstruct his
protagonists, as in the screed he delivered
in the first issue of Fag School. “We here
at fag school tend to lean towards the
specific belief that shit has really hit the
fan,” he wrote then. “These days, straight
dudes look like faggots, faggots are zom-
bies, and the only people who’ll hit on you
and truly mean it are old dudes at the
library. total bummer. We here at fag
school also believe that in times such as
these we have to separate ourselves from
this smelly, smelly bullshit and get to the
real nitty-gritty.”
Sex doesn’t have to mean anything,
but novels should and it’s not clear what
100 Boyfriends amounts to in the aggre-
gate. The paragraph-long snippets begin
to feel repetitive. They blur together,
as casual sex is wont to do. (There are
only so many sexual positions under the
sun.) What are we left with at the end
of it all? Certainly not marriage (thank
God). There’s desire itself, an unslakable
thirst. “My only desire is to be desired,”
one of Purnell’s narrators thinks to him-
self. “I can (at will) rip out all sense of
self just so a boy can have one more hole
to fuck me in.” I craved that level of sus-
tained intensity—back blown out, mind
empty—as I read toward a climax that
never quite arrived. ■