Brontez Purnell

JA

I want to begin with a quote which accompanies the press release for 10 Bridges. "The most high-risk homosexual behavior I engage in," you proclaim, "is simply existing." What did you mean by that?

BP

Oh my God, you're really going to sit here with a poet line for line and be like, “So I need you to explain yourself”? I think it was probably a very ballistic statement. Maybe to state simply, existence is hard. It is. I think at this point too, especially as we get older, I do think it was supposed to get easier, but by current metrics, I just don't think it is getting easier. So yes, every day we get out of bed, it’s a declaration. It is perilous.

JA

I've known you for what, ten, maybe fifteen years? Looking back, when we were coming up in San Francisco as kids, there was a certain boundless excitement and energy, perhaps even hopefulness—that seemed to define queer community. And yet, that hopefulness was tempered with a sense of fear, one connected to sex and the dangers it very much presented in the days before the availability of PrEP. Sex—having sex—carried with it the stigmas of HIV/AIDS, the usage of drugs like meth, not to mention the dysmorphias which circulated around it.

In a passage from 100 Boyfriends, you write: "I don't think I've ever lived a life where sex did not mean danger or coercion or so many wrong things that could happen." How have your collective sexual experiences come to inform your writing and why do you think it’s an important theme that recurs in your body of work, especially as a writer?

BP

I think when you're young there's kind of a fearlessness and there's the hormones. You throw yourself into whatever situation. There's that one meme—"My dick has led me to places I would not go with a gun"—that’s the total fucking tagline of my youth there. Youth is about believing that there is an endless possibility for growth, there's endless potential of growth.

But then you stay in one place for a long time, or after you're in one scene for a long time, you recognize that the world is finite. There's a finite set of experiences, there's a finite set of people, there's a finite set of circumstances. With every new encounter you think you're having, there comes a point where it just reminds you of something that happened before, and you become more cognizant of patterns the older you get and of how you get to these patterns.

Youth is about taking in information, taking in everything, trying everything. But then, I don't know, you get older, and you start to read yourself, you start to read the patterns and I think you kind of say, "Oh, this is what this is about." You're able to name things more. And you become a little wearier. The price of experience is weariness.

JA

What are some of the patterns that you've noticed?

BP

Oh God, there's so many. Believing that, I don't know, at any moment, the next guy I have sex with could be the guy who asks to marry me—something like that and really believing it. Or the fact that we engage in cruising, which I think ultimately is, by definition, not a vanilla behavior. Cruising is not vanilla and the element of not knowing what could happen—I think is what often fuels that kind of interaction.

But things change, flavors change. In my youth, there was the idea of an endless set of flavors and that always excited me. But now I don't know. The older I get, I find myself calling the men that I knew and were in love with in my twenties more and more.

JA

Let’s focus for a moment on the place sex holds in your writing. Why do you think it plays such a central role as a theme in your writing?

BP

I think writing about sex is its own mode of communication. It holds a lot of currency in our landscape, and I think it's often weaponized against us on all fronts—how much we are having or how little we are having. Plus, I think it's one of the things that's always written about in the most ingenuous way.

Often the sex I write about, it's not glamorizing it by any means. And I think most sex writing, most porn is always set to put the players in this kind of superhero role of formidable sex god. But I think the way I write about sex kind of brings all of that down to scale. I write from a very human approach. And there's lots about sex that is funny or humorous or sad, or often there's a lot about sex that is very actually unsexy, but it's as necessary a function as eating, breathing, meditating. It's kind of our function as humans.

JA

What was the impetus for you in writing 100 Boyfriends?

BP

After publishing Since I Laid My Burden Down, which was a novel, I really wanted to go back to the short story form. Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger—which had been my first book—was a collection of short essays, and I really loved that style. So I was returning to the short story form. I was also reading a bunch of stuff by the New York Language poets in New York, which inspired “The Boyfriend” interludes in 100 Boyfriends.

JA

What does the short story form allow you to do that maybe, say, a novel doesn't?

BP

You have to choose your words very carefully, particularly with the style. The first style I wrote in when I moved to San Francisco was the flash fiction style. And it's essentially way harder because it's like this Rubik's Cube—you have to get the whole story in and lay it out and really make it sing. Whereas, the longer forms, at best, you can build an extensive and great world, but at worst it becomes kind of like a weird word salad. People fight me on this, but I tend to think the key to communication is brevity.

JA

As Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

BP

Yeah, totally. And that was something that I always liked to get back to. Plus, I'm just a fat-ass and I love a buffet—essentially a short storybook is a buffet of stories. I think it's an interesting thing to go into a place where there's a bunch of galaxies going on. I really love that.

JA

You've been very open about your HIV status and it’s something you and I have discussed often, exploring our shared experiences being positive. I’ve found that, in the age of PrEP, when one would expect there to be more openness and understanding about the status of other, in many cases it’s the exact opposite, that not only does a certain level of stigma remain, but being positive continues to be the label which is affixed by others to your identity. How has being positive—and speaking to it—affected you, your work, and how you feel others approach you?

BP

I often say the reason I love Johnny, my first book, was because it really was a great snapshot of that precarious kind of coming-of-age pre-PrEP, where PrEP was like five seconds away, but we were already blossoming into our sexual youth.

Also, the older I get and the more I hook up with every kind of young man, more and more know about what undetectable means, so that if you say, "Oh, I'm positive," they'll be like, "Well, are you taking your meds?" The information is being dispersed. It's still scary, there's still not as much as there should be, but it has changed. For the men who died before us, we are definitely the generation that they were praying for.

But then it's hard because I hear so many kids younger than us always talking about this “generation” of men that died from AIDS, when, in actuality, I knew plenty of men at the time—and still to this day—who did not. There are men a good twenty-to-thirty years older than me who are HIV positive, and they complain about having no younger friends, of not really knowing the new generation.

As much as the younger generation loves to talk about these men, it's like how pro-choice people always talk about the baby—it's easy to advocate for the unborn because they require nothing. Sometimes, I feel like the younger generation loves to talk about the generation of men that died from AIDS because it's easier to advocate for the dead as they require nothing.

I also don't see the work done to integrate the couple hundred of thousands of HIV-positive men that are in their late fifties-to-seventies walking around right now who, as they enter their twilight, are going to need even more of our community support. We're so busy talking about the men that died that I don't think we give much reverence to the men that survived, even listen to them, have them around. It's funny, I get very persnickety because soapboxing about the HIV/AIDS epidemic is what a lot of people like to stand on, and I'm very cautious about it—I talk about it when I have to, when it affects me.

JA

In my case, I think I’m left with a certain overriding sense of, well, resentment and certain envy. You and I were really one of those last generations that lived in a pre-PrEP gay world, and I see the freedom that much younger people have around sex and I’m happy for them, but envious. My twenties were really spent being frightened of sex, really scared by it.

That’s perhaps why I love your writing, what resonates with me—the freedom, the fluidity with which you talk about sex. Whereas a positive diagnosis really challenged my comfort around sex and writing about it. Your writing has duality—you occupy the status of someone who is positive, but without wearing the shame of the diagnosis.

In fact, while I wouldn’t go so far as to say your writing is shameless, there is a certain joyful rebelliousness, a rejection of societal norms, perhaps even a purposeful refusal to accept what I see as the common tropes of the traumatized: a damaged gay man who has been ravaged by abuse, HIV/AIDS, the closet, which continues to persist in widely-popular books—A Little Life, The Great Believers, A New Life, to name a few. And I should note, it’s not that your work doesn’t address traumas, but rather I think despite them or, perhaps because of them, you embrace an optimism, a certain defiant tone that could almost—almost—be framed as romantic.

BP

I just don't see why one would not be optimistic. I like to read the biographies of people who, I think, have had difficult lives and the best artists always have difficult lives—we as human beings coexist with trauma. We really do. And I think we have this notion of trauma as this be-all end-all absolutist thing, but there are people who live through fucking adverse atrocities and still find a way to live authentically. We always, eventually, find a way to laugh again.

So, without negating what's horrible, I do think there is a default of optimism in everything I do. And it comes from all the fucking authors I ever read, the lives of the people I saw growing up in a depressed farming community, who still found a way to go to church and have their clothes starched and sing and pray and be happy. I think coming to a pathos or kind of a resolution with life as we know it, it's both central to art and central to our path as human beings. We always come to the point where we can start over again or we find the silver lining and we keep going, or we keep going despite being sad and destroyed. We do these things every day.

JA

And yet, despite operating with that kind of optimism, you write in 100 Boyfriends, "I've always been in the practice of being unnoticed." It’s a declaration that is at odds with the person I knew, who was always very much at the center of attention during our early days in SF. Where did this sense of invisibility come from?

BP

I think we all have had that experience of being just a face in a crowd. But also, standing out and being under surveillance does not negate being unnoticed at the same time. As much as we like to talk about our utopic youth in the Bay and SF, I do think there were a lot of years in our weird bubble where I was the poorest boy around a bunch of affluent boys, I was the only Black boy around a bunch of white boys. I mean, when I wasn't on stage dancing for these boys that saw me around, who never “wifed”or cuffed me, when I wasn't dancing for them on stage, I was serving them French fries and cola at Sparky's, the restaurant that I worked at.

There was a lot of times where I went actually unnoticed, where my actual emotional needs went very unnoticed. The physical attaining of a person or being in the service to them is quite different than someone really noticing you, really sitting down and getting to know you.

Now, the older you get, you find your voice, you find your family, and you find your place and you learn how to center yourself. And so, I think that's probably what I learned to do. But in the midst of when I was writing about this great thing that happens and the sexual confusion and craziness of it all, being a body where everyone's just running their body count, everyone's getting a high body count, being a high number in somebody else's body count, yeah, there was a lot of times where I, and a lot of men I know, basically went unnoticed.

JA

Speaking of communities and the tension between finding one versus feeling othered, the Bay Area, specifically Oakland and San Francisco, play significant backdrops in your writing. As cities that were once havens of queerness and radicality, today many who I speak to feel a great sense of loss in community, the fairies, burners, and drag queens. Everything has been replaced by beige, normative tech bros.

BP

I remember my 21st birthday party was at The Lexington, the Lesbian bar in the Mission. When I was go-go dancing at first, I go-go danced at lesbian parties because there was no fag party that would've let this kind of weird chubby androgynous boy dance there. That's the thing that I think was very open about the culture of San Francisco and how oddly bizarre we were.

I noticed a change started to happen in the Bay Area, first with the 2008 recession and then tech boom—the first places to go where the lesbian ones. The first bars to close were Lesbian ones like The Lexington, along with so many others. As I remember it, the language that we use, the language of ‘queer’ and ‘sexual openness’ is very largely at the insistence of a lot of radical dykes. But as that language proliferated and everyone started using it, I feel like that Lesbian identity was almost the first to be erased.

I'm going to say something, and people really disagree with me on this, but the queer revolution as it happened, as it was being purported to us, when I moved here, when I moved here twenty years ago, the only people that felt comfortable calling themselves queer were a group of radical sex working dykes that I knew in the Mission. When I first moved to the Bay, almost no gay men I knew even said the word queer. Also, at that time, I mostly hung out with lesbians, the lesbians who adopted me. I was what they call a “dyke tyke.”

JA

You’ve hit on something that persists today, where some gay men try to actively define themselves nominally outside of, or distinctly from, the “queer” community. Why do you think that is?

BP

I do think that once you are in some type of marginalized identity, it's easy to always think of yourself as a loner or completely singular or even an outsider amongst outsiders. But then also I do think in the way we grew up, what was represented to us as “queer,” it was very easy for us to be like, "Oh, that actually doesn't speak to me or that doesn't resonate with me at all.”

Now that we've passed gay marriage, and this, that, and the other, I feel like the current revolution did not necessarily create more space for gay men. I feel like there's exponentially more trans people and there's exponentially more straight men who feel like they have access to queer sex who don’t have to call themselves gay, whereas I still feel like faggotry, in general, is still on the short end of the stick. People on all sides still feel the most comfortable shitting on us gays. I feel like faggotry in general didn't win. I still feel like being a man that has sex with another man is probably a very demonized thing.

And this is another weird thing, but I'll go there—in most herds of animals, women and children stay in one herd, while men stay in the other. I think this is analogous to gay men. Every young fag I know talks about when they get to a certain age—23, 24, 25—they matriculate to The Eagle or The Stud—places where only fags hangout. This revolution that we talk about, it doesn't quite look how I thought it would look, or it definitely surprised me.

We're already moving forward into realms that I fucking wanted no part of myself. And I don't know, I feel like the gayborhoods, all the classic gayborhoods are full of fucking straight people now, or even more Midwesternized gays, honestly. The Castro is unrecognizable to me these days. A, because we can’t afford to live there, and B, it's not overrun by a bunch of, I don't know, 20-year-old deviants on drugs, which is what we were. There are ways we're moving forward, but I can't always picture what we're moving forward into, and I can't tell if it's a door that I want to walk through.

Do I care ultimately? No. But I think the one thing that we can agree on right now in America is that we are all deeply disappointed with what it looks like. Leftists and radicals are deeply disappointed. The conservatives, and thank God for this, are deeply disappointed. I think even the centrists or the moderates, deeply disappointed. In these culture wars, I do think there's this kind of weird notion of what utopia is supposed to look like for all our separate disparate groups, but the one thing we have all in common is that this new utopia is mutually unattainable.

JA

OK. But if utopia is not available, how have you made peace with its unattainability?

BP

At this point in my life, I can definitely say I am happy and healthy, and I feel more loved and cared for than I ever have. At 41, I've lived through years of stress, what I felt was marginality, and social disenfranchisement. And I say that I'm doing, I think, much better than I would've ever imagined now. Things are not perfect, but I wouldn't have ever imagined it being this well. This is probably as close to utopia as it gets.