Brontez Purnell Knihy

""Brontez is a raw tongue of flame blazing through all the blatant fakery and insincere bullshit of today's gay/music/human scene. This audacious non-memoir burnt the hair off the back of my neck and had me rolling with glee."--SF Guardian on Johnny Would You Love Me The adult DeShawn lives a high, artistic, and promiscuous life in San Francisco. But when he's called back to his cramped southern hometown for his uncle's funeral, it's inevitable that he'll be 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? Since I Laid My Burden Down is a raw, funny, and uninhibited novella that traces a queer black man's sexual and artistic awakenings as he stumbles-often painfully, sometimes joyously-down memory lane. Brontez Purnell 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. He was a guest curator for the Berkeley Art Museum's L@TE program, honored by Out Magazine's Hot 100 List and Most Eligible Bachelors List, and most recently won the 2014 SF Bay Guardian's Goldie for Performance/Music. His previous books include graphic novel The Cruising Diaries, and a novella Johnny Would You Love Me (if My Dick Were Bigger)"--

A collection of short, hilarious, profound, and filthy vignettes, Johnny Would You Love Me is a radical thrill ride through the nuances of queer sex and queer love that shows truly what it means to live on the fringes of a conservative society as a black, working-class gay man.

Transgressive, foulmouthed, and wildly funny 100 Boyfriends is a filthy, unforgettable, and brutally profound ode to messy queer love. Cult hero Brontez Purnell draws us into a community of glorious misfits while giving us an uncompromising vision of desire, desperation, race, loneliness, and queerness.

The Cruising Diaries is 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.

At night, Jacuzzi cares for his baby brother, makes a blender cyclone, ponders life, and waits for mama's arrival home.

A remarkable time capsule of Simi Valley, 1979, written before the author would become one of LA’s most influential artists of subsequent decades. When Sean DeLear died prematurely in Vienna in 2017, his friends discovered—among other treasures—an extensive diary kept at the age of fourteen. Still living with his Christian parents in the notoriously racist Los Angeles suburb of Simi Valley, Sean wrote almost every day about crushes and hustling, waterbeds, blackmail, Donna Summer, gloryholes, racism, and shoplifting gay porn. DeLear would go on to become the frontman for the Los Angeles punk/powerpop band Glue. He was a punk musician, visual artist, intercontinental scenester, video vixen, party host, marijuana farmer, and sometime-collaborator of artists such as Kembra Pfahler and Vaginal Davis. DeLear’s forgotten diaries capture a moment in Los Angeles underground and queer history when, as his friend the writer Cesar Padilla notes, “It wasn’t cool at all to be trans, gay, queer or whatever. Those words weren’t even in the vocabulary.” I Could Not Believe It, Padilla continues, “is a raw fearless innocent gay Black kid’s journey coming out into life at an incredible pre-AIDS period. It’s not cognizant of being literature. It’s as naïve and forthcoming as it gets. It wasn’t written with the desire to be published so Sean didn’t hold back. Sean’s goal was to be true to himself.”

From the beloved author of 100 Boyfriends, a wrenching, sexy, and exhilaratingly energetic memoir in verse.