Brontez Purnell Books in Order

If you want the clearest entry point: 100 Boyfriends
If you prefer a full novel first: Since I Laid My Burden Down
If you want the rougher early books: The Cruising Diaries → Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger
If you want the most personal recent writing: 100 Boyfriends → Ten Bridges I've Burnt
If you're reading with a child: The Nightlife of Jacuzzi Gaskett

Brontez Purnell grew up in Triana, Alabama, and that small-town Southern background never really leaves his work. As a kid he sang in church, where the loudest voice usually got the solo, and he has said that lesson in projection stayed with him. His mother loved literature and kept Black books around the house, so performance and reading were both part of his world early.

He started making zines as a teenager.

Punk helped him imagine a bigger life. Purnell made his first zine at fourteen, and later created Fag School, a funny, blunt, handmade publication he once described as a kind of Sassy for gay boys. That mix of candor, gossip, politics, sex, and survival still runs through his writing.

At nineteen, in 2001, he moved to Oakland, California. That move opened up room for everything else: dancing with Gravy Train!!!!, starting the Younger Lovers, studying dance, and later launching the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. He has also made films and documentaries, so his career has never stayed politely in one lane for long.

Across all those forms, he keeps coming back to some of the same material: queer Black life, Southern memory, punk scenes, working-class friction, family, and the comedy and danger of desire. Sex is everywhere in his work, but not just for shock. He uses the body to get at loneliness, shame, pleasure, power, and the strange ways people try to be seen.

He writes like someone who would rather be honest than respectable.

His books show that range clearly. The Cruising Diaries turns sexual misadventure into an illustrated, fast-moving memoir. Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger is rawer and more openly semi-autobiographical, following an artist through hookups, day jobs, and self-sabotage in a changing San Francisco. Readers usually come to Purnell for the blunt humor, then stay for how much feeling he can hide inside a filthy joke.

Since I Laid My Burden Down, published in 2017, brought more readers to him. The novel follows DeShawn as he returns to Alabama for a funeral and has to face the men, memories, and family history that shaped him. In 2018, Purnell won a Whiting Award for fiction, and that book helps explain why: it is tough, funny, restless, and unexpectedly tender.

100 Boyfriends widened his audience again. Its linked stories and vignettes move through Oakland, Alabama, sex, breakups, bad habits, and the ghosts people drag from one relationship into the next. The book won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction in 2022, and it is probably the easiest place to meet his full voice, horny, sad, biting, generous, and very funny.

His range is wider than first-time readers sometimes expect. The Nightlife of Jacuzzi Gaskett is a picture book about a boy caring for his baby brother while waiting for his mother to come home from work, and Ten Bridges I've Burnt turns memoir into verse, moving through family, work, race, sex, art, and survival. Purnell is still based in Oakland, and he has said he returns to Alabama regularly to re-center. That feels right for a writer whose work is always in conversation with home, even when he is arguing with it.