100 BOYFRIENDS

Purnell, a performance artist, musician, filmmaker, and writer, dives deep into the pathologies and delights of sex among gay men in this dizzying novel.

In these pages, the unnamed, formerly homeless protagonist, a “jaded judgmental borderline misanthrope” who’s also really funny, describes so much sex with a “nameless void of men” that it’s a wonder he doesn’t rub his fingers raw from undoing his pants so often. There’s sex on the protagonist’s European concert tour, bad sex with a Satanist in America (“if this was Satan’s best sex warrior it stood to reason why Satanism in general was such a PR nightmare”), and an obsession with a straight co-worker that compels the protagonist to masturbate in the office while watching him. Structured in short vignettes, the book is mostly told in a confessional first person, which make the stories feel autofictional. There are so many short episodes of sex that the book reads more like a diary—a vibrant, saucy, dishy, punk diary. One example: The protagonist, feeling lonely, hires a sex worker to act like a boyfriend, so the guy, just doing what he’s paid for, keeps whispering “I love you, boyfriend” in the protagonist’s ear. “He was beginning to feel like a boyfriend in that he was already annoying the fuck out of me,” Purnell writes in a typically knowing, self-lacerating insight. There are moments when Purnell steps back from offending delicate sensibilities to documenting real sadness and drawing wisdom in the process. The protagonist encounters a former boyfriend, “once a big beautiful star” who “has collapsed in on its own weight and turned into a black hole.” This man takes the protagonist to his parents’ home for Thanksgiving to an emotional void; his parents serve TV dinners for the holiday meal. “But this was one of the many holes he had in himself that he always made visible to me,” Purnell writes. The only nagging question this book engenders is why it’s packaged as fiction at all; it reads more like a memoir/manifesto that gay sex is still a rebellious act.

This book is feisty; whether it thrills or exhausts you reveals your own tolerance for outré reading.