Culture Vulture: Brontez Purnell and Jeremy O. Harris
Fierce queer black polyglot Brontez Purnell shows up all over the place these days. Guest-blogging about hooking up with Zachary Zane, author of the horndoggy Substack BOYSLUT. Yakking about hooking up with closeted (DL) guys on the Sniffies video-podcast. Being called upon by my favorite queer-owned dispensary, Housing Works Cannabis Co., to take part in their Weed and Read program, which offers a package deal: a copy of his latest book, Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, along with three products of the author’s choice – an edible, a pre-roll, and some flower. I couldn’t resist this novel multilevel marketing scheme.
The new book, “a memoir in verse,” matches his previous one, 100 Boyfriends, in its unfiltered, outraged, often hilarious narrative voice, whether talking about writing for TV (“Diversity Hire”), gaining and losing weight (“In a Participatory Capitalism”), or people’s reluctance to talk on the phone these days (“Mood: Bored”). From the last: “I/having no millennial fear/pick up/quite feverishly/no matter who is calling/like my life/codepended on it.” Not to mention his favorite or at least most frequent subject. As he wrote on BOYSLUT, “I am often intrigued by sex writing in general. I think it takes a certain kind of optimistic mindset to write about sex, which, honestly, I lack. I usually write about ‘anti-erotics,’ the things about sex that aren’t sexy. I think I gave out too much free pussy in my 20s and 30s and have earned the right to be a grump about it. Still, even though I’m a fat old grumpy gay man, I still hold solidarity with all things godlessly whorish.”
The contents of Ten Bridges could just as easily be dramatic monologues or autobiographical prose, but calling them poems connects Brontez Purnell to a lineage that includes Nikki Giovanni, Frank O’Hara, Ntozake Shange, and Essex Hemphill. These writers yank Poetry out of the arcane corners of academia and speak with an immediacy and urgency that anyone can understand and enjoy.
You know who else is a fierce queer black polyglot who shows up everywhere? Jeremy O. Harris. From the minute his edgy Slave Play opened Off Broadway at New York Theater Workshop, even before it moved to Broadway, Harris catapulted to influencer status through not only his playwriting but his screenwriting (Zola), his acting onstage (Black Exhibition) and on TV (Emily in Paris) and indie films (The Sweet East), his compulsively delicious fashion-obsessed Instagram “Mixtapes,” and his philanthropy (a retreat for young writers in Italy, a campaign to bring Lorraine Hansberry’s last play to Broadway).
On Max, you can currently see his fun and genre-smashing documentary Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play and hear him being incredibly smart, confident, and curious being interviewed by Tonya Mosley on NPR’s “Fresh Air.”