David Remnick: While it's accurate to call Brontez Purnell a novelist, his books, and there are many of them, are just one slice of what he does as an artist. Purnell has made films and he's written for TV shows like Queer as Folk. He plays in bands, and his first solo album, in an electronic vein, was called No Jack Swing.

[MUSIC - Brontez Purnell: Girl From Ghost Town]

David Remnick: All of that work reflects the underground spirit of the Oakland, California punk scene in the early 2000s, where Brontez Purnell came of age. Purnell's new book is a memoir with the unbeatable title, Ten Bridges I've Burnt. [chuckles] He spoke with Jeffrey Masters, who's a senior producer on The Radio Hour.

Jeffrey Masters: When I pick up a Brontez Purnell book, I always know that there are going to be scenes, specifically sex scenes, that make me gasp and blush, that make me cringe, and always laugh. That is definitely true with this new book. It's a memoir in verse, but it skips over these traditional memoir beats. This capital L, Life events that we often see, they're not a dart, and they're presented when necessary, but it's these smaller moments of his life that stand out.

It's these smaller moments, or seemingly smaller moments, we should say, like getting into a fight at a poetry conference, or as he describes it, the humiliation of jogging. It's those things that Brontez gives the most weight to, and just one of the many reasons why I wanted to talk to him about this new book.

Brontez Purnell: Okay.

Jeffrey Masters: Should we jump in and do it?

Brontez Purnell: Let's do it.

Jeffrey Masters: [laughs] One of the things that I find so compelling about your work, both in this book and your last book that was called 100 Boyfriends, and one of the things I'm so interested by is how much you honor a deep platonic love. It's almost like a platonic romance in many ways among your friends. I wonder to start, if we can have you read a section in the book that deals with that. I was thinking page 49.

Brontez Purnell: He is my father and my newborn. I take the greatest of care with him. When I rub the sleep from his eyes, rub his shoulders, pull the boogers from his nostrils, wipe the shimmer from his starry eyelids. Before we go back to the party, it is not hard to see what they see when we are together, the way our eyes soften in each other's direction, hence at the silent song we sing to each other, the vowels so clear they are invisible, sometimes even to us.

Jeffrey Masters: Thank you. I love that because we as a society, we uplift romantic love only. That's the thing to aspire to the most, but here you are writing a love poem to a friend.

Brontez Purnell: Oh, yes. I know. [chuckles]

Jeffrey Masters: Not just a friend, we should say. The poem's name is called For Jackson Howard, and that is your editor of your book.

Brontez Purnell: Yes [chuckles]. Me and Jackson, it is giving manic pixie 40-year-old and manic pixie twink energy. [laughs] Literally, I remember it was like he hit me up about a book deal. Then a week later, he was like, "Hey, come to New York. Come sleep on my couch." We talk every day.

Jeffrey Masters: Is he the reason why you're now with your publisher, FSG?

Brontez Purnell: Yes, totally.

Jeffrey Masters: I ask that because when I first discovered your work years ago, you were this more underground writer. You had a cult following, but it wasn't independently published, which are much smaller houses. Now that you're with a major publishing company, do you think that's changed your writing at all?

Brontez Purnell: I think a little bit but also too, it's like the trajectory of my writing was already happening because I don't know. I meet so many people, they asked me these questions about writing, and I feel like they want their first manuscript to win a Pulitzer off the bat. They want to hit a home run their first strike. I tell them, I was like, "I've been writing for free for like 20 years." What I think that was great about being on underground publishers is that I really got to do what I want. I had the luxury to improv and experiment. To be honest like that is gold. It's just a great way to develop your style.

Quite honestly, my first book, Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger, around the time that was written, I think that was finished. I started writing that in 2009, and then it wasn't finished until 2012. There was no publisher in the world that would have put that book out. There was no major publisher in the world. My love was writing, and so I kept writing and I kept refining and then, I don't know.

I think that's why 100 Boyfriends, as wistful as it seems to some people, 100 Boyfriends was the work of a lot of dedication, a lot of time, and a lot of devotion to style and an aesthetic that had been built up five zines and three books before it ever saw light on the earth. I think the longer a writer gets to spiral in their own chaos, I think I akin it to building the roux, making the roux, making the roux deep and rich. That's what you spring out of.

Jeffrey Masters: Tell me this, for the new book, it's a memoir in verse. This is not a traditional type of book that we often associate with memoirs. What does memoir mean here for you?

Brontez Purnell: Oh, memoir, for me, is complete fiction. [laughs] To be honest, let me be very honest with you. I'm always playing with the idea and the trope that in order for women, gay men, men of color, or people of color in general, in order for our work to be accepted as truth, there has to be the word memoir on it. I've gone over this debate lots of times about how in our society, the only people smart enough to write fiction is white men. The second you write memoir, it's like, "Wow, this gritty tale of this abandoned homosexual spilling his entire guts to the world. Wow, let's use his life against him."

When in actuality, even when I write memoir, in order not to get sued, you have to change everything. Memoir is fiction. I don't care what anyone says. You and I both could write down our lives as true as we know it, but the second our mom reads it or one of our siblings reads it or anybody else peripherally in the book, they can easily say, "What are you talking about?" That never happened like that. It renders everything we say like kind of fiction. When I say memoir and verse, I am trickily dealing with the very sticky notion of memoir.

Jeffrey Masters: Right. Are you saying that full stories are fabricated or certain details are embellished or both?

Brontez Purnell: Well, both and neither, but also too, if you write about your life, you have to protect the wicked too, namely, yourself. There is this game of pulling and punching. Even in my regular auto-fiction life, the other books that they call auto-fiction, there are things that are totally a pack of lies mixed with things that are absolutely true. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter because I think that is very foolish to believe that a fictional story has nothing to teach you about the human experience or that memoir has exponentially more to teach you about the human experience than fiction.

Jeffrey Masters: I think that one example of this not being a traditional memoir as we've been talking about is that only in passing do you mention HIV. You're listing something and you say, "The boy who gave me HIV." Then it's never mentioned again. That stands out because there have been entire memoirs devoted to the subject.

Brontez Purnell: I am from that weird generation where prep happened like five minutes after I serial converted, literally. If I had been one generation younger, it wouldn't have been anything. Also, I think that that subject has been written about very well and very extensively. I don't know, I think I wrote about it in Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger. I don't know if you can say that.

Jeffrey Masters: Yes, I can say that.

Brontez Purnell: My first book about the malaise of our generation. I had older men talk about how they felt sorry for us because we knew what AIDS was before we knew what sex was. That was a way different thing than just knowing what sex was. Then came AIDS. Sometimes when we talk about the disease, when we as gay men talk about disease, the conversation always goes to the generation of gay men we lost, which is horrific or whatever. We never talk about who it is affecting now, which something about that I feel is disingenuous. We should be having a smarter conversation about how it shifted and how we could help those people.

It becomes how those pro-life people love talking about the unborn, because essentially the unborn is a group of people that's easy to advocate for, because they require nothing of us. Giving lip service to the scores of men that died of HIV is easy because the dead require nothing of us. What are you doing for the men that actually survived and lived? What are you doing for them? The answer is usually nothing.

Jeffrey Masters: Well, to me, sex is one of the things that I think you are known for in your writing. In your last book, 100 Boyfriends, what have you learned about how to make sex work on the page?

Brontez Purnell: I say that I write anti-erotica because I don't know.

Jeffrey Masters: What does that mean?

Brontez Purnell: I remember when I was 18 and 20, reading these different sex journals by these gay men, and I get why they wrote that way. They were just like, "My body was like a porcelain statue as I received his duh duh duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh." The sex writing that I saw was very aggrandizing of sex, very aggrandizing of nothing was flawed or out of place, but it is because men were writing like that because of the AIDS epidemic. Whereas I write about sex in a way that's supposed to return our humanity to us, where sex is gross.

Sex is wrong sometimes, sex is extremely funny sometimes, and sometimes it's nice or sweet or, and plus I like worked at the bathhouse in my 20s. I had this experience that I think a lot of men didn't have. I think every gay man should be required to work at a bathhouse. If you just go sit in a bathhouse when you're young, when your synapses are still open, and you're still willing to try some stuff, it will completely change your sexual life forever. It will not make you fear aging. You know what I'm saying? You'll be ready to have a lot more fun, I think.

Jeffrey Masters: Wait though. You talk about in the book, but from the opposite angle. You're writing about your 20s and your 30s. You say you were trying to be sexy to appear sexy to others, but now you have found "the courage to be ugly, old, and defiantly unwantable." Connect that for me, because you're talking about not fearing aging and stuff, but also now you write about being unwantable as you say.

Brontez Purnell: What I mean to say is I spent I think a good 20 years doing that. I think wisdom comes from having too much, just so you know what just enough is. I feel in a way I have answered almost all the questions I personally have had around the subject of sex. It doesn't quite hold the same fascination for me like it used to.

Jeffrey Masters: There's more sex in this book than romantic relationships, romance. Looking back on your life, is it the sex that stands out the most to you?

Brontez Purnell: I don't think. It's hard to say. There were men that I had sex with for upwards to 10, 15 years that I met at the bathhouse, where I never even knew their last name. They were pretty instrumental to my formative sexual years. What constitutes an intimate relationship is-- I have a hard time figuring, piecing that out, what that means in all of our different worlds.

At some point, after you've been doing this dance with someone for four or five years, I do feel like that's a relationship. I do feel like it's intimate, and I do feel like it's important more so than anybody I ever pretended to play boyfriend with.

Jeffrey Masters: You mentioned that you're also a musician. You've been a part of many bands. You also released your first solo album last year.

[MUSIC - Brontez Purnell: Girl From Ghost Town]

Jeffrey Masters: What does making music do for you or allow you to express that your writing does not?

Brontez Purnell: There's just something about singing a melody in your head. I grew up singing in the church choir. Music is the thing that I've always given the most to that has returned the least to me. I was a go-go boy in this band, and sometimes I think it's really funny because I feel like that was the most support or whatever, or that was the most money I ever made.

When I'm dancing in my underwear on stage for people, there's plenty of money and support for that. Let me pick up a guitar and have my own ideas. That's when the world is just like, "Oh, well, we'll give you $150 to record." I recorded my first record with my first solo band for $150. I remember that. I don't know, music is definitely a calling, and it's a great timestamp. The songs I write, I feel like every year I get better and better at doing it. Plus, I don't know, being able to work in that realm, I think helps me in writing, too.

Jeffrey Master: Helps you how?

Brontez Purnell: I feel like in regular writing, it's just the written word is so-- it is so staunch. It's like you have to be so stark. You have to be so on time. I don't know, I feel like when you sing a melody, you can play with things, and you can be a cheesy poet if there's a melody behind it because it's a whole different thing. I would never in my everyday poet life be like, "I need flowers in the springtime," but once you're behind an acoustic guitar, you can be like, "I need flowers in the springtime." You're like, oh, I can get away with saying that because there's a guitar here now. It's a weird magic. I can't explain it.

Jeffrey Master: Brontez, thank you so much for talking. This is wonderful.

Brontez Purnell: Anytime. I had a great time.

[MUSIC - Brontez Purnell: Blues of Every Night]

David Remnick: That's Jeffrey Masters of The New Yorker Radio Hour, speaking with Brontez Purnell. His new memoir is called Ten Bridges I've Burnt.

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