NY PopsUp, the statewide initiative designed to celebrate and reinvigorate the arts in New York, is proud to present An Evening of 100 Boyfriends, curated by Whiting Award-winning author, Brontez Purnell. The one-time-only event, featuring readings from Purnell’s critically-acclaimed book, 100 Boyfriends, will be held at MoMA PS1 on Friday, July 30 from 5:30 – 8:00pm ET. To sign up for FREE tickets, please visit the MoMA website.
The cast for the FREE readings will include, Jackson Howard, Mx Justin Vivian Bond, Khalif Diouf, Max Steele, Cakes da Killa, Elliot Reed, Savannah Knoop, Wonza Johnson, Saxton Jay Walker, Adam R, ThugPop, Ty Mitchell, and Quinn Roberts.
A novel-in-stories that doubles as a “symphony of sex, trouble and wisdom,” 100 Boyfriends is a smart, shocking, and devastatingly funny spiral into the imperfect lives of queer men desperately fighting – and often losing – the urge to self-sabotage. Purnell’s characters solicit sex on their lunch breaks, expose themselves to racist neighbors, sleep with their coworker’s husbands, rub Preparation H on their hungover eyes, and, in an uproarious epilogue, take a punk band on a disastrous tour of Europe. They also travel to claim inheritances, push past personal trauma, and cultivate community while living on the margins of a white supremacist, heteronormative society.
Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children’s book, and the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Writers’ Award for Fiction, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, a cofounder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School, and the director of several short films, music videos, and the documentary Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock. Born in Triana, Alabama, he’s lived in Oakland, California, for more than a decade.
