Loverboy’s Fallon Gold is just a lil bit smitten with the sublime Brontez Purnell…

Brontez Purnell is everything. That’s not an exaggeration. Loverboy adore him and his uber-super-multi-talented wonderfulness. Back in the day Loverboy spoke to Bronny for The Back Building and since then this wonderful man has had his fingers in more pies than you’d find in a whole town full of Greggs.

You may know Brontez Purnell as part of electropop group Gravy Train!!! or heading up queercore punk riot band The Younger Lovers. You may know him as a zinester penning Fag School or from his new novella Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger, which he recently discussed with none other than godmother of riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna. Perhaps it’s the shapes he’s thrown as founder and member of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. You could have seen him (oh I bet you have) in Travis Mathews’ I Want Your Love. Now you’re going to get more Bronny because he’s just made a short entitled 100 Boyfriends Mixtape for NakedSword Film Works, the same studio behind Mathews’ movie. We managed to pin down this fabulous whirlwind for a few minutes to catch up and find out all about this wondrous film and just what else goes on in the beautiful Purnell brain.

You’re a queer renaissance man, Brontez Purnell. Zinester, writer, dancer, musician, actor, filmmaker. We love it! There’s a lot of countercultural approaches in your work, a great deal of DIY. How important is the DIY process and punk aesthetic to your projects?
I feel like DIY is my life blood! I started making zines when I was 14 and started playing in punk bands when I was like the same age. I guess it was never really a “phase” for me. It really informed so much of how I see the world. I’m grateful for sure.  I’ll start by saying that in terms to my approach to art DIY has kinda been my only choice. I mean as much as I would LOVE some corporate entity to come in and give me hella scrill it’s just not what’s happening lol. It’s certainly been a pain in the ass pushing like 95% of all the art I’ve ever made with my bare hands but the one thing that you have – that’s as important as it is perishable – is freedom. I think I’m like a lot of people when I say I made things because so much shit just was never speaking to me.  But I mean seriously, identity-wise, my life in art (and even perhaps in general) is so goddamn marginal that if I don’t make what I want to see, my existence and my say gets erased – and mama ain’t having that bullshit. I’m also discovering the awesomeness of the DIT movement (DIT=DO IT TOGETHER <3)

You’ve worked in electropop and queercore punk. Do you consider both genres to have radical potential? Do you think pure pop can be radical and subversive?
I think anything can have radical potential it’s just really about whom it’s in the hands of y’know? Like I remember when Lady Gaga first started pulling looks and I would be in the club with all these fags in their early 20s and it felt like this Club Kid renaissance – but you would talk to them and their personal politics would be some of the worst racist sexist body shaming bullshit. But it left its mark on me and I’m not gonna herald anyone as the avant-garde just because they are dressed like a space hooker. Same with garage rock. I mean I play punk/garage music cause its pure and fun and also cause of my family ties to rock n roll. But sometimes I will look at the bill for rock festivals and that shit looks like a Klan rally – it’s like all these happy white boys from Southern California and I’m always like, wait, these are my “contemporaries”?! I CALL BULLSHIT! I’ll say it like this. I mean these genres CAN be radical but there’s a reason why the radicalism is based in the marginal – you will have the people who are pioneering new vehicles always on the margins while some insufferable bullshit gets to fly, get better promotion and also – and this is the super fucked part – makes more money. I think pop stars can DO radical things but in terms of pop music having radical potential, I dunno. It’s so soaked in consumerism that I think its soul is always gonna be a little dirty.

Despite Travis Mathews’ work (which you’ve been a part of), seeing explicit sex between men (or any genders, come to that) on the screen in a film that isn’t purely porn is still disarming and a proper statement. You’re blurring the line between porn and ‘legitimate’ art, smashing through those imposed hierarchies and more. Can you tell us about your choices and what it was like getting actors to play those roles? Are they pretty much from the porn performer world?
Well in 100 Boyfriends Mixtape two of the actors are porn stars. There’s the light skinned dude who’s dick I suck, Element Eclipse (who was also the co-director), and then one more but I forget what his porn name is.  Everyone else not at all. To be honest I myself am disarmed by the sex in it and I wrote it! But at the end of the day I just couldn’t deal with making something “light”- I’m such a fucked up burnout – it takes SO MUCH for me to be stimulated/captivated – so hence why my art gets those kinda stamps.

100 Boyfriends Mixtape is about different relationships – romantic relationship without sex, a romantic relationship that’s based on sex and non-romantic encounters that are purely sexual. Are you making a statement about relationships or opening a discussion about what relationships are/can be? Or both?
Well 100 Boyfriends Mixtape is the story of 100 failed relationships condensed down into the story of one relationship. So yeah I definitely wanted to start a discussion on just how people relate to each other and why and how the decay of one thing can be the life of another. I mean we have been sold this narrow view of what love is supposed to look like. I mean I think it hit my parents’ generation in a worse way when you think of the divorce rates of that generation. I think the narrative in 100 Boyfriends Mixtape flatlines at the fact that nothing is supposed to look any kind of way and life and love is in the hand of the beholder.

What’s your favourite Mariah Carey song?
SHAKE IT OFF HANDS DOWN! NO! DREAMLOVER! WAIT NO! HONEY! WAIT NO! FANTASY! DO I REALLY HAVE TO CHOOSE?!?!?!?!??!

No you really do not. So, what’s next for you to tackle and conquer?
My new novella Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger just came out and I just finished a manuscript for my new new novella Since I Laid My Burden Down that’s coming out on Feminist Press. Brontez Purnell Dance Company and The Younger Lovers are touring and I just got a couple of grants to start work on a documentary entitled Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock chronicling the life of late San Francisco black gay experimental choreographer Ed Mock up until the time of his death of AIDS in 1986.

With The Younger Lovers you have a song called The Boy From Leeds which tells of a hookup. You have said that you lost touch with him. Did you ever find the boy from Leeds?
NO I HAVENT! CAN I PLACE THE MISSED CONNECTION HERE?!?!?! So it was 2005 and 2006 – whoever you are – we hooked up in a bathroom in Leeds, the next year we had sex. I forgot your name but haven’t stopped thinking about you ever since. PLEASE FIND ME. <3

You can watch 100 Boyfriends Mixtape at NakedSword Film Works