BUDS DIGEST 004 / FEATURE
BRONTEZ PURNELL & SES CENT MECS
Interviewed by ALEXANDRE GAULMIN
Photographed by SAMUEL MCGUIRE
Brontez Purnell photographed by Samuel McGuire at home in Oakland, CA. January 2022.
Author and multidisciplinary artist BRONTEZ PURNELL chats intimately with literary translator ALEXANDRE GAULMIN, showing off his remarkably captivating energy in this smoky, sentimental, and swirling conversation for Buds Digest.
Purnell’s unrestrained creative presence can be felt in his many endeavors across multiple mediums, most recently in his raucously cool book 100 Boyfriends, a novelette of candidly put retellings surrounding love and sex in both first and third person, a signature combination and blurring of reality that let’s the reader experience Purnell’s stories as their own.
In addition to Purnell’s long standing musicianship, the flamboyant wordsmith and zine maker has previously spent much of his life in the cannabis industry; cultivating, consulting and dispensing. These days, you can catch Purnell in Oakland at his local dispensary, ECO Cannabis, where he likes to pop in to check on his favorite budtenders and get a pre-roll for the road.
ALEXANDRE GAULMIN: Maybe we can start with how we met because it's a funny story.
BRONTEZ PURNELL: We can’t talk about our marriage, okay?
AG: Not yet. We didn't decide on a place. It's a bit of a secret for now. It's funny we met in a digital age. I knew you were existing through Jeff and Gabe from Oakland… Can you hear me Brontez?
BP: I can hear you, Papa.
AG: I knew you were existing through your art with your band, Younger Lovers. And Jeff, our mutual friend, always talked to me about this guy, this living punk legend from Oakland. I knew you were doing a lot of performance, dance, writing, video and stuff. I think it was around Christmas I started drawing a little cartoon called Lil’ Fag – just a simple image, but in the first one I got this little guy reading Fag School, your first zine, right?
BP: Mm-hmm!
AG: I tagged you in a picture and you sent me a message saying that you liked it and that you liked French and that we should do a song together. After that, as I was speaking French and English, the best I can, you asked me to work on your book Johnny Would You Love Me if My Dick Were Bigger. I started translating and we start talking almost every week, not only about work, but about who we are, our lives, our very different lives.
BP: That's very much how it started. I was very, very, very stoked…
AG: You were very what?
BP: Very stoked…
AG: Stoked...Yes, yes. I was almost at the end of the work on this book, translating the last chapters and we decided to meet in person in California. So, I took a plane to meet you and that is how the second phase of our friendship began.
BP: It was exciting! It was nice to finally put your flesh to form. To be quite honest, you were totally part of this weird fucking fetish I have – maybe it's like this mid-century thing where I thought, you know, because I'm like a “craazy black artist in America”, I would always have this brooding, French boyfriend. James Baldwin and Eartha Kitt talk about this a lot. How much it actually translates to reality these days, I don't really know. But you were part of a metaphor that grew exquisitely for me.
“How much it actually translates to reality these days, I don’t really know. But you were part of a metaphor that grew exquisitely for me.”
AG: What was this fetish about? You never talk to me about this!
BP: It's like my heroes, Baldwin, Kitt… All of them would just be like, “Yeah, I'm in France right now. Fuck America. I'm in France, fucking a brooding artist French boy.” So, for a long time, I thought that would be my life. But then someone explained to me, no, Brontez, that was France in the sixties. I'm sure you can't just show up there now and, you know, live like Eartha Kitt. That was a really hard fact.
AG: You know, you can, because Baldwin, when he was in France, was in the south of France where I grew up. So next time you come to France, we can visit my parents and live like we are in the seventies… or nineties.
BP: Oh my god, really? Like, you'll cook me squid in olive oil and we'll just walk around a beach naked?
AG: Of course! We do those kinds of things.
BP: Will you fetishize me for my free spirit and then get mad when I don't temper it for you?
AG: Well, you can’t speak to other white boys in the area.
BP: Oh, yeah. You hate when I speak with other white boys, that's cute.
AG: It's a routine. It's a routine we do in front of our friends.
BP: No, you guys, I want everybody reading this to know that Alex is my controlling white boyfriend. He won't let me talk to other caucasian men. If you see me in public and I blink twice, it means help.
AG: Don't do that to me, Brontez!
BP: Okay, what I mean to say is he's the only white boy that's ever really loved me, okay? Fucking blink blink…
AG: You’re silly. Let’s discuss some topics from the brief.
BP: No, wait. When are you gonna buy us a flat in Paris?
AG: Uh, maybe when I am rich after translating your work. So work harder!
BP: Okay, cool, awesome. We wear matching outfits.
AG: Well of course I will dress in black, you’ll dress in white and we will be like the new John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
BP: My god. That's so lit. Which one am I?
AG: Who do you wanna be?
BP: Yoko! Are you kidding me?
AG: Yeah, Yoko. Just in the corner screaming while I play music.
BP: That sounds lit. I've actually never really thought about how much my life is kind of like Yoko Ono’s.
AG: Are there some similarities in your lives?
BP: I mean… performance art, interracial sex… That's about it. Maybe it's not a lot like, but just enough – enough of the signifiers are there.
AG: It's funny because I was working this morning on the book and there is this chapter about the pot reviews you did when you were working in the industry.
BP: Oh yeah, at the end of Johnny…, the protagonist ends up working at a pot store and that was his pivot from being in restaurant work which was the light at the end of the tunnel. I forgot about that part. Very serendipitous.
AG: Were you working in a shop or in a place like cutting pot?
BP: So here's the long and the short of it: I had been working in pot gardens ever since I moved to the bay area. And I used to help people with their private pot gardens, helping them plant, helping them manicure. This lady who I worked for, she worked at the pot store that was owned originally by Dennis Peron. I want y'all to make note of this name because it's important in San Francisco pot history. Dennis Peron was basically the guy who started pot stores in the nineties, in San Francisco, before it was even legal. He just knew too many people that were dying of AIDS. He knew too many sick people. So he basically started this illegal pot store in the Castro where anyone with an illness could just walk in and buy fucking pot. We are talking like some radical San Francisco shit. I ended up working in a pot store that was originally owned by him. It was also the home of the San Francisco Act Up chapter.
AG: Were you writing pot reviews then?
BP: At that store, vendors would come in all the time and bring so many different strains of pot. And if you worked there, you were allowed to try every strain of pot, but you had to write a review. You had to write the name of it, whether it was a sativa, indica or hybrid and then literally sit there and write a review. I remember being stoned as fuck, trying to write about smoking pot and feeling like every thing I wrote was “a smoky flavor.” I think they were trying to keep us honest and not just grab pot to be grabbing pot, but there's no real way to write a dramatic, three paragraph narrative about smoking pot.
AG: Are you smoking a lot creating your art?
BP: I go through weird phases with it. To be quite honest, I've been a stoner for 20 years and when I smoke pot now, I don't get high. I don't know what's happening. My brain gets hot and I start forgetting why I came into rooms.
AG: I don't think you smoked when I was with you in Oakland or in Los Angeles. It was a funny time. That's where people started thinking I was married to you. In the gay community, friendship is not just estimated anymore. It's like, we could be just friends having fun and sleeping in the same bed.
BP: Well, yeah, I personally have this belief that all gay male relationships do kind of follow that weird Roman pattern of like… I do believe that in order for two men to be very deep friends, there has to be some form of eros between them. But… who's slaying your box? That is a horse of a different color. I've never understood why the people I wanna be around all the time, I don't necessarily wanna fuck. And why the people who I wanna fuck the most, I can't stand to be in a room with them for 10 minutes talking. It's always been very separated. I'm sure that's some other gay trauma we'll talk about in a non marijuana magazine.
I've had other books translated, but this is the first time I've ever had a relationship with the person who was translating or interpreting my work. So I felt like that part was really, really special. I feel very deeply intimate with you. Johnny, Would You Love Me if My Dick Was Bigger is like – it's my favorite book that I've ever written. It was written at the tail end of my twenties. I think it's honest and the first time my voice became 3D.
AG: You're dancing, you're performing, you are writing, you are singing, you are playing music – how did you start making your life into so much art?
BP: It’s autofiction. I feel like it happened upon me. I feel like I was just walking into life. You know that young chicken in the gang bang videos? They put the camera on him and he is just like “Hehe, I'm nervous.” And then they pan over to the five guys about to rail him. That's how I feel about my art career – that's how that happened. But if you're asking me how I started writing… writing had always been there. My mom was really into poetry and so I just picked that up as a kid. I remember my mom had been writing a book. My aunt always wrote. I saw some poetry of hers somewhere. And then there was this woman in the neighborhood that went to my church. She was on the Geraldo show and she wrote some book about her life that I wish I could get ahold of, but I've never seen.
I knew [writing] was open to me. When I was a teenager, I started writing zines and then I started writing Fag School and Fag School had the cruising reviews in it and all this other stuff.
AG: The first thing I read of yours I found at a queer fair in Paris. Jeff Cheung was selling Fag School. Jeff and I became friends before we became friends. Then I bought your book, Johnny…, online and I was traveling in the south of France to visit my parents. I was in the train reading it and it felt very true. I felt I really needed to read this kind of stuff. It was close to me. And maybe for the first time a book was really talking about me. I don’t think we have the same sex life and experiences of course, but I dunno, I feel close to that free tone, that free speech. And I felt really close to you, like instantly.
BP: Johnny… was actually the fourth issue of Fag School. I think I showed it to you. And then I started working with Michelle Tea and Sister Spit and got this artist's residency in Mexico.
AG: Translating this book helped me to have something to do every day. At the end of the first phase of COVID, it was a really good occasion to travel the world with a purpose and the purpose was Johnny…. So, I owe you a lot. I owe this book a lot because I found it in a particularly difficult time for me. It made me laugh, made me feel more free. And after all that, I traveled the world to meet you and finish the book. And I'm still traveling the world until the end of the year to finish this book. It's so meaningful for me, our friendship, this book, working with you on the other side of the world. And it's maybe one of the most beautiful things that happened to me this year, so thank you for that, my dear Brontez. I love you so much for that.
BP: Are you trying to make me cry?
AG: No, but it's true. It's about meeting you. It’s about being true. Sometimes I'm a big mouth. And it was easy to meet a guy like you who is very out loud, who speaks the truth every time. And I feel kinda in my place right next to you. You feel like home, actually.
BP: My god, you already own my heart! You don't have to romance me every day. Just kidding. Yes, you do. I'm about to rip my heart out right now. I'm booking my flight to Paris right now. I can't stand for us not to be together another day.
AG: We're gonna hang all over the world doing shit together.
BP: Yeah, we can. I'll deliver.
