Description
Whiting Award winner Brontez Purnell's debut novel is an uninhibited portrait of growing up gay in 1980s Alabama: exploring art and sex with "more layered insight than the page count should allow" (Hanif Abdurraqib, MTV News).
DeShawn lives a high, creative, and promiscuous life in San Francisco. But when he's called back to his cramped Alabama hometown for his uncle's funeral, he's hit by flashbacks of handsome, doomed neighbors and sweltering Sunday services. Amidst prickly reminders of his childhood, DeShawn ponders family, church, and the men in his life, prompting the question: Who deserves love?
A modern American classic, Since I Laid My Burden Down is a raw and searing look into the intersections of memory, Blackness, and queerness.
An antidote to the rigamarole of gay lit. --Mask Magazine
Slim yet potently realized, with a lot to ponder. --The Bay Area Reporter
"Since I Laid My Burden Down has a fearless (sometimes reckless) humor as Brontez Purnell interrogates what it means to be black, male, queer; a son, an uncle, a lover; Southern, punk, and human. An emotional tightrope walk of a book and an important American story rarely, if ever, told." --Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave
Author: Brontez Purnell
Publisher: Amethyst Editions
Published: 06/13/2017
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 8.00h x 4.80w x 0.50d
ISBN13: 9781558614314
ISBN10: 1558614311
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | African American & Black | General
- Fiction | LGBTQ+ | Gay
- Fiction | Family Life | General
About the Author
Brontez Purnell has been publishing, performing, and curating in the Bay Area for over ten years. He is author of the cult zine Fag School, frontman for his band The Younger Lovers, and founder and choreographer of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. Formerly a dancer with Gravy Train!!!, a queer electro indie band that gained national prominence in the mid-2000s, Purnell's other prominent artistic collaborations include his supporting role in the queer independent feature film, I Want Your Love (Dir. Travis Mathews, 2012).