Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger

 
 

By Brontez Purnell

Published 22/09/2022

9781739784911 / Paperback / £9.99

A raw, dirty, hilarious, and often poignant cult classic, Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger paved the way for a new kind of queer writing that changed how we talk about sex, relationships, drugs, identity, race, HIV, and what it means to be gay in the 21st Century. 

Recounting the life of an artist and 'old school homosexual' who bears more than a small resemblance to author Brontez Purnell, Johnny Would You Love Me takes us cruising in late night parks and bath houses, searching for sex and intimacy in a newly gentrified city where even the gays are getting fancy. A collection of short, hilarious, profound, and filthy vignettes, Johnny Would You Love Me is a radical thrill ride through the nuances of queer sex and queer love that shows truly what it means to live on the fringes of a conservative society as a black, working-class gay man.


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 32 Black Male Writers of Our Time by The New York Times Magazine. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, a co-founder 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. He lives in Oakland, California.



"Brontez is unabashed, and, unlike most of us, can admit that he just wants people to like him. Well, we do like Brontez, and as he says in his book, yeah, his stories are on fire”. - Slutist


“Brontez is a raw tongue of flame blazing through all the blatant fakery and insincere bullshit of today's gay/music/human scene. This audacious non-memoir burnt the hair off the back of my neck and had me rolling with glee.” -S.F. Bay Guardian


“By asking, "Would you love me if....?" Purnell is not inquiring about the limits of love, he announcing his awareness that limits exist and snubbing his nose accordingly. He refuses to go straight, adjust his expectations, or refrain from being too much. Along the way, he has carved out a creative and hopefully satisfying life full of dance, writing, friendship, sex, adventure, and as it seems, love.” -Lambda Literary Review