Every day is opening night.

Press Contacts for NY PopsUp:
Rick Miramontez / Marie Bshara
rick@omdkc.com / marie@omdkc.com
212 695 7400

NYS Executive Chamber:
press.office@exec.ny.gov

Empire State Development:
pressoffice@esd.ny.gov

FOR RELEASE ON MONDAY, JULY 26, 2021

NY PopsUp
PRESENTS

“AN EVENING OF 100 BOYFRIENDS”
CURATED BY
BRONTEZ PURNELL 

FEATURING READINGS OF
CRITICALLY-ACCLAIMED BOOK
“100 BOYFRIENDS” 

AT MoMA PS1
ON FRIDAY, JULY 30

FREE TICKETS AVAILABLE
FOR NYC RESIDENTS

New York, NY – 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 www.mo.ma/ps1tickets.

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.

PRAISE FOR 100 BOYFRIENDS

Named a most-anticipated book of 2021 by Vulture and Literary Hub
New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice

“This hurricane of delirious, lonely, lewd tales is a taxonomy and grand unified theory of the boyfriend, in every tense…Paragraphs run quick and cool, like stacked ice cubes… [a] feeling of eternal recurrence is beautifully by design, it is the very argument of the book… All these desires, these imperatives, lodge themselves into that little word ‘boyfriend,’ into fantasies of men past and present, into those ghosts, who prove so necessary.”
Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

“I loved this book—raunchy, irreverent, deliberate, sexy, angry, and tender, in its own way.”
Roxane Gay (via Goodreads)

“Brontez Purnell is a tireless creative force… At times reminiscent of the work of Eve Babitz, 100 Boyfriends is simultaneously tough and vulnerable, bawdy and knowing, and relayed with a deceptive ease.”
The A.V. Club 

“A hilarious, non-stop series of boyfriends past, united by candid takes on love, sex, and more sex… Purnell finds the beauty and dignity in every ex.”
GQ  

“[100 Boyfriends] reads like a series of 4 a.m. text messages received from a very smart and very messy friend — when there’s no way you can wait till morning to respond, ‘What the fuck? Are you OK? Did you at least have fun?’ If Purnell is a living archive of the Bay’s queer and punk scenes in last two decades, 100 Boyfriends is an autofiction anthology of drug-fueled warehouse dwellers, queer skate kids, and regretless heartbreakers.”
Saam Niami, Vulture

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The event will also be live streamed on the festival’s Instagram feed: @NYPopsUp.

NY PopsUp is an unprecedented and expansive festival featuring hundreds of free and open to the public pop-up performances that intersect with the daily lives of New Yorkers, as announced by Governor Andrew M. Cuomo. ​The series of events is intended to revitalize the spirit and well-being of New York citizens with the energy of live performance while jumpstarting New York’s live entertainment sector in coordination with the New York State Council on the Arts and Empire State Development. The programming for NY PopsUp is curated by stage director Zack Winokur, in partnership with a hand-selected council of artistic advisors who represent the diversity of New York’s dynamic performing arts scene and artistic communities.

NY PopsUp launched on Saturday, February 20 and will run through August 7. NY PopsUp is being coordinated in lock step with state public health officials and will strictly adhere to New York State Department of Health COVID-19 protocols and guidelines. NY PopsUp’s model for delivering safe performance experiences help​s provide a reopening roadmap for New York’s cultural institutions, including Lincoln Center, in the planning of their new outdoor performing arts complex, “Restart Stages.”

Please note that, given the impromptu nature and surprise element of the pop-up format, not all performances will be announced in advance. Please follow @NYPopsUp on Twitter and Instagram for the latest.

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