Since I Laid My Burden Down

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. “Performance artist Purnell beautifully captures a personality through introspection and memory in this slim novel . . . a compelling portrait of a particular disaffected kind of gay youth caught between religion, culture, and desire.” —Publishers Weekly “It’s a true novel, chaptered, and bound, that not only holds its own as queer literature, with its unapologetically misanthropic narrative, but also expands upon it.” —San Francisco Chronicle “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 Castle on the River Vistula

Through stories (including their own), interviews, and analysis of the most recent data available, Dr. Alvin Poussaint and journalist Amy Alexander offer a groundbreaking look at 'posttraumatic slavery syndrome,' the unique physical and emotional perils for black people that are the legacy of slavery and persistent racism. They examine the historical, cultural, and social factors that make many blacks reluctant to seek health care, and cite ways that everyone from the layperson to the health care provider can help.

Gathers Negro spirituals, traditional gospel songs, European American hymns, and contemporary gospel songs.

Valuable not only for their sublime musical expression, the African American spirituals give us profound insights into the human condition and the Christian life. Many focus on an essential scene of the Christian drama: the coming of God as the child in Bethlehem and as the hope of the world and the liberator of God's oppressed people. In these devotions for the season of Advent, Luke Powery leads the reader through the spirituals as they confront the mystery of incarnation and redemption. In Rise Up, Shepherd! each devotion features the lyrics of the spiritual, a reflection on the spiritual's meaning, a Scripture verse, and a brief prayer.

In Hands on the Freedom Plow, fifty-two women--northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina--share their courageous personal stories of working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. The testimonies gathered here present a sweeping personal history of SNCC: early sit-ins, voter registration campaigns, and freedom rides; the 1963 March on Washington, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the movements in Alabama and Maryland; and Black Power and antiwar activism. Since the women spent time in the Deep South, many also describe risking their lives through beatings and arrests and witnessing unspeakable violence. These intense stories depict women, many very young, dealing with extreme fear and finding the remarkable strength to survive. The women in SNCC acquired new skills, experienced personal growth, sustained one another, and even had fun in the midst of serious struggle. Readers are privy to their analyses of the Movement, its tactics, strategies, and underlying philosophies. The contributors revisit central debates of the struggle including the role of nonviolence and self-defense, the role of white people in a black-led movement, and the role of women within the Movement and the society at large. Each story reveals how the struggle for social change was formed, supported, and maintained by the women who kept their "hands on the freedom plow." As the editors write in the introduction, "Though the voices are different, they all tell the same story--of women bursting out of constraints, leaving school, leaving their hometowns, meeting new people, talking into the night, laughing, going to jail, being afraid, teaching in Freedom Schools, working in the field, dancing at the Elks Hall, working the WATS line to relay horror story after horror story, telling the press, telling the story, telling the word. And making a difference in this world."

Winner of the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Longlisted for the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize. One of Buzzfeed's Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2021, NBC's 10 Most Notable LGBTQ Books of 2021, and Pink News' Best LGBTQ Books of 2021. "This hurricane of delirious, lonely, lewd tales is a taxonomy and grand unified theory of the boyfriend, in every tense." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times "I loved this book—raunchy, irreverent, deliberate, sexy, angry, and tender, in its own way." —Roxane Gay An irrerverent, sensitive, and inimitable look at gay dysfunction through the eyes of a cult hero Transgressive, foulmouthed, and brutally funny, Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends is a revelatory spiral into the imperfect lives of queer men desperately fighting the urge to self-sabotage. As they tiptoe through minefields of romantic, substance-fueled misadventure—from dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama—Purnell’s characters strive for belonging in a world that dismisses them for being Black, broke, and queer. In spite of it—or perhaps because of it—they shine. Armed with a deadpan wit, Purnell finds humor in even the darkest of nadirs with the peerless zeal, insight, and horniness of a gay punk messiah. Together, the slice-of-life tales that writhe within 100 Boyfriends are an inimitable tour of an unexposed queer underbelly. Holding them together is the vision of an iconoclastic storyteller, as fearless as he is human.