In one of many hysterical vignettes collaged in Johnny Would You Love Me if My Dick Were Bigger, a 2015 not-quite-memoir by the writer-artist-dancer-musician Brontez Purnell, our hero, a Black gay American waiter bored at work, anatomizes his discontents with dating another writer. “We differed and disagreed stylistically,” starts Purnell, because “he felt like I was too often sincere and forthcoming in my writing, and I thought he was too often full of shit.”
The Boyfriend is always publishing stories about the “Incredible Adventures of Two Boring-Ass White Dudes in Love,” mostly in periodicals under titles like “New Best Gay Erotic Fiction.” The “Brontez” of the novel is aggrieved by the “plucky, wide-eyedness” of it all—“Like, why couldn’t one of the precious boys be a murderer and a junkie or have an eating disorder?” he wonders. Just a few sentences later, he learns his beloved has plagiarized one of his ideas, which tend to slant toward “real shit” like gun violence and semen addiction; infuriated, he drenches his paramour’s silver laptop with lighter fluid (“holy water”) and sets it ablaze in the garden. “He never talked to me ever again,” says Brontez, “and he could never really return the favor: My stories were already on fire.”
