About the Book

Bald Ambition is a potpourri of ideas, essays, writing styles and assorted madness representing a unique voice of black gayness regurgitated from the ghetto bowels of Detroit

Brent’s Fagenda and Brent Reloaded

From 2001 through 2004, the outrageous, thought-provoking, award-winning column in the Detroit-based Between The Lines newspaper chronicled the life of the writer struggling to cope with the everyday freak shows and fallacies of being black, gay, HIV-positive and bipolar in America.  Includes such classic essays as “Dreading the Term ‘N-Word’ More than the Word Itself,” “C’mon, Baby, Let Me Just Stick the Head In,” “In Search of the Perfect Orgy,” “When the Bottom Falls Out of the Market,” “Girl, He Tore my Guts Out,” and “When are You Queens Going to Let Go of Astrology??”

Historically Black, Historically Gay

40 short bios and beautifully rendered drawings of black gay historical figures, including Barbara Jordan, George Washington Carver, Angela Davis, Bayard Rustin, Billie Holiday, Benjamin Banneker and many more!

Black Pride Diaries

A snapshot of the Black Gay Pride circuit as witnessed by the writer during three summers of book tours!

Verse Perverse

A twisted collection of five very naughty black gay erotic fantasies, including the unspeakably blunt “Prisoners of Lust!”

Don’t miss out on this groundbreaking latest work from the up-and-coming writer of the electrifying novels Man of the Cloth, This Time Around, and The 21^st Century Chronicles of Thugg the Barbarian King!

About the Author

     Brent Dorian Carpenter was born April 19, 1964 in Detroit, the third of three sons to educators Spencer and Carmen Carpenter.  His early interests included archaeology, astronomy, geography, history and comic books.  He began writing and drawing his own comic book stories around age seven.  By high school, his parents were divorced and Brent discovered his gay sexual identity concurrent to being caught in the throes of manic depression.

     As a young adult, Carpenter was briefly employed as a flight attendant for two charter airlines, which offered him a unique opportunity to become a world traveler, journeying to 13 countries on four continents.  During this period of the late 1980s, he lived in Atlanta, and was struggling to come to grips with the reality of HIV infection in the early years of the pandemic.  His partner of four years, Duane Richards, succumbed to AIDS in 1991, sending Carpenter into a deep depression.  The battle with the disease would rage on throughout the 1990s, and he was on his deathbed on at least three occasions.

     Working through his grief, by his mid-20s, he and other talented friends had founded Foundation Studios and he began his first publishing endeavor, producing an international comic series, U.N. Force, efforts that won the attention of CNN/Headline News in 1993.  The short-lived series folded after a few issues, and he later turned his focus purely toward writing, launching his first attempts at penning novels.

     Following a debilitating nervous breakdown in January 1999, Brent was diagnosed with manic-depressive bipolar disorder, and at the end of the year, he was discovered to have an aneurysm on his aorta, and was dying of an AIDS-related infection so devastating, his doctor in Atlanta had written him off as a lost cause.

     Rescued by his mother, he reluctantly returned to Detroit, where he was slowly nursed back to health.  He used the time during his infirmity to finish writing and self-publish his first novel, Man of the Cloth, an unlikely tale of a Vatican plot to create a clone of Jesus Christ.  An interview regarding the book in a local Detroit gay newspaper, Between the Lines, resulted in a job as a journalist and biweekly columnist.  This in turn led to a second newspaper job at the Michigan Citizen, where Carpenter became the first openly gay black writer reporting about the black gay community for a black newspaper.  As his awareness of activism grew, he began speaking out publicly about AIDS, winning several awards for his outspokenness and writing.  In 2002, he successfully self-published his hard-hitting second novel, This Time Around, about a black gay college student who discovers a way of time travel and goes back into the 14^th Century to attempt to stop the institution of slavery before it ever begins. 

     For the next three years, Carpenter relentlessly multitasked as a journalist, public speaker, gay activist, and traveling across the country to Black Gay Pride events on book tour.  Two surgeries eventually corrected his deadly heart condition.  In January 2004, he was instrumental in helping organize the first-ever-of-its-kind town hall meeting to address homophobia in Detroit’s black community to a standing-room-only crowd at the Charles Wright Museum of African American History.  His father died in July, and by the end of that year, he had completed work on two more books, Bald Ambition, a collection of his columns, bios of black gay historical figures and gay erotica, and The 21^st Century Chronicles of Thugg the Barbarian King, an outrageous novel loosely based on his year-long love affair with his partner Mark Williamson, who inspired it and to whom it was dedicated.