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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.

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.

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 14th 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 21st Century Chronicles of Thugg the Barbarian King, an
outrageous novel loosely based on his year-long love affair with his partner who
inspired it and to whom it was dedicated.

Brent plans to spend 2005 promoting and
booktouring , continue working on his
next two literary ventures, including a
coffee table book bio/discography/music
review of film composer John Williams, a
true story based on a gay cop who was
shoot in the head with his own gun by a
hustler and faced a homophobic witch
hunt by his own police department, and
search for the elusive mutlimillion dollar
book contract.