christopher de la Torre

With the return of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda in the silver screen debut of Sex and the City, we’re reminded how funny and fulfilling (however unfulfilling) accounts of heterosexual love can be, as genders battle each other in playful irony that always ends in the big question: do I love myself here? Joel Derfner’s Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever asks the same question, but the only real difference is there are next to no women around. And why should there be? With books like this one, gay men are reminded of how we – just like Stanford and Anthony – can have our fill of sex in the city, too.

Derfner is funny – incredibly hilarious, as a matter of fact. This guy is the haute couture of textual comedy. He’ll have you hooked by the time you read about his unnatural obsession with knitting his soon-to-be ex-boyfriend a pair of socks. Derfner’s writing is perfect, weaving you in and out of scenarios you’d probably be too embarrassed to discuss out loud in the subway; the book does exactly what it sets out to do. He’s your best friend. He’s your brother. He is you.

And Derfner isn’t only funny – he’s smart, too. Graduating from Harvard might not tell you a whole lot, but his use of events like 9/11 and The Holocaust, as well as quirky references to Ann Coulter and Masada, suggest him to be very much a thinker, while his short explanation as to why some Jews don’t believe in God as anything but a metaphor, along with his thoughts on the constructionalist vs. essentialist views of being gay, might suggest he’s thrown some research into the mix for good measure.

But smarts aside, what’s truly clever about Derfner’s writing is how he in passing intellectualizes the often times inexplicable quirks of gay society. For instance, “When two gay men meet under potentially romantic but public circumstances,” he writes, “the default dynamic is for each one to appear to want the other less than the other wants him, which is why often people who ware dying to sleep together end up not looking at each other for hours at a time.”

You learn with him as he loses loved ones, recalls childhood role models and ex-boyfriends, and dives headlong into go-go dancing and ex-gay retreats simply to experience something new. And Derfner injects his accounts with enough charm that, even if you don’t always recognize the terrain, there’s always something on the horizon to beckon you back to your own experience.

What this book gives us that Sex and the City didn’t, is an in-depth look into the childhood of the narrator. Perhaps SATC would have done well to add elements of The Wonder Years – then again, maybe not; there’s only so far narration can go before it turns into complete obnoxiousness. But no worries; Derfner has also mastered the art of flashback, so you’ll never get lost.

Swish is a witty gem that scores big, proving that gay literature can – like its characters often do – chew gum, read Tolstoy and give a good BJ all at the same time; this read will surely make any self-respecting gay man laugh out loud, from cover to cover.

Read my review on Edge.
Top Image from JoelDerfner.com