Swish



By Joel Derfner



Four stars



This is not a funny book.



Oh, yeah, I laughed. There is much that is amusing in Joel Derfner’s wry memoir about being gay today in America.



But really, this book is heartbreaking. This is a look into a gay man’s soul. Some of what he shows us is not pretty, Some of it is, on the other hand, beautiful.



I spent a third of my time reading this book wanting to take Derfner in my arms to comfort him. Another third was wanting to take him by the shoulders and shake some se

Swish



By Joel Derfner



Four stars



This is not a funny book.



Oh, yeah, I laughed. There is much that is amusing in Joel Derfner’s wry memoir about being gay today in America.



But really, this book is heartbreaking. This is a look into a gay man’s soul. Some of what he shows us is not pretty, Some of it is, on the other hand, beautiful.



I spent a third of my time reading this book wanting to take Derfner in my arms to comfort him. Another third was wanting to take him by the shoulders and shake some sense into him. And the final third was simply reading his words and thinking, “I’ve felt that. I’ve been there. This is me.”



Joel is eighteen years my junior, which in gay world is really a full generation. What always startles me most about gay memoirs is that the similarities—regardless of different contexts, backgrounds, educations, careers—are all striking. For all its specificity, for all its sometimes painful particularlity to Derfner’s own life, there is a moving universality present that makes it possible for Derfner’s quixotic narrative to be applicable to other lives and other times.



The book is divided up into nine thematic chapters, each of which focuses on a single aspect of the author’s life, and then spirals for a while away from that topic. Ultimately, each theme turns back in on itself and comes to the point, which is both understanding Joel Derfner, and ourselves (I think) through the lens of his life.



With chapter headings as innocuous as “On Knitting” and as potentially contentious as “On Casual Sex,” the real goal is neither to titillate or to amuse, but to draw the reader into Derfner’s vulnerability; to allow us to probe every tender hidden place to help us understand what makes him go.



The final chapter, “On Exodus,” is the most contrived, and yet also the most emotionally intimate in some ways. Derfner takes us to an annual convention of ex-gay believers—some 1000 participants—where he has decided to become an infiltrator, working undercover in an “enemy camp” just to create a tantalizing chapter in his memoir.



What he instead encounters—aside from bizarre rationalizations and bad pseudo-science—is a group of men who are unnervingly like him. Broken, lost, and almost desperate for something like peace and contentment. Near the end of the conference, Derfner writes: “I ask whatever forces there might be in the universe to have mercy on the three of us, and on everybody in the room.” It is a touching moment when, having expected to feel nothing but loathing for Exodus and the ex-gay people he meets, he instead feels both compassion and brotherhood.



My one complaint here would be in Derfner’s own circumscribed world view. He fails to recognize that the Exodus movement represents a very specific subset of the overall Christian world in America today. His understanding of Exodus is tainted by the fact that he can only imagine two possibilities: a world in which God exists, and therefore in which gays are condemned; and a world in which there is no God and therefore one in which gays are free to be happy.



This was a disappointment to me, simply in that I am an active, liberal Christian, and for me there is no conflict at all between being a believer and being gay. One of the great triumphs of the twentieth century, socially speaking, has been the shift of much of mainstream Christianity and Judiaism away from condemnation and into full, loving embrace of gay folk. It is in that context that, for me, the work of Exodus and other organizations like it becomes particularly pernicious. Because Derfner does not consider this option, his analysis of the ex-gay world loses some of its punch.



His compassion, however, does not. In the end, the Joel Derfner I wanted to shake in anger is far outweighed by the Joel Derfner I would want to hold and comfort. His memoir, for all its laugh-lines, is a paean for gay solidarity, because of the joys and sorrows of life that, each of us in our own way, shares with all our gay kin.



