Author Archives: Joel Derfner

Saturday, after the cheerleading squad cheered at the New York Sharks game, one of the flyers revealed that, because of other things going on in her life, she’s going to be taking time off from the squad.

I hugged her goodbye and told her I’d miss her but secretly I spent the entire subway ride home—a long one, as the game was in Queens—trying not to let my nearly uncontainable glee show on my face, because naturally I am the obvious choice to replace her.

Then I remembered that there are tryouts for the squad next Thursday, and since then I have been consumed with fear that people smaller than me will show up and make the squad and that I’ll get passed over for flyer status.

The solution, of course, is that I’ll have to go to the tryouts, get the names and addresses of all the people smaller than me, and arrange for them to meet with unfortunate accidents.

Because I’m going to be a flyer if it kills me.

Or, more accurately, if it kills others.

So the anaerobic physicist has returned from his trip overseas. (For those of you who are joining us in medias res, I am referring to my step aerobics instructor who also has a Ph.D. in physics and is fluent in Italian and is my soul mate, though he doesn’t know about the last part.)

Due to poor planning on my part, I was unable to go to his Friday night step class. Since I’m going to be out of town next Friday, this meant that it would be weeks before I saw him, and he would think I had stopped coming to his step class because I am in love with him and can’t deal with the fact that he has a boyfriend, and I would then never be able to go to his step class again because then I would have to see him and be utterly humiliated. I was about to go mad with frustration until I checked his web site and saw that he was going to be subbing for another instructor’s class this morning.

So instead of sleeping in, I woke up early and went to Union Square. When he saw me, he seemed pleasantly surprised; I of course pretended to have had no idea he was going to be there, and claimed (lying through my teeth) that I had a meeting in the neighborhood and figured I’d just stop by the gym beforehand. I’d practiced several amusing things to say off-hand in Italian once he mentioned that he spoke Italian (my knowledge of his skill in that area having come from stalking him rather than from his ever having said anything about it), but by the time I realized he wasn’t going to mention that he spoke Italian I’d already said all the amusing things in English, and my Italian is rusty enough that I didn’t trust myself to improvise, so I pretended to have to get a drink of water and fled the scene.

When I came back, there were still a few minutes before class started, and he was entangled in a conversation with a woman taking the class. She had evidently been a regular at one of his classes some years ago and was catching up. She asked some question too quietly for me to hear, and he answered, with a laugh, “No, not yet. I think it’ll be quite some time.” I couldn’t decide whether she’d asked him if he’d gotten tenure yet, in which case I could go on with my life, or if he’d settled down with somebody yet, in which case I would have to kill myself, because of course if he was dismissive about the idea of settling down with somebody, then that means he’s not serious about his boyfriend and yet he still doesn’t want to date me, which means he doesn’t love me and never will.

Such was the state in which I started step class. It actually went quite well, and I managed to keep the semblance of a smile plastered on my face for most of the time, though this was made more difficult by my constant uncertainty about whether my staring at him would come across as appropriately watching the teacher or pathetic and undisguised doomed love.

At one point the tape ran out, and he went over to change it, muttering rhetorically, “What’s next?” I said, “Chocolate!”, which was about the level of humor of which my brain was capable at the moment. He stared at me, baffled, and said, “What?” Thinking that I must have spoken too quietly, which I often do, I croaked “Chocolate!” with more volume and projection. He said, “What?” again. “CHOCOLATE!” I screamed. He continued to stare at me, and the woman he’d been talking to before class said, “Abs!” and he turned to her and said, “No, abs is later.” Then he put in a new tape and I committed seppuku.

Unfortunately, he didn’t notice my ritual suicide, so I had to finish the class.

After class was over, a thin ray of hope entered my life. We were doing abs and had gotten to a part where our legs were supposed to be up in the air. This being a position with which I am quite familiar, I figured I had it down pat, but as he walked by, he adjusted my feet.

He touched me.

I mean, he touched my shoes, but still. I almost fainted right then and there.

Then I went and had lunch with a cute (but unfortunately unavailable) guy who also takes his step class regularly, and I told him about the momentous event, and he said, “Oh, yeah, he adjusts my feet all the time.”

It’s too bad I’ve already committed seppuku today, because I don’t know what else I can do to put myself out of my misery.

I’d throw myself out my window, but I’m only on the second floor, so I’d probably just break my hand again.

I thought I was gay as I could possibly get. I mean, what with the orgies, the knitting, the cucumber and mud masks, and the general super-homosexuality—I would provide links to various posts detailing these and other illustrations of my entertaining if occasionally excessive fagginess, but I can’t work the new Blogger interface—I figured I’d gone as far as I could go.

I figured wrong.

On August 17, I will reach the zenith of my queerness; I will achieve, if you will, my gaypotheosis.

I’m taking the test to be certified as an aerobics instructor.

No need to crowd to kiss my hand or touch the hem of my robe; there’s enough of me for everybody to share.

I know this from experience.

Last night I decided to make banana bread (from scratch, naturally) for the first time in my life.

So I got some overripe bananas, mashed them up, toasted some walnuts, etc., etc., and ended up with an appropriately curdled-looking batter, which I poured into two loaf pans and put in to bake, after which I busied myself with various other activities for the 55 minutes called for by the recipe.

Then I went to take the bread out and found I’d forgotten to turn the oven on.

The bread I eventually ended up with tasted delicious, but maybe next time I’ll skip the extra step.

If I have to work street corners every night from now until August 17, I am going to get the money to go here.

They took my cast off today.

I never knew that it was possible for washing one’s hands to bring one to the brink of orgasm.

Oh, what the hell. This is technically today’s second post, but really it’s just a reposting of yesterday’s deleted post. For a discussion of why I deleted it in the first place, see today’s first post. For a discussion of why I’m reposting it, see my subconscious.

Before my assignation early this morning with a married man, I was planning to write a post about how scandalous and titillated I felt having an assignation with a married man. (It hadn’t happened yet, but I was sure I would feel scandalous and titillated once it did.)

However, though I did feel moderately scandalous and titillated, something else happened that seemed more interesting, which is that I learned something.

What I learned is this: though being ordered around in bed turns me on more than I can possibly say, being called a whore in the middle of sex does not.

Not that I fault him; he was clearly participating in the game of sex rather than expressing his actual opinion of me. And, after all, his understanding, of however recent a date, of my other preferences could easily lead him to believe that I would be aroused by name-calling as well. How I’ve managed to reach the ripe old age of 30 without discovering otherwise is a mystery to me.

But at that moment, what had been theretofore a delightful, if somewhat smarmy, experience—or perhaps delightful because somewhat smarmy—acquired a tinge of unpleasantness. Just a tinge—certainly not enough to cause me to put a stop to the activity in which we were both enjoyably engaged—but, still, I was taken aback.

The problem was, what to do about it? To say anything would completely destroy the tone of the encounter, which was otherwise most satisfactory. And I couldn’t meaningfully refuse him access to my inmost depths, as there was no part of my inmost depths into which I hadn’t already welcomed him. But I had to do something to defend my honor.

And then circumstances provided me with the perfect opportunity, and my mother wit was for once quick enough to take immediate advantage of it.

For the first time in my life I spit instead of swallowing.

I feel so triumphant I could burst.

I have deleted yesterday’s post about spitting vs. swallowing, name-calling, and my assignation yesterday morning because the comments led me to believe that the post shared so much information as to embarrass both its readers and its author.

However, I do want to point something out, for the benefit of those who left comments about the relative safety of letting somebody come in your mouth. While it’s true that there is some disagreement about how safe unprotected receptive oral sex is, the consensus from all parties seems to be that it’s significantly safer than protected receptive anal sex, because of condom breakage, slippage, etc. Letting somebody fuck your ass while wearing a condom is, in other words, two to three times more dangerous than letting somebody come in your mouth. So to participate in the former but refrain from the latter seems to me to be letting sensationalism rather than science dictate your behavior.

Of course, in my case, both sensationalism and science take a back seat to neurosis and paranoia, but I have to assume there are some people out there for whom this is not the case.

(The CDC Collaborative HIV Seroincidence Study is pretty clear about the numbers involved, and here is a more recent document that discusses in detail the risk of HIV transmission through oral sex, with a comparison at the end to other sexual practices, including protected receptive anal sex. One passage in particular details the relative safety of a range of behaviors: “You know, the principles on individual risk reduction have always been to move people along toward a safer part of the spectrum. So to move them from unprotected receptive anal, to receptive anal with a condom, to insertive, to insertive anal with a condom, to receptive oral with ejaculation, and if I was dealing on an individual level with a patient whose primary risk behavior was oral sex with exposure to ejaculate, I would counsel that individual to try to reduce their exposure to ejaculate.”)

Ordinarily, I avoid thinking about the political climate in America, as doing so reduces me almost immediately to a quivering mass of rage and despair. However, on this Fourth of July, reading this essay by a twelve-year-old about the American flag gives me a tiny shred of hope for the future.

A few days ago, I found out that, when you join the Radical Faeries, you have to get to take a Radical Faerie name. Since then I have been unable to think about anything except what my Radical Faerie name would be in the extremely unlikely event that I became a Radical Faerie. Examples I’ve encountered include things like Persimmon, Cup Cake, and Sparkles.

I’m leaning towards Bile but am open to suggestions.