Author Archives: Joel Derfner

Yesterday I went clothes shopping with my office crush, who has a terrific sense of style. Afterwards we came back to my apartment to have fondue. I discovered to my horror that he had never seen Auntie Mame. I put this down to youth and inexperience on his part rather than an insurmountable character flaw (he is 22—though perhaps being 22 is an insurmountable character flaw in itself) and rushed out to rent it. To his credit, he fell in love with it immediately.

Now we just have to work on his falling in love with me.

This little drama in turn put me in mind of a former student of mine, who at age fifteen went around saying things like, “My last ex-boyfriend and I blah blah blah.” I was delighted that the world has changed so much as to allow adolescents to experience and own their sexuality so openly; I was dismayed, however, to learn that the trade-off for this, at least in his case, was that he had never heard of Dorothy Parker.

My theory is that, as gay people are coming out younger and are finding more societal acceptance, they don’t need to turn as much to older mentors for emotional support, which in the past has always also come with an introduction to the canon of gay culture and history. It is of course wonderful that kids today have an easier time being gay, but it’s sad that something is being lost as well.

On the eve of gay middle age (I turn 30 a week from today), I am in a mood to tilt at windmills. Therefore I have compiled a thoroughly subjective and not at all comprehensive list of required reading/viewing/listening for all gay men, in particular gay men 25 and under. When options are given, you get extra credit for exploring all choices.

I’ve left out anything that everybody today seems to be current with (Will & Grace, David Sedaris, etc.). The inclusion of a person or work on this list is not an indication that I approve—merely that I think he/she/it occupies an important place in our cultural history. The list entries are in no particular order.

Here goes.

SYLLABUS, GAY 101

MOVIES:

Auntie Mame
The Boys in the Band or Torch Song Trilogy
My Beautiful Laundrette
Mommie Dearest or Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Brideshead Revisited
The Wizard of Oz
The Women
Maurice
Jeffrey

AUTHORS/BOOKS:

Dorothy Parker
Fran Leibowitz
the Lucia books of E.F. Benson (there are six but you can start with this one)
The Lord Won’t Mind by Gordon Merrick or Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
Tales of the City and all its sequels, by Armistead Maupin
any book by Mary Renault (though this one is particularly delectable)
the plays of Oscar Wilde (especially The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere’s Fan)

SONGS/BANDS/ARTISTS:

The Village People (“YMCA” or “In the Navy”)
Barbra Streisand (all movies and recordings) or Bette Midler (all movies and recordings)
Gloria Gaynor (“I Will Survive”) or The Weather Girls (“It’s Raining Men”)
ABBA
The Pet Shop Boys or Erasure or The Smiths

MISCELLANEOUS:

the International Male catalogue
Tom of Finland
figure skating
Greg Louganis
Provincetown or Fire Island or Key West

I’m sure I’ve left off dozens of vital things that should have been included. Please forgive me. Because I thought the most important thing was to get the list out as soon as possible.

Before Alzheimer’s sets in.

Earlier in December, I wrote about painting a Little Mary Sunshine mug for a friend whose husband has been diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. Here are photographs.

The first panel:

The second panel (the first word in the fifth line, which people seem to have trouble reading, is “agonies”):

The third panel:

Note the red and green plague pustules to symbolize rot, and the angular hair out of which the cheerful curl has been driven forever. The black lines near the bottom indicate the stench of decaying flesh.

Maybe I shouldn’t quit my day job.

Today I cancelled my subscription to men4sexnow. I haven’t really been using it that much lately anyway, so it’s more symbolic than anything else. Symbolic of what, I’m not sure. My friend M.N. thinks that all the casual sex I’ve been having is getting in the way of my search for love.

But when it comes down to it, as much as I enjoy meaningless sex, it’s never quite as good as Pride and Prejudice.

So where does that leave me?

1. I have spoken with Milksop, and he has expressed his intention to start a blog at some point in the not-so-far future. When this happens, I will make sure to link to it and we can all live in harmony together.

2. The magical hair product that prevents sex hair is called—I’m not making this up—göt2b glued. Below this title on the bottle are the words “styling SPIKING GLUE [water resistant] 4: screaming hold—>spike, grip, chunk.” It is in a yellow bottle, part of the göt2bme brand put out by a company evidently named FatBoy. I swear, with this stuff in your hair you could stop a battalion of Panzers. Or of pansies, as the case may be.

3. In order that you might understand more clearly how phenomenally fucked up I am in my daily interactions with practically everybody I speak to and, in fact, with most people I don’t speak to, I am sharing with you a lyric I have recently finished:

Hello.
I stopped by to tell you I’m not neurotic.
I mean, you probably think I’m neurotic,
Especially after what I said this afternoon.
I mean, you laughed, but I wasn’t sure you meant it,
Or if you were thinking, “What a neurotic freak!”
But it’s okay and you don’t have to, ’cause I’m not.

Hello.
At last I can tell you: I think it’s over.
I’m sick and tired of you making me crazy
When I am not the one who has the problem here.
If I’ve been anxious and upset and weird, it’s your fault.
But I’m starting over. As of today, from now on,
I’m going to a different postal worker to buy my stamps.

This is the problem when you go away for a week and leave your blog in the hands of somebody who is both cooler and sexier than you—all your readers, including most probably your soul mate, will fall madly in love with him, and since the entire purpose of your starting a blog was to make everybody love you the most, you will be left with a strange and empty feeling of purposelessness in life.

But since a strange and empty feeling of purposelessness in life is pretty much par for the course for me, I don’t suppose this is any different.

The second most important thing I learned on my visit to Prague was that if there is any chance you will be visiting a sauna, perhaps in hopes that you will find yourself in the middle of a Bel Ami video, make sure to bring your contact lenses. If you don’t, you will end up either having to wear your glasses—and no matter how good they look on you when you’re dressed, they look ridiculously unsexy when they’re the only thing you’re wearing—or not being able to see a goddamn thing. This will render you completely incapable of picking up on the subtle visual clues that are the entire basis of cruising, which means that every man in the place could be staring at you with undisguised lust, and you won’t know it, and you will instead be filled with despair and self-loathing because you are absolutely certain that no one wants to have sex with you.

Furthermore, when you find someone who gives you unmistakable clues that he is interested—by, say, sitting down next to you and starting to jack you off—you will have no idea whether he is young, handsome, and lithe, or old, ugly, and fat.

I discovered eventually, using senses other than sight, that he was far closer to the former than to the latter. This was lucky, because by that time, given the extremely low probability of his having five hands and three penises, it would have been awkward, to say the least, for me to extricate myself from the situation without offending any number of people.

Then, in our chat afterwards, he revealed that his grandmother had been an inmate of the concentration camp I’d spent the day touring. I was very careful not to ask any questions for fear of discovering I’d just had sex with the grandson of the Holocaust survivor I’d interviewed three hours earlier.

So the thing about contact lenses was, as I say, the second most important thing I learned on my trip.

The most important thing I learned was that I have finally found a hair product strong enough to prevent sex hair.

[Milksop still here, but barely.]

The downside of all this intensity, of course, is I end up feeling not unlike Jennifer Connelly in Requiem For a Dream. Which means I should take home the Oscar next year.

The upside is I seem to have lost almost five pounds.

Why is it anything seems justified if it results in weight loss?

[A much more rested Milksop here. Faustus still at large…]

Since I have no idea where to begin this story, I think I’ll begin in medias res.

There are three guys, lying on the floor naked, but then again, everyone is, so there you go. The Puerto Rican guy has “I Am Beautiful” tattooed on his arm, and all I can think of is the new Christina Aguilera song. Another guy, Lucky Brand underwear around his ankles (“What can I say? I like the feeling of underwear around my ankles…”) is on the receiving end of what might just prove to be the longest blowjob in the history of the art form. (It went on, not kidding, for almost four hours while I was there. And they were still at it when I left.) The third guy – the minister of said blow job – is an Unbelievably Tall Guy with a skin condition on his legs and a jaw apparently made of rubber. He rests only once that I witness, when his knees start to hurt. (Lucky Underwear applies actual Ben Gay to Unbelievably Tall Guy’s legs when this happens, a gesture I find oddly touching.) I like to think they’re still at it even now, a full 36 hours later. “I Am Beautiful” and Lucky Underwear arm in arm, discussing Jackie Kennedy, and Unbelievably Tall Guy just going down, going down, going down…

Welcome to my first after-hours.

There really isn’t a whole lot of difference between an orgy and an after-hours, although I think after-hours tend to have more drugs. Certainly, everybody I encounter is tweaking. (Appropriately enough, given the “I Am Beautiful” tattoo, the primary highway of choice here seems to be ‘Tina.) To give you an idea of the scope, probably about 30 or 40 guys wander through during the 15 hours (15 hours!) I am there. However, with everyone generally piled on top of one another, the one-bedroom apartment of the host (and drug dealer, I’d venture a guess) does not feel overcrowded.

I arrive at midnight. I have never done anything remotely like this before. I mean, I’ve been stinkin’ drunk on occasions, and I’ve gone to stranger’s apartments looking for sex, and once I even ate a pot brownie. But I’m generally a clean living Sodomite. And this is utterly outside my realm of experience. So much so that writing about it now feels strangely like fiction.

There’s no way I can give this experience any sort of an arc, so I think a more Dada approach is called for. (That’s “Dada” not “Daddy.” Otherwise, we’re talking a completely different kind of after-hours.)

Around 8 in the morning, a Frizzy Blond Southern Boy arrives. He says little by way of introduction, but proceeds to strip down and give himself a “Booty Bump.” This is a complex procedure involving a plastic syringe-like, turkey-baster implement filled with liquid ‘Tina. (I think. Most of this I glean from other people’s conversations. At no point is a pamphlet or glossary distributed. Although, for all his ingenuity, the Drug Dealer/Host could teach one hell of a course at the New School.) The Frizzy Blond Southern Boy inserts this plastic syringe-like, turkey-baster implement into his own ass, and fills himself quite literally to the brim with the liquid T. The turkey-baster, however, once inserted, doesn’t want to be removed. After struggling for several uncomfortable minutes, the Drug Dealer/Host comes to the rescue. An actual round of applause erupts from the onlookers as the Frizzy Blond Southern Boy is unhoisted from his own petard.

There are not one, but two birthday boys in the house. One wants to bottom for me. One wants to top me. Both (at different points) ask me to leave with them. There just might be something to that whole Zodiac thing after all. (I decline to leave with either, incidentally, out of some strange fealty towards the Drug Dealer/Host and his minions who have taken me so generously under their collective wing.)

The shower is in constant use. There is an enema-like hose attachment, for, I suppose, the ill-prepared. Most boys shower quickly upon arrival or before departure. (A kind of decompression chamber, if you will.) One boy arrives at the party, spends slightly over an hour in the shower alone, then leaves. During this extended scrubbing down, men actually resort to peeing in empty Gatorade bottles. (Gatorade abounds. Something about the electrolytes, I gather. Whatever the reason, I stay away from all Gatorade for the remains of the day.)

The phone does not stop ringing. (“I Dream of Jeannie.”) The highest turnover rate is definitely after the bars close (4 in the morning-ish) and post-brunch (1 in the afternoon, I have no idea why). For some reason, I am not on everyone else’s timetable. When I arrive around midnight, there are three guys there, plus two napping in the “No Sex Allowed” bedroom. (Said bedroom is also sans bed.) When I depart, around 3 in the afternoon, I am definitely the only one on my way out the door. In fact, as far as I can see, this party only tends to grow. Very few people leave, but a relatively steady stream arrives and stays and stays and stays. Roaches check in, but they don’t check out.

One boy, napping when I arrive, tries for awhile to fuck me, then abandons that quest for the internet. He is obsessed with internet chat rooms, although he is so high he can barely type or work the computer. (I cannot say why, but he always turns to me for help when he cannot do something extremely technological like, say, open Internet Explorer.) Throughout the course of the evening, the Internet Boy lures 5 or 6 various boys from various chat rooms, only to discard them once they arrive so he can go look for the next one. Fortunately, his taste is consistent, and his reject pile, almost to a man, ends up into and all over each other. When life hands you lemons …

‘Tina is irony in powder form. (“Tina’s such a bitch” I hear more than once.) She makes you soooooooo horny, and hyper-sensitive, but then, nine times out of ten (by my crude reckoning) takes away your ability to have an erection. (It’s like rain on your wedding day…) The three or four boys who can maintain wood are not only popular, but essential. They are oxygen. They are unbelievably busy.

Safe sex is not only absent, but alarmingly so. (Footnote: I make no judgments on this issue. I strongly believe that anyone has the right to put anything in their bodies they see fit, rubberized or not.) Two different times I inquire two different potential suitors about condom-age. Both fellows are eager to comply, but I end up feeling rather like a teacher giving out homework on the day before Christmas vacation.

A Rugged Spaniard (from actual Spain) enters around noon, lured and abandoned by the Internet Boy. He is unspeakably beautiful, and, as he is Spanish, is drawn to me. (I have learned over time that, for a white boy, I got back. And say what you will, this renders me as popular as J-Lo in gay Hispanic circles.) He follows me around for nearly two hours, repeating “I am yours.” Yada, yada, yada … He gets paged by his hospital (he’s a cardiologist, but asks me to not tell any… whoops…) and has to leave. He tells me he wants to see me again. He tells me he wants to fuck me, but he also wants to make love to me. (Actual quote.) He tells me his dream is to have a three-way relationship, and he wants me to be one of his boyfriends. And, as appealing as most of this sounds, it’s all a little much for me (it’s a sex party, after all, and what an impossibly awkward “Meet Cute” story to tell the grandkids…) and I give him a bogus e-mail. (Footnote: There is not a direct cause/effect relationship here. I actually didn’t realize I gave him a bogus e-mail until after he had left. Swear to God. But two minutes after he was out the door, my over-tired, over-accelerated brain processed that the e-mail I had given him was bogus. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. And I’m not sure what all this portends, but as I also believe that there are no accidents, I’m gonna assume it’s all part of some grand design.)

Last story: Porn plays endlessly on the crappy TV. Everyone is glued to the porn at all times, even when the exact same sex act is being performed in front of the TV. (It’s similar to the sensation of going to a concert, and only being able to watch the large screen projection hanging above the stage.) Nobody can figure out the VCR, and as I’ve already proven my resourcefulness in regards to the internet, every time a tape ends, the room looks to me for help. This makes me feel like Gandalf. When I do decide to finally leave, the Drug Dealer/Host corners me to thank me “for all I did for the party.” He then gives me a price list, in case I ever “need anything.” I suddenly am overwhelmed with the reality that there is a gay agenda, and it’s remarkably similar to a tupperware party. Leaving without buying anything is certainly frowned upon. I slip him $40. (Is this enough? How come there’s a cover charge at the exit door? Is this why nobody leaves?) The Drug Dealer/Host also tells me he can tell I’m a good guy, and asks for my contact info, which he enters into his computer. Being a seasoned liar, I change just enough digits so as to render me, thankfully, out of the loop. I do, however, inexplicably give him my actual cell phone number. Why I always choose to lie when I oughta be truthin’ (and vice-versa) is beyond my comprehension. But every time my cell phone rings, I wonder if it’s someone from the endless after-hours, wanting me to come back over and change the videotape.

[Milksop here, still subbing for Faustus.]

All I have to say is that I had the wildest night of my ENTIRE LIFE last night. I also think it is dangerous to write about it right now. So consider this the world’s shortest blog entry, which is really a preface to tomorrow, the world’s longest blog entry.

Must sleep now. Tune in tomorrow.

[Faustus has expressed some concern that his soul mate might fall in love with the wrong blogger, so … be warned, soul mate. This is Milksop speaking. I think we might be allowed to mess around, but Faustus has clearly put the whole true love thing off limits. Whatever.]

I am newly bespectacled.

This is much more enormous than it seems, as I today realized I have had four (count ’em … four) pairs of prescription eyewear in my entire life. My first pair of glasses came, appropriately enough, in first grade. They were faux-gold-framed, and looked disturbingly like a smaller version of my father’s. Then, Dr. McGowan, eye doctor to the suburbanites, had the bright idea of fitting me for contacts. In second grade.

Pretty much kicked ass that day at show-and-tell, let me show-and-tell you.

I kept that first pair of glasses until sixth grade, when my head got too big for them. (Insert joke here.) Since I only wore them from bedroom to bathroom, the need to upgrade was not pressing. This set was a slightly larger set of the faux-gold, father-emulating pair. But still smaller.

This pair stayed with me through my sophomore year of undergrad, when my Mom got remarried, and my StepFather (how the heck do you capitalize that and not offend any family members?) brought in a replacement optician. McGowan, out. Johnson, in. Remarkable fellow, this Johnson. Convinces me to go with faux-gunmetal-silver instead of faux-gold. (At least, I assume it was faux-gunmetal. Growing up in the South, anything is possible.) These glasses stayed with me until today, when I picked up my hip, hep black-framed faux-Weezer-lead-singer glasses.

So, class, if I had the first pair five years, and the second pair eight years, and the third pair thirteen years … how old will I be when I retire pair number four?

The problem with having an entire day to yourself is how easily it can become a day for no one.

Case in point: yesterday, the day was (supposed to be) mine, all mine! So I logged on to a local cruise-y chatroom hotspot. (I don’t know how Faustus feels about unpaid-for website endorsement, so let’s just say it rhymes with “Neigh Fraught Prom” …) And I was popular. I’m talking Faustus levels of popularity, here. 100% flyer cheerleader popular. And then, it happened.

Some guy sends me a picture of himself, but I’ve seen the porn it’s from.

Epiphanic moment moment here. Boys in chat rooms lie. Who knew? (OK, I realize everybody knows this, but give me a break. You can take the boy out of the suburbs, but you can’t take suburbs out of the boy…) Always priding myself as a glass-is-half-full, make-lemonade kind of guy, I immediately decide to channel this whole lying thing to my advantage. You know, as a kind of gay sociological experiment. So I alter my profile to become a 19-year-old college freshman fratboy swimmer with a girlfriend and a nine-inch dick.

Much more popular than before.

So I change my profile again. Leather daddy. Closeted Hollywood actor. Bi-curious Abercrombie model twins. (That one was a real hit.) And suddenly, it’s 4:00 in the morning, and I haven’t had sex with anyone. (Well, the twins watched each other masturbate, but I don’t think that really counts.)

Lying is fun! And safe! And not very messy!

There’s a big bottom deep down inside me that desperately wants to be whatever it is that the person I’m talking to wants me to be. Don’t like tall guys? Prefer men from Oregon? Looking for someone with a Prince Albert? I can do that. Let me alter my reality to fit your fantasy.

Whoops. Life lesson, here. Damn life lessons. All I wanted was to get laid.

Anyway, after my second epiphany (sadly, not a euphemism), me and the twins and the leather daddy and the fratboy swimmer and the closeted Hollywood actor all crawled wearily into bed together.

And the bed felt really, really empty.

(The twins kept hogging the sheets, though.)