Author Archives: Joel Derfner

Today I got a colonic irrigation.

It was both repulsive and absolutely fascinating.

Certain aspects of it were, of course, familiar to me, while other aspects were new and different. I am used to having phallic objects (and sometimes phalluses themselves) inserted in my body, for example, but usually it’s men who do the inserting. If you had told me even this morning—this was a spur of the moment decision—that I would be paying a woman to shove what was essentially a dildo up my ass, I would have mocked you mercilessly.

But you would have gotten the last laugh.

I asked her how long she had been doing this. “Two years,” she said. “Before that I was a corrections officer.”

I can’t even begin to frame all the scenarios one might envision.

She said that colon hydrotherapy was her destiny. I think—my rational mind doubts that she actually said this, because what sane person could, but it’s what I’m remembering—that she said she had been called to be a colon hydrotherapist.

On my way out, she gave me a badly photocopied handout about colon health. It contained things like blurry photographs of unhealthy colons and (annotated) essays by people writing in the Snake Handler Style—you know, commas missing, eccentric capitalizations, that sort of thing. I quote:

“Our greatest enemy to health is constipation! I have No Cure For Constipation! . . . I think the toilet is the most abominable device ever invented in our civilization. We find that the Indians never had any rectal troubles; they had no hemorrhoid troubles whatsoever. Why? They squatted to defecate.” Portions of the text were underlined. Next to the underlined portions, someone had written things like “EVERY YEAR AMERICANS SPEND OVER 800 MILLION DOLLARS ON LAXATIVES. WOW! FRIENDS, THAT IS A LOT OF CONSTIPATION!”

But she had a really fabulous hat, so I’m going back.

I went to my first cheerleading practice tonight. They taught the new squad members some basic stunts, and since the ratio of bases to flyers was off, I learned the flyer parts.

And I was really good at it.

One of the assistant captains even said so.

I don’t want to jinx anything, but my “mid base flyer” status may not last for too long.

If I could go to cheerleading practice every day I would never be depressed again.

I have a zit on my nose. This is the first zit I have had in fifteen years. When I was an adolescent, I had terrible, terrible skin, far worse than your standard adolescent skin. I eventually went to a dermatologist, who prescribed an acne medication that, though it evidently put me at risk for damage to my liver, intestines, eyes, ears, and skeletal system, as well as serious psychiatric problems up to and including suicide (none of which anybody told me at the time), had the virtue of banishing my acne once and for all.

Or so I thought.

Now I have a zit on my nose, and I’m terrified that, if my acne is coming back, the rest of my adolescent miseries can’t be far behind. Soon I will be having dozens of conversations every day that mirror this one:

W.E.: “Hey, Faustus, where’d you get your pants?”

FAUSTUS (smiling proudly at his bright green pants with white piping on the side): “J.C. Penney.”

W.E.: “They’re really . . . spiffy.”

(W.E. bursts into poorly muffled laughter and immediately starts talking to his friends, pointing at FAUSTUS. FAUSTUS looks down at pants and knows people hate him but doesn’t understand why.)

Dear God, do they have Accutane for the soul?

Today someone found my blog by doing a google search for “my first orgy.”

Is this some kind of Fisher Price toy for really precocious homosexual children?

I can just see the commercials now:

DAD (returning from work): “Hey, hon, where’s Christopher?”

MOM (wiping hands on apron): “Oh, he just can’t get enough of that My First Orgy!”

CHRISTOPHER (from behind closed door): “Let me see if I can get them both in at the same time! Mphblphmphblphmph.”

DAD: “Do you think he’ll ever let me play with it?”

(MOM rolls her eyes and smiles at DAD, who grins sheepishly back.)

CHRISTOPHER: “I promise it won’t hurt.”

(MOM and DAD burst into peals of laughter. MUSIC. FADE OUT.)

I have had an extraordinary 24 hours.

Last night, I went to Modell’s Sporting Goods and bought a punching bag. I did this because my therapist has been after me to find a form of exercise that was “metaphorically appropriate” to the emotional issues I’m dealing with; namely, my vast stores of suppressed rage. He thinks that “moving the energy” in a “metaphorically appropriate way” will do me no end of good.

I have to say that the idea of having something in my home whose sole purpose is for me to beat it up makes me very excited.

Then tonight I went to Our Name Is Mud, a pottery painting store, with my friend D.R. D.R. painted a beautiful vase for his brother and his brother’s fiancèe; I painted a mug for a friend of mine whose husband was recently diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. She told me at one point that she was glad she didn’t have to do her Little Mary Sunshine act with me, and I told her Little Mary Sunshine could rot in hell. She loved this image. So I painted a mug with the following (illustrated) text:

“Little Mary Sunshine went out for a walk one day. A safe fell on her and crushed her stupid head. She suffered terrible agonies before she died. Now Little Mary Sunshine is rotting in Hell forever.”

My Little Mary Sunshine was a pathetic stick figure (as is, in fact, any human being I try to draw) but she had the distinction of having repulsively curly blonde hair and a blue dress. To depict her rotting in hell, I turned her smile into a jagged line and added green and red dots to her face. The illustrations will certainly require explanation when I give my friend her mug, but I think the impact of the gift will be undiminished.

After I finished the mug, I went to join the cheerleading squad at an LGBT sports team mixer at XL, a bar in Chelsea. Now, I hate bars. They always make me desperately unhappy. They’re loud, so I can’t talk to people that I know, and smoky, so I can’t breathe, and intimidating, so I’m terrified to approach anybody. I went to this mixer fully prepared to spend a miserable hour not mixing with anybody before hightailing it out of there.

Instead, I had a totally great time.

From the instant I walked in, the cheerleaders were so supportive and welcoming that I felt like I was at a party with good friends where the music just happened to be too loud. I got a “Cheer Loud, Cheer Proud” t-shirt, which I immediately put on and then tied very tightly so as to expose some bare midriff, and a really gay silver sparkly Santa hat. The cheerleaders were the most touchy-feely group I’ve ever been a part of, and within moments I was leaning all over people, hugging them, putting my hands in their pockets, and generally being swishier than I’ve allowed myself to be in fifteen years, sucking my teeth and saying things like, “she’s such a bitch!” while pointing dramatically at a big, burly cheerleader.

I’ve said this before: it felt like home.

The only even mildly unpleasant element in all this was that I had to sell raffle tickets to people at the bar. Now, I am a reasonably attractive man; I know this. But settings like this deflate my self-confidence to such an extent that asking me to approach strangers and even engage them in conversation, much less get them to buy raffle tickets, is like asking Calista Flockheart to eat a 30-scoop Earthquake sundae from Swenson’s. It’s just not within my power to do.

So I just bought ten tickets myself and wrote the names and numbers of my friends D.R., B.N., N.M., and Y.E. on them.

But then it turned out that we hadn’t sold enough tickets, so I had to go and actually attempt to sell some.

And I succeeded. I hung out by the bathrooms and swooped down on unthreatening-looking guys, gave them a winning smile, and said, “can I sell you a raffle ticket?” And two or three of them, after some sweet-talking and eyelash-batting on my part, said yes.

I was actually able to charm men into buying raffle tickets.

I have never felt more desirable in my entire life.

So I finally left XL–having been there for over two hours and having enjoyed myself for virtually the whole time—and checked my messages on my way to the subway, and a guy I have a crush on had called me for no reason at all, just to say hi and he hoped I had a good time at the mixer.

Plus, I haven’t weighed myself in TWO DAYS.

I should probably burn myself as a heretic for saying this, but I am beginning to wonder if perhaps there aren’t some small happinesses to be found in this world.

Today I had my first cheersetback.

On a cheerleading squad, there are two positions. These are not, as one might expect on a gay cheerleading squad, “top” and “bottom,” since everybody on the squad is very clearly a bottom, but “base” and “flyer.” A flyer is, of course, somebody who gets thrown in the air, and a base is somebody who does the throwing. From the moment I realized there was a chance I could be a cheerleader, the dearest wish of my heart was to be thrown in the air. Since I am short and fairly slim, this seemed to be a reasonable thing to hope for if I made the squad.

So they sent out an e-mail today about squad positions. I eagerly scanned the list for my name and was shattered to see next to it the words “mid base flyer.”

Clearly they think I am TOO FAT TO BE THROWN IN THE AIR.

I’m trying to decide whether to lose fifteen pounds or to eliminate the pure flyers on the squad one by one until they are forced to promote me to pure flyer status.

The latter would be both healthier and much more fun.

I made the squad!

I’m a CHEERLEADER!

This is the proudest day of my life.

I am sick. I have an upset stomach and an achy body and a fever. I want a cute boyfriend who will bring me soup and stroke my hair and tuck me in and make me feel all better.

I also want to inherit 100 billion jillion dollars from a long lost relative and to win the Nobel Peace Prize. At the moment these goals seem more realistic than the first.

Maudlin whining brought to you by TheraFlu.

Yesterday I found out my therapist isn’t gay.

I told him I knew it didn’t matter but I still felt betrayed, just like when it turned out that Atkins protein bars are actually full of carbohydrates, even though they’re the kind of carbohydrates that don’t have any effect on your blood sugar and therefore don’t count as Atkins carbs. But still. They’re full of carbs.

I hate everyone.

After trying in vain for two days to summon the mental focus required to blog about the cheerleading clinic, I’ve come to the realization that I am simply mentally unfocused. Perhaps I require mental contact lenses. Or mental bifocals.

I was accompanied to the cheerleading clinic by my staunch and loyal friend D.R., who claimed he was coming along for moral support but whom I suspect to have joined me simply to see the cute guys jumping around in athletic shorts.

I was actually late meeting him because I couldn’t decide whether to bring my regular athletic shorts or my athletic shorts that are way too short and tight. In the end I decided to bring both and wait and see what seemed most appropriate. When I got there it very quickly became clear that the too short, too tight shorts were the way to go.

So of course I had left both pairs at home and had to do the whole thing in jeans. It was mortifying and I wanted to die.

Plus, I have really cute legs, and I had been counting on them to give me an edge.

One very fascinating thing was how multiethnic the squad and squad hopefuls were. Of about thirty people in the room, exactly five were white. Given that the gay community tends to draw racial lines very strongly, this was both surprising and heartwarming.

Also heartwarming was the fact that these were the queeniest queens ever to queen their way down the pike.

Now, nobody who spends more than three seconds in my company can say that I am in any way a paragon of masculinity. But next to some of these guys, I was positively Schwarzenegger-esque. My gay mentor, the first person I came out to and the guy who helped me be okay with everything, was also incredibly queeny, and so in a very real and very comforting way, this felt like home.

I really don’t understand it at all. Given the fact that I hate everyone, you’d think that cheerleading was the very last thing on earth I would enjoy doing. But there I was, clapping and jumping and shouting “Go, New York, let’s go!” and “New York, let’s hear it! Yell go, fight, win!” and having the time of my life. It could be a Molière play: The Misanthrope Cheerleader.

Of course, since I am insanely competitive, I spent the entire time with a look of grim concentration on my face, hoping that my cohorts would trip or fall while I got everything right. Every once in a while I would remember that I was supposed to be cheering, and I would grin like a madman for a minute or two, and then I would go back to wishing my competitors ill.

The one thing that makes me sad is that this is clearly not going to be the place where I meet my soul mate.

They’re bottoms, to a man.