Author Archives: Joel Derfner

Well, that was certainly exhausting.

Not quite as exhausting to tell as to go through, but still.

Continued from two days ago.

We left the restaurant and started walking around the block. It’s slightly difficult to walk with one’s heart in one’s throat, but somehow I managed. Eventually he said, “I like you. And I’m really attracted to you. But . . . what’s going to be different this time?”

I started talking, stammering even more than I usually do when I’m nervous. I talked about the strong effect our conversation on Yom Kippur had had on me; I talked about my coming to see him in a new light; I talked about my understanding of what a blackguard I’d been. “I’m a different person than I was a year ago,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

“I mean, you can think about it, you don’t have to give me an answer now, or if your answer’s no I completely understand and—”

“No, I mean, okay, I’ll go out on a date with you.”

Then I burst into tears.

Which was the first time I’d done that in front of him, despite having dated him for six months. So I was already doing better on the emotional honesty front, as bursting into tears is something I find myself having the urge to do at least twelve times every day, but I always bottle it up.

So we’ve seen each other a few times since then, and I’ve had a really nice time (except for when I herniated, though I suspect that, with some fudging, not having to go to the emergency room can be counted as having a really nice time). I’m excited and nervous and terrified and full of hope and doubt.

And with that, you’re all current. So far, this story has no ending.

It’s just to be continued.

This is David with a bit of an emergency entry. Don

Isn’t chocolate yummy?

Continued from yesterday.

Of course my first impulse was to leap immediately into the street, into the path of oncoming traffic, and hope that there was a Mack truck very, very close by.

Paralyzed by cold and horror and guilt and shame and wishing I’d never been born, however, my body refused to act on this impulse, and so instead I sat there in silence, staring at my lap because naturally I was about as capable of looking him in the face as I was of sprouting wings and flying to the moon. I’m sure only a minute or two went by, but it sure as hell felt like I remained mute for the length of all the Cretaceous Period plus half of the Tertiary Period before I spoke.

“I’m trying to figure out what to say that won’t be meaningless,” I said.

“Just say the truth,” he said.

So I did.

And what followed was an extraordinary conversation about honesty and letting people in and fear and facing your emotions and telling other people what you really think. None of these things has ever been my forte. My M.O. is, in general, to tell people what I think they want to hear so that they won’t despise me when they find out who I really am. But in this case, there was no escape route open, there were no evasive tactics I could employ. I had to talk about what I actually felt.

And it was wonderful.

To detail the actual feelings would be too soporific for even the most avid readers, and, besides, they’re more or less contained in the narrative of this blog. So I’ll summarize: ambivalent, cavalier, affectionate, all mixed up together.

It turns out that, about a month before the conversation I’m writing about, he’d seen somebody’s profile on gay.com that had a link to that person’s blog; that blog in turn had a link to mine. He realized it was me after about two seconds—so much for the pretense of anonymity here—and went back to read the archives from the time we were dating.

In the end, he said (I’m paraphrasing somewhat), “I understand why you did what you did. You were just out of a serious relationship; you should have had ‘rebound’ stamped on your forehead. What upset me was that you didn’t tell me—I didn’t have informed consent.”

Finally, the cold made it impossible for us to continue the conversation, so we headed towards the subway. “At first I was furious,” he said. “But now I feel like it’s actually pretty funny.”

“Give me a month to get there,” I said. “Right now I just want to go home and throw myself out my window.”

“Don’t throw yourself out your window. You live on the second floor. You’ll just hurt yourself.”

The thing is that the next morning, when I woke up, I still felt great about having actually been honest in a difficult situation for once in my life. (I don’t mean to imply that I’m a pathological liar—though I’ve told more than my share of untruths, I’m speaking here of emotional honesty.)

And then I started thinking, wait, what if it wasn’t him who was the problem when we were going out?

What if it was me?

Could it be that my complete inability to let him in or trust him or show him any real part of myself or see any real part of him had something to do with why I felt it wasn’t working?

He does, after all, fit all of my requirements: he’s handsome, smart, funny, compassionate, stimulating, and a top. Furthermore, he’s a med student, and he says things like, “I can’t figure out whether I want to join Doctors Without Borders when I graduate or run a gay community health center.”

In the days following The Conversation, we hung out more frequently than we ever had when we were dating—he said that he felt a lot better having gotten things off his chest—and I found myself wanting more and more to try again, if he’d even remotely consider such a thing, that is, given the cad I’d turned out to be on the last go-round. So, in fact, this post was about him.

Eventually I realized that the only thing to do was to ask him. I was completely ready for rejection—what sane person, after all, would want to stick his finger in that pencil sharpener again?—but held out a slim hope that he might not be sane.

So we went to the movies (this time it was Runaway Jury, the quality of which augured better for the subsequent conversation than Underworld had) and then to dinner. I sat through the whole dinner completely distracted and unfocused, wanting at every moment to speak and being unable to. If I can just get one word out, I thought, I will have committed myself and I can finish.

So finally I got out “There’s,” thereby committing myself, and followed it with “something I want to talk to you about.”

“Okay,” he said.

The silence that followed this exchange lasted for eras, not just periods, making the silence described at the beginning of this post seem positively infinitesimal. Staring at the table, because once again I couldn’t look him in the face, I kept beginning:

“I . . . I wa— . . . I . . .”

And finally, from some place hidden in the depths of my psyche, I found a store of courage previously hidden from me; having found that courage, I screwed it to the sticking place and said:

“I want to ask you out on a date.”

He looked at me briefly without saying a word. Then he spoke:

“Let’s go for a walk.”

To be continued.

Those of you who’ve been reading my blog since the beginning, as well as those of you who have joined late in the game but who have read back through the archives, may remember E.S., a man whom I dated for about six months before breaking up with him. He thought we were something serious and I thought we were something casual—so casual, in fact, that, while dating him, I slept with half of Manhattan, singly and in groups, on film and off, and blogged about it all. (Those of you curious to know the full backstory can peruse the archives from February through September of 2002; they’re rather sparse, as I wasn’t posting daily then. Those of you interested in the short version or a brief refresher can look here, here, here, and here.)

In any case, after we broke up, E.S. and I remained friends. He was in Boston for much of last school year, getting yet another graduate degree; he came back to New York in June. Upon his return, we started hanging out again, this time platonically. Every once in a while, I’d think, “Gee, maybe I made a mistake breaking up with him—he’s a great guy, I have lots of fun hanging out with him,” etc., etc., but I’d always return to knowing that I’d made the right decision.

So a little over a month ago, we made the terrible mistake of going to see Underworld, which I knew would be bad but which I didn’t expect to be nearly as bad as it was. Furthermore, it was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, on which we traditionally fast from one sundown to the next. So I had to watch the damn thing without any candy or popcorn to distract me from its awfulness.

In any case, after the movie, we wandered around Union Square, talking about this and that, generally having a good time. Eventually I started getting cold, so I turned towards the subway. He said, “Actually, let’s sit down for a while, ’cause there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

Now, there is absolutely nothing that strikes more terror into my heart than hearing the last nine words of that sentence. So I sat down, quivering now both from the cold and in anticipatory dread of whatever awful thing he was going to force me to deal with.

In the event, I wasn’t quivering nearly enough.

Because what he said was, “I read your blog. All of it.”

To be continued.

Being sick and feeling rotten and thinking there’s no Theraflu in your apartment and then finding out that there actually is: it’s not quite heaven.

But almost.

I spent the day today performing with the gay cheerleaders at the Gay Life Expo. During a break I saw James Getzlaff from Boy Meets Boy exploring the Expo with Jai Rodriguez from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

The realization that the boundaries of reality TV are so permeable almost caused me to faint on the spot.

Luckily I regained my senses before I had to go up in a half liberty as part of a wolf wall.

Several years ago I wrote a very short musical about a guy coming out to his mother. It was hysterically funny, if flawed, but as there are very few production opportunities for ten-minute musicals, it has been lying in the desk drawer gathering dust.

Here is a lyric from it, sung by the mother.

Some Playboys would be nice and
We’ll sign you up for track.
We can throw away the Streisand.
We’ll get the minister’s advice and
Get you back.
Don’t worry; you will heal.
If you feel
You’re not okay,
You forgot some
Of the flotsam
Is departing
Starting
Today.

You’ll stay away from disco.
We’ll dress you all in plaid.
I’ll use lard instead of Crisco,
And we won’t visit San Francisco
Or your dad.
We’ll make this disappear;
You’re not queer,
You are not gay.
‘Cause you’re not having drama,
And, besides, you don’t tell mama;
You will not go to gay bars
And you’ll pick up girls at Zabar’s.
We’ll change your chromosome, oh,
You don’t have to be a homo!
Reinforce that
On the course that
We’ll be charting
Starting
Today!

It’s the most problematic song in the piece, because it’s not really funny so much as clever, and too clever by half, but still I kind of like it.

Everyone must go here immediately and click on “watch it now.”

Thanks to this man for the link. May his return to blogging be permanent.