Swish

by Joel Derfner

  And I don’t know how the two sides, acting in good faith, can ever reach an agreement, because it comes down to whether God said so or not. And if you believe that God said man shall not lie with mankind as with a woman, it is an abomination, well, then no amount of argument is going to change your mind. And if you believe that God doesn’t interfere on such a microscopic level with humanity, or that He doesn’t give a fuck about us, or that He has never existed at all, then nothing is going to convince you that if you disobey Him you are bound for the Pit.

  I had foolishly given my e-mail address to my swimming companions, and two days after my return to Manhattan I got a message from Rob, informing me that I was a cool guy, that he thought he could learn a lot from me, and that he was impressed with my openness and honesty.

  Two days later I got a message from Bill hoping my trip home had been safe.

  Three days after that I got a message from Louis saying he didn’t want to lose track of me.

  These e-mails sat in my in-box for weeks, torturing me in twelve-point Helvetica type. On the one hand, I wanted to stay in touch with Rob and Bill and Louis, so I could show them that they had options. I fantasized about a growing intimacy with them, an intimacy that led to New York visits during which they spent time with me and Mike and realized they could be gay and happy, visits during which they broke free of the chains with which they had allowed themselves to be shackled.

  But I always ran up against the fact that any good such an example might do them would be destroyed utterly when my book was published and they read it and they found out that I had been deceiving them all along. “I lied to people to make them like me,” I moaned to my friend Sarah.

  “We ALL lie to people to make them like us,” she shouted in frustration.

  Except that I had also unintentionally infused my conference interactions with a great deal of truth. Yes, I was practicing a deception. But in the end I did show them who I was, and I did come to care about them deeply. How was jumping out over the Asheville River a lie? How was putting my hand on Louis’s neck when he was weeping a lie? How was laughing a lie?

  I wished I had never given any of them my e-mail address. I called my father for advice five times a day. I talked to my therapist about the issue and found him singularly unhelpful, so I got a new therapist, who was no better. I ordered a copy of Sissela Bok’s Lying but it got lost in the mail.

  I still haven’t answered the e-mails.

  That, more or less, is what I wrote during the summer after I got back from the Exodus Freedom Conference, and I thought it was the end of the story.

  It wasn’t.

  A few weeks after I finished a first draft, Rob e-mailed me again to tell me he had found my website and read about my book, Gay Haiku. “Imagine me, knowing a famous author,” he wrote. “If you write a play about the crazy Exodus crowd, please get a good actor to play me.”

  “The game is over,” said Mike when I showed him Rob’s e-mail. “He knows why you were there.” Something frozen in me began to melt.

  “It was great to get to know you in Asheville,” I wrote back. “I may just write something about the Exodus crowd. And I’ll get Tom Cruise to play you.” I attached a photograph of myself playing softball at the gay summer camp from which I had just returned. “Let me know if you’re ever in New York and I’ll show you the town.”

  “Sorry, brother,” he responded, “but you just don’t seem very ‘gay’ to me. You did not have any fear of the water in NC and were quite daring on that rope swing. Now you send me a picture of you looking like a natural at home plate.” I did not tell him that I looked like a natural only because a lesbian had adjusted my stance.

  As Rob and I continued our intercontinental correspondence, I made sure to include subtle references to my boyfriend and our life together, to keep before him the idea that it might be possible for a gay person to find intimacy at places other than rest stops. “Don’t be too aggressive with him,” warned Mike. “You don’t want him to shut down.”

  Rob sent me a frustrated e-mail about a doctor in Cádiz he’d become friends with who wanted to be more than friends, and I sent him a supportive response. He wrote back, “I wish I could give you a big hug right now!” He totally has a crush on me, I thought.

  I told Mike to watch his step. “There’s a guy in Spain who’d be happy to wash the dishes if I asked him to,” I said.

  But as the months went by it began to dawn on me that Rob really didn’t know I had been undercover at the conference. I was once again tortured by guilt but this time the decision was much easier to make; I had maintained an emotional bond with him, and I owed him the truth. I dropped an offhand remark into a subordinate clause in my next e-mail that left no room for doubt (“Since I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that I was at the conference doing research for a book…”).

  He didn’t answer.

  He still didn’t answer.

  He continued not to answer.

  “I’m not sure what you’re feeling about me,” I wrote finally, my fingers trembling, “but if we aren’t in touch again I just want to tell you that in the short time we spent together I grew to admire you deeply.”

  His response came almost immediately. “Lighten up, my friend,” he wrote. “My silence only means that I’m overworked. You did a great spy job. I was honest when I said that you have a piece of my heart. And through our e-mails that piece has stayed alive.” He wrote a little bit more about Jesus and ended with, “Keep searching for Truth.”

  I burst into tears in the middle of Starbucks.

  We stayed in touch, and in April he told me his summer traveling schedule had him laying over in New York for a few days in July, so naturally I insisted that he stay with us. I joked to Mike about how excited I was to realize my conversion fantasy. I started planning menus; I investigated various tours of the city; I bought tickets to Wicked, the Broadway musical that tells a different Wizard of Oz story, in which Glinda and the Wicked Witch of the West start out as school roommates and best friends. “If a musical about the Wicked Witch of the West doesn’t turn him gay,” I said, “then nothing will.”

  He arrived and hung out with us. We went to my favorite Thai restaurant. He came to the gym with me. I cooked chicken with pineapple-jalapeño salsa, and peach Melba for dessert. We got caught in a downpour. We went to Central Park and took photographs. He asked my advice about the doctor in Cádiz; I told him he didn’t have to stay friends with this guy just to be nice. He told me he had been in touch with Louis, who was now back in the lifestyle and had a boyfriend, something I was very happy to hear. I asked Rob if he believed that people who don’t believe in Jesus are going to hell, and he said that, if they’ve had the opportunity to believe and chosen not to, then yes, they’re going to hell. I asked if that included me and he said no, Jews are a special case.

  Then, the night before he left, we went to the theater. I had seen Wicked before, and I was looking forward to sharing it with Rob. Even if he didn’t want to be gay, I thought, how could he not love a show that portrays the Wicked Witch of the West as a spunky young heroine (named Elphaba) who meets the Wizard, realizes he is waging a perfidious war against the citizens of Oz, and sets herself against him with a power she has barely begun to understand?

  Just as I had expected, Rob was mesmerized by the spiky Elphaba and her sparkling rival Glinda. I realize now that I was watching with only half my mind; the other half was reeling with metaphor. Some of it I had expected. We were watching a show about a character who was not like other people and shunned because of it; a character who, after spending much of her adolescence hoping to fit in with everybody else, decided to accept herself for who she was; a character who, hidden behind a black hat and a broomstick and a mask of green skin, found the freedom to choose for herself who she wanted to be. This was the archetype of the coming-out tale—whether gay or ex-gay, anybody in our society who has felt homosexual attractions knows how the story goes. Hell, anybody in our society w
ho has felt different knows how the story goes. My decision to dress as a witch for Hallowe’en at age five had been wiser than I knew.

  What I hadn’t expected upon walking into the theater, though, was that I would see my friendship with Rob reflected in the friendship between the two witches onstage. Of course there was the obvious: from vastly different backgrounds, with vastly different self-images, heading in vastly different directions, they forged nonetheless a bond as real as it was unlikely. But as I watched them struggle, Glinda against the seductive safety of being loved, Elphaba against the small-mindedness of those around her; as I watched them yearn, Glinda to be good, Elphaba to belong; as I watched them fail, Glinda for lack of courage, Elphaba for lack of facility, I grew less and less able to figure out which one of them was Rob and which one of them was me.

  When the two girls barricaded themselves in a tower against the Wizard’s guards, however, I abandoned the attempt, because we had almost reached the act-one finale, to my mind the high point of the show. Glinda urged her friend to apologize to the Wizard so everything would be okay again, but Elphaba responded that something had changed in her, that she knew it was time to leap. “I think I’ll try defying gravity,” she sang, and kept on singing. And then, in the middle of the song, for one exhilarating moment, Glinda seemed on the verge of joining Elphaba in the quest to bring freedom to the land of Oz and to seize a share in that freedom. The witches’ hands gripped Elphaba’s broomstick as if they belonged to one woman.

  And then the energy onstage shifted, and Glinda stepped back. “I hope you’re happy, now that you’re choosing this,” she sang, and her best friend answered, “You, too.” The Wizard’s men broke into the room; Glinda rushed to block their way but they pushed roughly past her. It didn’t matter, though, because the girl who would become the Wicked Witch of the West had begun, for the first time, to fly. Swathed in billowing midnight, soaring higher and higher above the stage, as Glinda and the Wizard’s soldiers looked up in awe, she sang that if they cared to find her they should look to the western sky. “I’m flying high, defying gravity!” she exulted, and then her melody became wordless and from high above us her voluminous black robe spread and spread until its eldritch shadow covered the entire stage and the audience’s applause exploded before the curtain had even begun to fall.

  “So?” I said, turning to Rob and wiping my eyes as the houselights came up. “What do you think?”

  “Wow,” he said, “this is amazing. What a way to pop my Broadway cherry.” I laughed. “They have great voices. If I get the CD out in the lobby, will it be these people singing?”

  “No. But the people on the CD will be just as good, if not better.”

  “Back in Cádiz,” said Rob, segueing into some anecdote about his next-door neighbor that had nothing to do with witches or Oz or homosexuality, and I felt a rush of disappointment that I had to work very hard to keep off my face.

  And then it hit me: My line to Mike about the Wicked Witch of the West turning Rob gay had been only mostly a joke. Some very small part of me had really thought that, when Rob saw Elphaba rise from the ground, singing “It’s time to try defying gravity,” he would smack his forehead, turn to me, and say, “Now I see the truth!” Faced with incontrovertible proof of my point of view, he would have to surrender; he would abandon his narrow idea of God and become more than he had ever imagined he could be.

  But we weren’t in my own personal dimension, we were in the Gershwin Theatre on Fifty-first Street; and this wasn’t Purim, it was a regular day, neither Mordecai nor Esther in sight; and Rob had reacted to the enjoyable spectacle before him with, well, enjoyment. I already knew how the show ended: the witches’ friendship changed both of them for the better, but Elphaba stayed wicked and Glinda stayed good, whatever those words meant in the version of the world onstage in front of us.

  I had wanted to rescue Rob at the theater just as he had wanted to rescue me at the Exodus conference. But now I think that in fact neither one of us can be rescued. If he comes to think differently about his sexuality, it will not be because of anything I have said or done; he will simply have come to think differently about the universe and our place in it. The same goes for me: I cannot say for certain that I will never believe in Jesus—after all, I once said I would never end a sentence with a preposition or wear rayon—but I’m pretty sure it would take more than a weekend visit to a friend to do the trick. Every one of us is lost in a different way, and the only one who can save Rob is Rob, and the only one who can save Jon is Jon, and the only one who can save me is me. As we stumble around searching for Truth, the best we can do is to remind one another, when we collide, that there are moments in which we are not alone.

  “Hey, should we go get some snacks?” I asked Rob as we sat in the theater.

  “Sure,” he said, and we went out into the lobby and stood together eating M&M’s until it was time to go back in for the second act.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My first thanks must go to Joy Tutela, the sexiest agent in New York, to David Black, the second-sexiest agent in New York, and to Andrew Corbin, the sexiest editor in New York, for their faith in this book and in me. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read, it is to them and to the sexiest assistants in New York, John Burke, David Larabell, Darya Porat, and Johnathan Wilber, that you owe your thanks.

  Without Sarah Rose, precious adviser, colleague, and friend, this book wouldn’t exist.

  Without Victoria Cain, I probably wouldn’t exist.

  Bob Alpert, Jon Barrett, David Buscher, John Crook, Rob Hartmann, Phil Higgins, Andy McQuery, Pamela Merritt, John Morgan, Dan Rhatigan, Julia Sullivan, Jennifer Tattenbaum, Greg Yoder, and the members of the Sackett Street Writers Non-Fiction Workshop (www.sackettworkshop.com), Ryan Carrasco, Abigail Carroll, Beth Cranwell, Jessica DuLong, Beth Greenfield, Emily Helfgot, Lori Hurley, Laura Longhine, Maureen Miller, Helen Newman, Liz Skillman, and Samantha Walters, gave me invaluable critiques on what they read and forgave me for hating their guts when they didn’t tell me everything was already perfect. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Lauren Naturale, whose patience is as everlasting as her insight is keen, and to Nancy Rawlinson (www.nancyrawlinson.com), who knew not only exactly what the writing needed but also exactly how to tell me.

  Without the behind-the-scenes work of Ruth Childs, Bob de Luna, Chris Keane, Erik Liberman, Anya Nawrocky, Matthew Phillp, and Veronica Vera of Miss Vera’s Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls, many of the pages between these covers would be blank.

  Ted Conover provided excellent ethical advice at the right moment. Tommy Semosh provided excellent advice on both publicity and facial hair.

  If Swish is not riddled with errors when it veers from its main subject—that is to say, me—it is because of Michael Bailey, Michael Bussee, Gene McAfee, Noam Pianko, Robert Spitzer, Warren Throckmorton, and Dean Wendt.

  I must thank Steven Best, Alfred Kleinbaum, Jonathan Portera, Cheryl Whaley, and Eric Wolff for keeping me sane, literally.

  I feel especially grateful to those who played central roles in the stories I’ve told: Glenn Bassett, Susan Clinkenbeard, Bill Cole, Sasha Derfner, Gina Fried, Andrew Jonas, Holly Lisanby, Antonio Montovani, Oscar Morales, Daniel Nardicio, Kerry Riffle, and Jonathan Vatner. I owe a particular debt to the men and women I met at the Exodus, International Freedom Conference. I hope they find the peace they are looking for.

  My brother Jeremy was there when I started and, though he’s moved across the continent, he has supported me the whole time as if he were still living twenty feet away from me. Though I have forbidden my father, Armand, to read most of the chapters, he and his wife Mary—along with my in-laws, Ken, Ronnie, Cathy, and Dennis—have been more enthusiastic than I could ever have hoped for. Unfortunately my mother, Mary Frances, left this earth before I began writing, but her spirit infuses every page.

  Mindi Dickstein, Len Schiff, Rachel Sheinkin, and Peter Ullian have not only taught me most of what I know about writing
but also displayed extraordinary patience with the number of projects I’ve insisted on juggling.

  Fred Carl, Marie Costanza, Julianne Davis, Martin Epstein, Sean Flahaven, Karen Henderson, Danny Larsen, Robert Lee, Mel Marvin, Sybille Pearson, Sarah Schlesinger, Alex Zalben, and the Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program at NYU have given me a home.

  And last, and most, I want to thank Mike Combs, for more than I can ever say.

  ALSO BY JOEL DERFNER

  GAY HAIKU

  FOOTNOTES

  *1I saw the author of this e-mail three years later at a Margaret Cho concert and he looked terrible. He hadn’t gotten fat, but his face was lined and haggard and droopy enough to suggest years spent wandering the desert in search of the Promised Land. Far be it from me to suggest that he had the Promised Land within his grasp and that his present desiccation was merely the natural result of his failure to do anything about it when he had the chance.

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