Swish
A Quest
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
As emotional as it is funny, Swish is the moving account of one man's journey from stereotype to truth.
Joel Derfner is a knitter, an aerobics instructor, a cheerleader, a go-go dancer, and a musical theater composer, but when he realizes one day that he's a walking gay cliché, he embarks on a quest for deeper meaning. Confronting the demons of his past at an LGBT summer camp, using the Internet to "meet" men (many, many men), or going undercover to a conference of ex-gays, he discovers that what he's looking for—and sometimes even finds, hidden under the surface of everyday life—is his own identity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Derfner (Gay Haiku) recounts his forays into indignity, knitting and unlikely friendships in this engaging if uneven memoir. Derfner's affectionate portraits of the men he met at a Christian homosexual conversion retreat and his account of his dueling desires to accept them or shepherd them toward self-acceptance provide welcome gravity in a book that flirts with more substantive issues of intimacy, identity and masculinity but never fully engages them. The book's conversational tone suffers from a heavy reliance on hyperbole, and the author's carefully cultivated campy persona feels tiresomely derivative and forced. And while Derfner's foibles losing his aerial cheerleading position to more capable females, making only $5 in his first night as a go-do dancer are amusing, his kiss-and-tell accounts of hookups and bad sex rarely rise above their own prurience. The most forceful ruminations arise gracefully from unlikely sources: memories of his musical theater education digress into a discussion encompassing concentration camp artwork, ancient Hebrew concepts of creation and the Columbia space shuttle explosion. Derfner's essays on his struggle to form meaningful relationships benefit more from his emotional intelligence than his wit.
