May 30, 2008  |  By: GREG MARZULLO  | COMMENTS     

If you’ve ever found enlightenment on the dance floor, at a Broadway musical or knitting in public, then Joel Derfner’s new book, “Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever,” just might be your manifesto.

In 2005, Derfner came out with the delightfully acerbic “Gay Haiku” (“The salmon’s divine,/But I’m afraid we can’t stay —/ I fucked our waiter” being one of many observations on gay adult life expressed through the Japanese poetic form), but this is his first foray into a longer work.

While “Swish” might sound like a playful romp through one queen’s attempt to embody every stereotype possible — gay cheerleader, musical theater composer, whore of Babylon — beneath the showers of gay glitter lie the author’s insightful discoveries about himself, suggesting that all experiences, when lived with authenticity, lead to a possibility for greater self-actualization.

“Those connections are there for everybody who does anything, and it’s just a matter of whether somebody chooses to explore the connections,” Derfner tells the Blade.

A searing self-analysis is one of the memoir’s hallmarks. No experience remains unexamined, but that awareness comes at the price of not having some inner peace.

“It can be very difficult for me to just enjoy something,” Derfner says, adding that he wishes sometimes his brain “would just shut the fuck up.”

BENEATH THE BOOK’S wit —which is plentiful and often laugh-out-loud funny — are deep emotional struggles (one passage deftly takes the comic wind out of any blustery jokes about mental illness). Self-loathing — the bugaboo of many a gay man — takes on almost epic proportions in Derfner’s life, leading the reader, at times, to wonder how he makes it through the day.

“I think that wounds don’t completely heal, they can’t completely heal, because if you expected to be completely whole and unscarred, then you would be a mess all the time.”

Only in rare moments does the Derfner of “Swish” seem to find some sense of contentedness with where he is in life (surprisingly, one of these times is after he finishes a stint as a go-go dancer, an episode that seemingly allows him to extend a kind of compassionate magnanimity to others and by extension to himself). But on the heels of every even keel comes a fresh bout of anxiety about not achieving personal perfection.

“My therapist says, ‘I don’t understand why you need to be perfect.’ It’s not that I need to be perfect — it’s that I need to be better than everyone else,” Derfner says. “Part of me believes that perfection is possible, and I think that’s a very insidious, dangerous thing to believe … I’m waiting to stop believing in it.”

Throughout the book, Derfner sees perfection in others (usually the younger, supposedly cuter and not necessarily more talented), but by writing the book, he says he was able to view various segments of his life in a broader context.

“A couple people have said, ‘Oh, it’s so amazing how much you reveal,’ … it’s not like I’m saying I killed babies, it’s not like I’m saying I pushed old ladies into the path of oncoming traffic. The feelings I’m talking about are the feelings everybody has. … I don’t have any friends who haven’t felt deeply envious and deeply insecure. To me, it’s a universalizing kind of thing.”