Losing Dorothy Parker

Writer and composer Joel Derfner realizes his childhood dream of acceptance has arrived -- at a cost.

By Joel Derfner

From The Advocate October 7, 2008

Five years ago, when I was 30, I started teaching a musical theater workshop for high school students. Given the subject, I wasn’t shocked to find that most of the male pupils were the sort of guys whose response to a football would be to cover it in glitter. My mandate was to teach these kids how to write musicals, but, recalling my own difficulties with teenage social life, I also looked forward to reassuring them that better things lay in store.

What became clear almost immediately, however, was that to these kids, being openly gay was about as remarkable an achievement as flossing. “My last ex-boyfriend…” trilled one 17-year-old; my staggering astonishment caused me to miss what he said next.

I came out at 15, but in 1989 -- in South Carolina—it was inconceivable that I’d ever begin a sentence with “my last ex-boyfriend.” I suspected that there were a few other boys my age who harbored feelings similar to mine -- a suspicion confirmed, I am pleased to note, with the passage of time. But on the few occasions I dared approach the subject, I was met with stony silence.

Luckily, I wasn’t forced to go through my teenage years alone; I did find a community of like-minded friends. But they weren’t my peers. They were a group of older men and women who congregated regularly in a chocolate store one of them owned. It was from these people that I learned how to duel à la Oscar Wilde, hurling epigrams like hatpins. With them I first saw The Women and gasped with delight to learn that most of its stars had been passed over for the part of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. Among them I understood there was a place in the world for a person like me.

But years later, the kids I was teaching didn’t need to search for a gay community, because their place in the world was already clear to them from watching, Will & Grace, talking to their gay next-door neighbor, and running into their ex-boyfriend. I was deeply moved: The future I had only dreamed of was coming to be.

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Derfner is the author of Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever.

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