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| photo: Chia Messina | |
Joel Derfner is a composer and writer living in New York City. He is or has been a knitter, cheerleader, step aerobics instructor, go-go boy and math teacher. His new book, Lawfully Wedded Husband: How My Gay Marriage Will Save the American Family, is from the University of Wisconsin Press (September 19, 2013).
On your nightstand now:
Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo. It taught me the value of revenge.
Your top five authors:
Of course my very favorite author is me. After that come, in alphabetical order, Jane Austen, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O'Connor and Oscar Wilde.
Book you've faked reading:
Everything in my sophomore year of high school, because I hated my English teacher. This included Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, and D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. Some of them I've read since, but talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Somebody once wrote me a fan e-mail, and at some point in our exchange he mentioned that he'd never read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I sent him a one-line e-mail saying I wasn't writing him back until he'd finished it. (He did, and although he didn't love it as much as he ought to have, we still had a fruitful correspondence.)
Book you've bought for the cover:
Mel Keegan's Fortunes of War, a gay romance novel set in 16th-century England. The cover showed a pirate ship with this unbelievably hot, bare-chested Spaniard and his lover, who looked exactly like me. My husband has yet to transform himself into an unbelievably hot, bare-chested Spaniard, but I live in hope.
Book that changed your life:
Brian McNaught's On Being Gay. I read it in ninth or 10th grade and felt for the first time that that I wasn't alone. I wrote him a fan letter--an actual letter, mind you; the Internet hadn't been invented yet--and he wrote back telling me to "continue to grow, to reach, to roar!" I still have that letter.
Favorite line from a book:
It's a tie between "Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!" from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Pride and Prejudice's "I have not the pleasure of understanding you. Of what are you talking?" I hate to use the same book twice, but if Jane Austen was more brilliant at 18 than I will be in innumerable lifetimes put together, then I guess I can at least give her credit for it.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, because in a sense I never even read it the first time. In looking for ideas for a theater project I came across a Masterplots version of it and was like, ooh, that sounds fabulous. Then I read it, and when I got to the end, instead of the extraordinary sense of awe and elevation and wonder I would have felt if I had been surprised by it, what I thought was, oh, right, just like Masterplots said. One of the saddest moments of my life, and high up on my list of things to go back and prevent once time travel is invented.
Is it true that your great-grandmother had an affair with George Gershwin?
Yes. "I hated him," my grandmother told me once. "He would come over and pound on the piano at all hours of the night, and I was eight and I just wanted to go to sleep."