Swish : My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and What Ended up Happening Instead

Written with wicked humor and keen insight, "Swish" is at once a hilarious look at contemporary ideas about gay culture and a poignant exploration of identity that will speak to all readers--gay, straight, and in between.

On Knitting


The two Englishmen were staring at the half-finished glove in my hands, aghast. “What is that?” the short one asked.

“I know it's a mess,” I rushed to apologize. I was lying. It was not a mess; it was perfect. But I had just arrived from the airport and I didn't want to offend them, as they were my hosts while I was in town for a small theater's production of a musical to which I had composed the score. The couple continued to stare in reproving silence at the work in my lap. “I've never done a glove before,” I continued desperately, “and the fingers are trickier than I expected, and they—”

“No!” the tall one interrupted, his voice quick with dismay. “It's not that. It’s that you’reknitting. Men don’t knit, young people don’t knit. Knitting is…something yourgrandmotherdoes!”

My mother's mother was a raging alcoholic who had been married seven or nine times (depending on whether you counted the annulment and the common-law bigamy), including once to a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee and once to a French royalist arms smuggler, so I felt I could safely assert that knitting was not a pastime she had ever enjoyed. “Besides,” I said defensively, “knitting is very fashionable in New York these days.”

“Well, this isn't New York,” the short one retorted, but something in my face must have inspired pity.

“All right,” said the tall one grudgingly. “Just as long as nobody sees you doing it in public.”

But it was already too late, as the tube ride from the airport had been a long one. To mollify them, I put the knitting away, and then we had sex. It was more than satisfactory, as far as that sort of thing goes, but I still didn’t trust them. What kind of people would disapprove of the manufacture of a pair of beautiful cable-stitch gloves, no matter by whose hand?


***

My friend Cynthia tried to teach me to knit in college. She was a good instructress, but no matter how relentlessly supportive she was I always ended up feeling as if Tomás de Torquemada had taken an especial interest in my hands. It became clear to me very soon that I would never create a garment. I was destined to buy my clothes forever from The Gap. In fact, I thought as I massaged my cramped, searing palms, I would never create anything; I would only be a barnacle on the seedy consumerist underbelly of humanity, sucking up resources and contributing nothing but the occasional second–rate witticism.

But years later, after my boyfriend Tom broke up with me, I thought,Why not try again?In the last two years, twenty-nine weeks, and four days not that I was counting or anything, I had mastered utterly the legerdemain required for the illusion that I was in a healthy relationship. What difficulty could winding pieces of string around each other pose my nimble fingers now?

So I signed up for a course at a yarn store called Gotta Knit. There were six students in the class: five women between the ages of forty-five and fifty-five and me. On the first night the teacher, a young woman named Mindy, put six balls of acrylic yarn on the table and told each of us to pick one. Five of the balls were pink and one was purple; I wanted the purple ball of yarn more than I ever wanted anything in my life, including the time I was at a charity auction and lost a bidding war for an autographed photo of Ralph Macchio and snuck in during dinner and stole it and left cash on the table to match the winning bid. But in Gotta Knit I held back out of politeness and somebody else swooped in and pounced on the purple ball, leaving me with one of the dumb pink ones just like everybody else. My immediate impulse was to push my rival out the window, but I did not want to go to pri

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Excerpted from Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and What Ended up Happening Instead by Joel Derfner
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