For your reading enjoyment, an excerpt from Joel Derfner’s latest book:
Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Alive
“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
presentation of a show 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’re knitting. Men don’t knit, young people don’t knit. Knitting is . . .
something your grandmother does!”
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.” …
(To read more of this chapter, and the rest of the book–buy it here!)
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