“Yes, being gay is just one of a thousand traits that make up my character, no more remarkable than my love of M&M's or my ability to mess up a room in fifteen seconds flat or my failure to understand the appeal of Luke and Owen Wilson.

But I believe that the desire to love and be loved is the strongest force on earth. And in that way, being gay affects every interaction in which straight people take part. Every human motive is in the end a yearning for companionship, and every act of every person on this planet is an effort not to be alone. ”
― Joel Derfner, Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever

“It is easy to see in retrospect that what I longed for was not a boyfriend but a version of me without my defects --- a man in whom I could see myself as flawless, a man whose jokes always caused riotous laughter instead of sometimes falling flat, whose German was fluent instead of passable, who actually knew everything instead of pretending to and then Googling it when he got home.”
― Joel Derfner, Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever