Joel Derfn­er is the author of Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Per­son Ever and What Hap­pened Instead and Gay Haiku, as well as arti­cles for The Advo­cate, Out, Genre, and Time Out: New York. Musi­cals to which he has com­posed the score have been pro­duced in Lon­don, New York, and var­i­ous cities in between (going counterclockwise).