I can’t remember when or how exactly I stumbled onto Joel Derfner’s A Search For Love in Manhattan, but I do know that I was so impressed by the quality of his writing that I spent the next few hours reading through the entire archives until I was fully caught up, and I’ve been reading faithfully ever since. Derfner’s new book Gay Haiku (which sprung out of a bunch of his blog posts) launched recently and he’ll be doing a reading/signing event in support of it tomorrow, Thursday May 26 at 7 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble on 22nd and 6th. Here’s a snippet from yesterday’s Gothamist interview:

The actual content of your gay haiku covers a wide range of topics, including your dating life, and even in that short format you are pretty forthright about some bad dates. Are you expecting to get any flak for any of the poems?
Yes, especially because I keep running into the people involved. I’ll get on the subway and there will be the guy with the pet tarantula. He won’t recognize me, but the instant I see him the whole terrible experience comes rushing back. I’m just hoping it’ll be like a Molière play; his audiences laughed hysterically without realizing they were the ones he was savaging. I hope the people involved will laugh without recognizing themselves. Or at the very least that they continue not to recognize me.