24 : O_IT f'lfune A2001 I-’-* a,wi,,e... gigaeeaaa A 2, {W oance ” BY ERNIE MCLEOD The prologue to Andrew Holleran’s “Dancer from the Dance” consists of a series of letters between two gay men, one of whom has fled the 70’s New York gay scene for “The Deep South.” the other of whom has decided to write “a gay novel” chronicling their passing youth. These letters, in addition to pro- viding a context for the novel and set- ting its often catty tone, serve also as a disclaimer. The aspiring novelist tells his friend he has no interest in success- ful fags, only failures: “So you see I’ve written about a small subspecies only, I’ve written about doomed queens . . . . THAT is what I want to write about— why life is SAD. And what people do for Love (everything)—whether they’re gay or not.” “Dancer from the Dance” was pub- lished in 1978, well into the hedonistic gay disco era, but at a time when realis- tic portrayals of gay characters in fic- tion were virtually nonexistent. Of course, “realistic” is a relative term. As the prologue to the novel suggests, Holleran (who writes only under a pseudonym) is showing the reader a narrow slice of urban gay life. However, because gay life of any kind was so absent from fiction at the time, “Dancer” became falsely representative of a whole generation, one of the early must-read novels for any young man coming out in the 1980’s. Today, “Dancer” is both revered as having laid the foundation for unapolo- getically gay contemporary fiction and lambasted for creating an urban “ghet- to” mold from which gay writers are still struggling to break free. I think it falls somewhere in between and is worth reading as an important time cap- sule and for Holleran’s lush, uncompro- mising prose. “Dancer from the Dance” basically I Quotable Dancer Awe would not stop dancing. We moved with the regularity of the Pope from the city to Fire Island in the summer, where we danced till the fall, and then, with thegeese flying south, the butterflies dying in the dunes, we found some new place in Manhattan and danced all winter there. I thought Malone was the handsomest man I d ever seen. But then I was in love with Falling in love is such a delicate matter, he said, lighting up a Gauloise. Really like timing a roast. half those people, and I never said hello or good-bye to any of them. tells the story of Malone and Sutherland, the former a goldenly beau-. tiful young man who discovers his sex- uality and embarks on a “career in love” amid the burgeoning 70’s gay circuit scene, the latter a sharp-witted queen of the scene who takes Malone under his wing. More than that, though, the novel describes a new gay world where, for a — few moments at least, young men believed they had escaped to a sexually liberated paradise beneath the spinning disco ball. Holleran passionately evokes the romantic idealism of this ephemeral paradise while scoming its shallowness: “They were bound togeth- er by a common love of a certain kind of music, physical beauty, and style- all the things one shouldn’t throw an ounce of energy pursuing, and some- times throw away a life pursuing.” Though “Dancer” was written and set in the 70’s, it has a haunted, elegiac quality that seems to foreshadow the AIDS epidemic, adding an eerie bite to its pathos and humor. Later Holleran works reveal that this hauntedness is natural to his style, but it’s impossible to read “Dancer” now without feeling Further Fiction by Andrew Holleran: 1983 Nights in Aruba 1996 The Beauty of Men 1999 In September, the Light Changes: The Stories of Andrew Holleran sightout . ROUGH MUSIC by Patrick Gale David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell 1840-1918 by David Deitcher and Stephen Yenser 21 Church Street Open Seven Days 863-8326 Edmund White . THE GIRLS: SAPPHO GOES TO HOLLYWOOD by Diana McLe|Ian . I'M THE ONE THAT I WANT by Margaret Cho . FROMMER’S GAY AND LESBIAN EUROPE . IN MAREMMA: LIFE IN A HOUSE IN SOUTHERN TUSCANY by . DEAR FRIENDS: AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS OF MEN TOGETHER, 7. A YEAR FULL OF MOONS by'MadeIyn Arnold 8. JAMES MERRILL: COLLECTED POEMS edited by JD. McCIatchy 9. THE WORLD OF NORMAL BOYS by K.M. Soehnlein 10. LOSS WITHIN LOSS: ARTISTS IN THE AGE OF AIDS edited by the shadow ofAIDS on its pages. At the same time, comparing the novel to the allegedly ground breaking “Queer as Folk," one realizes that the more things change, the more they remain the same. 20—pIus years separate these two cultur- al milestones, yet they mine, for better or worse, much the same territory. Personally, I avoided “Dancer from the Dance” for 20-plus years. As a young person unsuccessfully struggling to envision life as a gay man, I didn’t want to know about the bitchy, one- night-stand (or less) realm of Fire Island disco queens. Its campy dia- logue, naughtier than but not dissimilar to “Will & Grace” quips today, would have been almost as depressing to me as the repeated descriptions of tea room trolling. Malone’s initial emergence from years of self-enforced celibacy into the arms of an adoring male lover would have fueled my own equally unrealistic romantic ' dreams, but his subsequent disillusionment and down- fall might have reinforced my view that the closet was preferable to such an existence. In other words, “Dancer from the Dance,” like all of Holleran’s work, is far too bleak to be a gay pep talk. The good news is that nowadays, with many more books (not to mention TV shows, movies, and real-life role models) out there, it doesn’t have to be. It can be what it is: an often gorgeously sad, wickedly funny, unflinchingly honest look at what it was like to be exuber- antly gay but less than proud. The other good news is that Holleran is still writ- ing, the fiercely wary eye he once cast upon the dance now focussed on what happens when the dance is long over but the desire for love refuses to quit. tome