Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran
This creepy, beautiful novel, one of the most significant pieces of LGBT writing, is a seriocomic memory of things past—and so tragically present. It tells the story of Malone, a charming young guy who is looking for love in the burgeoning gay scene in New York. Malone searches far and wide for meaningful company, from Fire Island’s empty parks and extravagant orgies to Manhattan’s Everard Baths and late-night discos. Sutherland, a campy archetypal queen and one of the most iconic figures in modern fiction, is the person he finds.
Dancer from the Dance is real, daring, absurd fiction told in a voice that is simultaneously near to laughter and tears. It is hilarious, smart, and ultimately devastating.
Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran
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It takes place on Fire Island as well as at nightclubs in midtown Manhattan and portrays homosexual New York in the 1970s. The images from it that stick with me are these sweaty, dancing, ecstatic bodies, followed by deserted, deep, snowy, freezing Manhattan streets, and that feverish contrast between an underground world of joy, release, and sexual freedom—both literally and figuratively—and these chilly, empty, dubious, dangerous New York streets. It’s a love story, and the wording is incredibly lush and evocative. It has this lovely elegiac quality, which undoubtedly heightens the sorrow of Aids and the way that this entire generation of people lost their lives in New York—among other places.
Malone is our Gatsby, and the scene is set in the 1970s, as New York’s gay scene was just starting to take off. We learn the type of novel this is less than 20 pages into the book: it’s about “doomed queens,” “why life is unhappy,” and “what people do for love—gay or not.”
Like The Great Gatsby, a narrator is an anonymous person who is simply observing the stunning and imposing Malone. Sutherland, a seasoned “queen,” adopts Malone under her wing and looks out for him as if he were a best friend. Malone initially romanticizes the thought of falling in love, but he soon grows weary, realizes that this is just a wishful illusion, and accepts a life of vapid hedonism.
Malone and Sutherland’s lives are one big party full of sex, drugs, and dance. Holleran, however, portrays the hollow melancholy and fruitless longing that lie underneath all the surface beauty and sensual pleasures, just as Fitzgerald did when he revealed the gloomy core of the fashionable 1920s.
The plot is heartfelt and melancholy, and the prose is exquisite and evocative. It is a lovely piece of fiction about two closest friends leading the only lives they are familiar with.
