Dancer from the Dance

"Like the Genet and the Hollinghurst books, it has a sumptuous, beautiful, poetic style, which isn’t really present in Maurice or A Single Man but which I think is a characteristic of gay writing in general. Anyway, Dancer from the Dance has some of the most beautiful, lyrical writing, plus it’s very, very funny. It’s about Anthony Malone who is an ex-lawyer who comes from the Mid-West to New York in order to have a gay lifestyle; to dance at discos and to have lots and lots of sex. You have to remember this is a book from before the Aids era so it was the golden age of promiscuity. He’s described as being beautiful and everybody who’s gay desires him. The other main character, who barely knows him, is called Andrew Sutherland and he’s a drag queen and a speed freak and he’s very funny. He lives on Madison Avenue and is fascinated by Malone. One thing he wants to do is sort of sell Malone as a potential mate for somebody who’s rich and clean up from the transaction. At the end of the book he overdoses and Malone disappears and the Everard Baths, a large sauna of that period, burns down, killing many people. That really happened, historically. Yes, in the same way that The Great Gatsby sums up its era. It is very influenced by Fitzgerald, who is one of Holleran’s favourite writers. Yes, still beautifully. He wrote a book called Grief a few years back, which was a superb book. It’s about an older gay man who’s been nursing his parents, who have just recently died, and who’s now cut adrift and who returns to Washington DC and is living in the house of an old friend of his who has become entirely celibate because he’s afraid of Aids – he’s in mourning for his life, as you might say. It’s a very sad book, which is also, oddly enough, a lot about Mary Lincoln, [President] Lincoln’s wife, who went mad after he and one of her children died. She became a shopaholic. She bought so many clothes her children had to have her institutionalised or else she would have dissipated their entire fortune. Anyway, it’s a sort of tribute to Mary Lincoln and a meditation on what it’s like to outlive all the people you love."

"In my twenties I began to understand that I was gay. I did not want to be gay. I fought it very hard. And the reason for that was not that I was prejudiced against gay people, or thought it was a sin. It’s that I did not want to live in what I thought was the dark underworld of homosexual life in the 70’s and 80’s. One of the first books I read in that period was this book, Dancer from the Dance , by Andrew Holleran – which is actually a pseudonymous name. It was published in 1978 and is a very powerful, very poetic, evocation of gay life in the 1970s, pre-AIDS. And what it highlights is the extreme unsettledness of gay life – the transience, the fluidity of relationships. They’re not even really relationships in many ways. Just a lot of sex. And to me that was very scary. I didn’t realize it at the time but in hindsight what Holleran was depicting so vividly is a world without marriage, a world without family bonds and family commitments. It is a poetic book and it is, in many ways, an affectionate book. But it captures a moment in history when you’ve got the emergence of an entire culture of people for whom free love is legal, but marriage is unthinkable. And family is, in many cases, rejected as a kind of bourgeois obstruction. It struck me much more as a dystopia than anything else."

"I’m trying to remember how I found this book, because it gave me a sense of gleeful discovery, like it was this secret I’d been lucky enough to be party to. I think it was well-regarded when it was published, but I feel it’s been neglected since then, so it’s nice that I get to talk about it here and champion it a bit. It depicts gay New York in the 1970s, and it’s set on Fire Island, but also in downtown Manhattan night clubs. The images I retain from it are these ecstatic, sweaty, dancing bodies, and then deserted, deep, snowy, freezing Manhattan streets, and that feverish contrast between an underground world—literally and figuratively—of joy, release and sexual freedom and these cold, empty, dodgy, dangerous New York streets. It’s a love story and it’s written in this really lush, heady prose. It has this exquisite elegiac air, which obviously compounds the poignancy of the tragedy of Aids and the way that this huge swathe, this generation of people, were lost in New York—and elsewhere. The book is pre-Aids, but reading it now, there is of course a retroactive sense of tragedy. I often think if I could go back in time I’d choose New York of the 80s, the era of David Mancuso’s Loft and Paradise Garage and Area . Hopefully there will always be ecstatic gatherings of people in New York. Hopefully there will always be places where people dance. New York is a city of immigrants. You become a New Yorker through being in New York, not through having been born in New York. I don’t know what an insider would look like. What makes you a self-defined insider is probably money, which does seem more egregious than ever in New York right now, and perhaps in London too: a widening gulf. To live in Manhattan, you basically have to be very rich. “If I could go back in time I’d choose New York of the 80s, the era of David Mancuso’s Loft and Paradise Garage and Area” Having an outsider protagonist is often a default of fiction because it allows the narrator to observe things more clearly and acutely. I think that’s why so many novels, New York ones and otherwise, have an outsider sense in them. It’s almost a function of craft more than anything else: if the story were narrated from the perspective of an insider there would be a kind of obliviousness, unless it was a particularly attuned insider…"