I just finished Dancer From The Dance by Andrew Holleran. What I thought was going to be an annoying gay novel turned out to be a life changing read. I've been finding many life changing reads recently. Which is no surprise when Joan Didion is leading the way!
This novel has stabbed deep. It has kept me awake all night. It has made me pause while reading. It has made me weep. Written in the 1970s, it is just as prevalent today. Except the Romance is just gone from Gay NYC. We still fuck each other repeatedly and without slowing down. Now we have Manhunt and Craig's List!
We're no longer truly poor. Holleran makes a big point of saying how Bohemian and poor the gay men of NYC were. Go to Fire Island and no one there is anything less than a Financial Banker. We no longer know what it's like to starve. While the East Village is hardly a place to lose oneself, there are certain streets you could disappear forever in. I'm not speaking of any streets located near the Whole Foods.
To leave this world the way Malone does! So beautiful and surreal. When the book ended, I just felt lighter. Something snapped inside my head. It just made everything seem okay. How could Holleran predict what would happen to us? We're so similar, but it's all changed so much. I am not even in the world that Holleran described. I'm more like the Poet who appears on page 164 and then leaves for the rest of the novel.
I've seen into this world, I know what it holds. What happiness and sadness can come from it. About 65% of this book I was afraid to continue with because I saw myself. My mindset in Malone. I know this is probably a very common occurrence to any gay man (especially in New York City) who reads this novel.
Lastly, two different quotes that I loved:
pgs. 244-245
You can't love eyes, my dear, you can't love youth, you can't love summer ducks that washed us out of out tenements into the streets like water falling over rocks—no, dear, madness that way lies. You must stick to the earth, always, you must love another man or woman, a human lover whose farts occasionally punctuate the silence of your bedroom in the morning and who now and then has bad moods that must be catered to.
That lover could possibly have matched what Malone had stored up in his imagination? Or any of us, for that matter. We were lunatics, I'm sorry to say.
pgs. 249-250
I used to say there were only seventeen homosexuals in New York, and we knew every one of them; but there were tons of men in that city who weren't on the circuit, who didn't dance, didn't cruise, didn't fall in love with Malone, who stayed home and went to the country in the summer. We never saw them. We were addicted to something else: something that lived with so long it had become a technique, a routine. That was the real sin.
