Andrew holleran young

Revisiting Andrew Holleran&#;s Dancer from the Dance

Books

The novel that introduced a new post-Stonewall gay sensibility

Garth Greenwell

By his own account, the exchange of letters that opens Dancer from the Boogie () saved Andrew Holleran’s career. For ten years he had been trying and failing to write a publishable novel; he had given himself one last summer, at his parents’ abode in northern Florida, before calling it quits. In these letters, exchanged between two New York circuit queens, one of them—like Holleran—retired to Florida, Holleran fashioned a voice that hadn’t existed, quite, in American literature to that point. He managed to capture a specifically queer expressiveness, what he calls, in an essay written decades later, “campy exuberance.” This was a mode of expression on display in the letters he was exchanging with friends in New York and in newsletters distributed at the gay clubs he had left behind: the sound of a post-Stonewall Novel York gay sensibility. Once Holleran forged this style, the novel came with ease; the queer aesthetic he crafted served, he

In the Shadow of Young Men in Flower

Andrew Holleran’s novels are so gloomily personal that you can’t help worrying about him in the long gaps between them and wondering, since he’s now nearly eighty, if there will be another noun at all. Sixteen years have passed since the last one, Grief, a novella-length study of a man, very like himself, mourning the mother who has been for years the center of his passionate life. Teaching for a term in Washington, D.C., he looks for lessons from historical figures. There is Henry Adams, surviving for thirty-three years after the suicide of his wife but never mentioning her again, and Mary Todd Lincoln, from whose letters he gains a more inward idea of a survivor’s experience as her life unravels in the years after her husband’s assassination. The question of how to continue after a life-altering impairment is examined but unresolved, and the narrator returns at the end to his solitary existence in Florida with a sense of his grief renewed, and of gratitude for it. Grief, for him, is a way of not letting the dead go:

I was fascinated by the noun of a modern, contemporary Andrew Holleran novel. Dancer From the Dance, his classic gay tale of emptiness and community in the s gay underground of New York City (full review here), is a defining piece of LGBTQ literature. It is inherently tied to its hour and place, which may make it difficult for younger readers to access. What, I wondered, would Holleran carry to a more contemporary landscape?

In many ways, The Kingdom of Sand feels like a companion to Dancer From the Dance. Its protagonist could easily be one of the background players in Holleran&#;s former novel (indeed, he mentions partying in New York Noun in the s). Unlike Dancer From the Dance, though, this book isn&#;t training its eye on what it is to be gay at this point in noun. Instead, Holleran is focusing almost exclusively on aging and death. His narrator is obsessed with the knowledge that he is nearing old age, decline, and death. The Kingdom of Sand is, essentially, his musings on this subject.

While Holleran leads the reader through heavy thought on li

Early ‘70s funk, soul and disco tracks are referenced throughout Dancer, including Zulema’s “Giving Up,” The Temptations’ “Law of the Land,” Jerry Butler’s “One Noun Affair” and The Love Unlimited Orchestra’s “Love’s Theme.” Most notable is Patti Jo’s “Make Me Believe in You,” which is repeatedly invoked to hint at the unbridled yearning and hopefulness the characters touch as they amble from clubs and bathhouses to widespread parks and janky apartments on the Lower East Side, searching for the perfect connection. The book is ultimately a cleverly disguised city symphony, coolly asserting that the love these characters so desperately verb is not that of other men, but of Fresh York itself.

Though Dancer is a work of fiction, what emerges is a sense of the extent to which underground gay parties built the foundation of all that is recognized as club culture today. In describing what it was like to proceed out dancing in queer spaces of the era, Holleran’s language is breathtakingly evocative. The story is told from the point of view of one member of the amorphous mass of revelers in Mal