Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran
This is a classic gay novel from 1978 that I had never read. A friend recently read it and was excited about it. He had an extra copy: one of those cases where you buy a book, don’t read it, forgot that you own it, and then buy it again. He gave his extra copy to me. On his recommendation and gift, I finally read it.
The novel is the story of a particular subset of gay men, living in New York, during the decade from 1968 to 1978. These are the guys who dance in the discos, starting from the time when disco was just a gay thing, through the time when disco was everybody’s thing, ending at the time disco became nobody’s thing any longer. The world included a lot of drugs and a lot of casual sex. The era of the 1970s was a liminal time for gay men. Post-Stonewall, gay men still trailed the shame and secrecy of the closet. A truly liberated gay life had yet to be created. None of the characters in the novel are out to their families. Few of them can imagine a future that might include a long-term partner, or a family. As a teenager in the 1970s,that’s how I felt: that gay liberation had been announced but hadn’t arrived. Indeed, the men in this scene can hardly conceive any life at all for a gay man once he’s lost the beauty of youth. That the characters in the novel constantly talk about their search for love, yet only look for it in physical beauty, forbear of long-term relationships, satisfy their sexual needs with anonymous sex in the parks, the subway restrooms, or the baths, and spend their twenties and thirties in an extended adolescence of no profession, poverty, and partying, is sad, actually, and makes for a rather sad book.
On the other hand, it’s a beautiful book. The writing is gorgeous. It was a pleasure to read. The sadness is also sweetened because the novel is also very funny in places. You can always count on a queen for a great one-liner. And the sadness is self-acknowledged by the author and the characters, so you feel for them. They know how sad it is, despite the fun of the dance, and the drugs, and the sex; they just can’t imagine anything better. The tragedy is that just as a different future started to open, AIDS struck, and we had to get through a decade and half of that.
The book begins with an exchange of letters between two men: one living in New York, one formerly of New York now retreated to rural Georgia, tired of the scene and ready for a different life. They sign their letters with made up names and address each other campily as “Ecstasy” or “Vision” or the like. The man in New York has written a novel, which he calls Wild Swans, about two men from their circle named Anthony Malone and Andrew Sutherland. The New York man asks his friend in Georgia if he will read the manuscript and then sends it to him.
Chapter One then, begins what we understand to be the text of the letter-writer’s novel. It begins in the present day, September of 1977, with the unnamed narrator traveling out to Fire Island to dispose of the belongings left behind by Malone who we presume has died. Chapter Two flashes back to 1971 and introduces a dance club called The Twelfth Floor. The narrator relates a series of conversations he overhears from the other end of a couch as various men take a break from dancing. Sutherland is there with a young man, the heir of a family who made a fortune in fertilizer and who we later learn is named John Schaeffer. But something is confused. Some of the stories that the narrator relates as happening that night in 1971 are the same stories that he included in the letters he wrote to his friend in Georgia as having just happened in 1977. The muddled chronology bothered me until I decided that perhaps the author means to describe the scene as one where characters circle endlessly, never progressing, stuck in an endless loop, repeating the same tired lines and actions. Or perhaps, simply, an author using whatever material he has to flesh out his fiction.
Chapter Three flashes even further back to tell the story of Malone before he arrives in New York. Born in the midwest but raised in Ceylon because his father moved there for a job. Returning to the States for an Ivy School education, he becomes a lawyer and works in Washington. But he watches his college friends maturing into marriage and family, and regrets that a gay man doesn’t have that option. He rents a room from a widow and helps around the house. When she hires a young man to work with him in the garden, Malone falls for the man, but nothing can come of it. The young man is straight, oblivious of Malone’s passion, and leaves for college. Malone, desperate for love moves to New York, quits his job, and joins the circle of men at the dance clubs.
I won’t summarize every chapter. Malone starts a relationship with an Italian laborer named Frankie who works for the transit authority. They move in together. But the relationship is based on nothing but physical attraction. Once the spark fades, Malone begins having affairs, which he writes about in his diary and Frankie reads. They fight and Frankie hits Malone. Malone flees and is taken in by Sutherland.
Malone is everywhere described as beautiful, charming, polite. Sutherland is a queen. He dresses in drag. He takes enormous amounts of pills. It isn’t clear how either of them make a living.
Malone hides out with Sutherland until Frankie, still holding a torch, and his anger, discovers where Malone is living. In order to get away from Frankie, Malone takes an apartment alone in the squalor of the Lower East Side but continues his friendship with Sutherland. Malone takes to prostitution to support himself. Sutherland hatches the idea to “marry” Malone to a wealthy man, and here is where John Schaeffer appears again, the fertilizer heir. John is entranced by Malone. Sutherland takes John under his wing.
The novel within the novel concludes with a huge party at a home that Sutherland rents for a few weeks on Fire Island. Sutherland casts the party as the “engagement” party for Malone and John Schaeffer. But Malone has never assented to the scheme and won’t go through with it. At the end of the party, Malone goes down to the beach and swims away. Does he drown? Or does he swim across the bay and disappear into Manhattan? Because he is never seen again, some of the crowd gossip that he must have been one of the anonymous men found dead in the fire at the Everard Baths that supposedly happens the morning after the party. But here is more chronology confusion, because the Everard Baths did burn, and nine unidentified men died there, but it burned on May 25, in 1977, not at the end of the summer when Sutherland’s party clearly takes place.
And then there is more confusion, because in the final scene of the novel in the novel, at the end of the party, Sutherland takes a pill to help him sleep, and through some combination of everything else he had swallowed and drunk all night long (and been taking for years) he doesn’t wake up. So Malone disappears but Sutherland dies. But in the exchange of letters that begins the book, Sutherland is alive. I flipped back to make sure. I can’t explain it, except to say it’s all fiction, although even in fiction I want a story not to have such obvious inconsistencies.
The book ends with another exchange of letters between the narrator and his friend in Georgia. There is a little bit of “where are they now?” for Frankie and John Schaeffer. The letter-writers speculate on whether Malone really did die in the fire at the baths, of if he didn’t, where he might have disappeared to: San Francisco? Singapore? Sutherland is conspicuously not mentioned so whether he’s alive or dead remains unclear.
The book reminded me of The Great Gatsby. There are the Manhattan and Long Island settings (Fire Island standing in for the Hamptons). The big party scene. Holleran’s writing is as beautiful as Fitzgerald’s. Malone is a kind of Gatsby character, from the mid-west, tragically in love with something he cannot have: Daisy for Gatsby, any man for Malone. Holleran’s narrator could be a Nick Carraway.
But the situation kept annoying me. Was love really impossible for gay men in that decade? What if Malone had kept his attorney job instead of living in squalor and turning tricks? What if the men explored each other’s lives a little more deeply off the dance floor? What if they attempted real intimacy instead of anonymous sex? What if they defined “beauty” more broadly than just a handsome, young, face? I wondered whether I just wasn’t understanding the real constraints for gay men in that just barely post-Stonewall era. But then Holleran includes a “tell” in the final pages of the book, a remembrance of the first gay pride march (1970), a note that affirms that this novel only describes a narrow slice of the gay life of the time and that other lives were possible.
Holleran writes, in the voice of the narrator in one of his letters to his friend in Georgia: “And even so, do you realize what a tiny fraction of the mass of homosexuals we were? That day we marched to Central Park and found ourselves in a sea of humanity, how stunned I was to recognize no more than four or five faces? (Of course our friends were all at the beach, darling; they couldn’t be bothered to come in and make a political statement.) 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” (p. 249).
The true sadness of the men in Dancer from the Dance isn’t that they didn’t find what they were looking for, it’s that they weren’t really looking.