Wow, no secrets, no lies, no despair! Maybe even a gay man who experiences a moment or two of happiness, and doesn't die at the end.
No such luck.
The gay men in Dancer from the Dance are all young, beautiful, wealthy, and cursed. They trudge from gym to bar to after-hours club to bathhouse, dancing, taking drugs, having sex, seeing the same faces year after year, but knowing nothing about them except their penis size. They have dozens of lovers but no friends. They are unable to find any meaning in life, or any happiness.
As one of the characters explains: "The world demands that gay life be ultimately sad, for everyone in this country believes. . .that to be happy you must have a two-story house in the suburbs and a FAMILY." Andrew Holleran not excluded.
The main character, Malone, vanishes at the end of the novel. Sex/dance partners are always vanishing. Some escape, like the character who moves to the Deep South and finds infinite joy in helping a friend install a septic tank. Others die. The rest keep on dancing.
Very depressing take on the gay world. Yet I wasn't depressed, because I knew something that Malone and his coterie didn't: the men they saw day after day, year after year were, in fact, a FAMILY, an adhesive brotherhood that could change the world.
See also: The Violet Quill
I forced myself to finish reading this- I had started it a few years ago but found it boring. The book has gorgeous literary prose but the story ( what story) is dated. I found the characters annoying the beautiful Malone who becomes a high price hooker and his drag queen friend who ends up dead. The only character that seemed real was Frank the electrician from New Jersey who gives up his straight life and family to be with Malone- who then betrays him.
ReplyDeleteHolleran belonged to the Violent Quill, the first generation of post-Stoneweall gay writers who thought that upper-class white New York was the entire gay world. They were so insular that they make forannoyingreading now.
DeleteHolleram wanted to create a the Great American Gay novel and his model seemed to be "The Great Gatsby" but he is not Fitzgerald. I also reread Gore Vidal's "The City and The Pillar" which has aged a lot better not just as portrait of gay life in America in the 1940s- but it's gay love story has timeless quality.
ReplyDeleteVidal changed the ending so that the couple stays together instead of one murdering the other.
ReplyDeleteYes Vidal rewrote the climax of "The City of the Pilla" and now Jim does murder his love object but it does not end happily ever after either. But it is a book worth reading.
ReplyDeleteMy first gay novel was 'City of Night' by John Rechy. It's the story of a male hustler who drifts from New York to Chicago to L.A. to New Orleans. It seems to be set in the mid 1969s. Although fiction, it seems to reflect a lot of Rechy's own life experiences. Is it depressing ? Yes, very much so. The protagonist clearly is conflicted about his gayness, and feels like something of an outcast. But it's a beautiful,introspective, well-written story. I came across it by chance back in 1976, when I was in my twenties, while browsing in a bookstore in Washington D.C. I'd never heard of it before. I was on a weekend pass in the Army. I kept it well-hidden in the barracks. It was the first gay novel I'd ever read.
ReplyDeleteI read "Dancer From The Dance" when it came out in 1978, and found it to be a poignant, reflective chronicle of urban gay life in the late 1980s. I found it to be more melancholy than depressing. It certainly brings out the inner loneliness of big-city gay life. I'd returned to my home city by then, and was in my mid-twenties. And I was just beginning to realize that there was a gay community out there. But shortly afterwards I read "The Best Little Boy in the World", which had a more upbeat, practical, down-to-earth perspective on gay life.
I'd heard about "The City and The Pillar" for years, but considered it too old-fashioned to bother reading it. But a friend who was moving and disposing of his old possessions gave me a copy about 5 years ago, and I took the time to read it. By that time, I was in my late fifties, and had been socially active in my local gay community for many years. I enjoyed the book, although it too has a lonely side to it, unrequited love and unfulfilled longing. And although the ending was rewritten, it still ends sadly.
I think that all of these books, depressing though they may be, helped to shape the gay community into what it is today.