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Dancer from the Dance

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Dancer from the Dance
Dancer from the dance first edition 1978 andrew holleran.jpg
Cover of the first edition
AuthorAndrew Holleran
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreGay novel
PublisherWilliam Morrow & Co.
Publication date
1978
Media typePrint (hardcover)
Pages250 pp
ISBN978-0-688-03357-6
This article is about the 1978 gay novel of this title. For the Yeats quote which inspired the title, see The Tower (poetry collection).

Dancer from the Dance is a 1978 gay novel by Andrew Holleran (pen name of Eric Garber) about gay men in New York City and Fire Island.[1]

Discover more about Dancer from the Dance related topics

Gay literature

Gay literature

Gay literature is a collective term for literature produced by or for the gay community which involves characters, plot lines, and/or themes portraying male homosexual behavior.

Andrew Holleran

Andrew Holleran

Andrew Holleran is the pseudonym of Eric Garber, an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer, born on the island of Aruba. Most of his adult life has been spent in New York City, Washington, D.C., and a small town in Florida. He was a member of The Violet Quill, a gay writer's group that met in 1980 and 1981 and also included Robert Ferro, Edmund White and Felice Picano. Following the critical and financial success of his first novel Dancer from the Dance in 1978, he became a prominent author of post-Stonewall gay literature. Historically protective of his privacy, the author continues to use the pseudonym Andrew Holleran as a writer and public speaker.

Gay men

Gay men

Gay men are male homosexuals. Some bisexual and homoromantic men may also dually identify as gay, and a number of young gay men also identify as queer. Historically, gay men have been referred to by a number of different terms, including inverts and uranians.

Fire Island

Fire Island

Fire Island is the large center island of the outer barrier islands parallel to the South Shore of Long Island, in the U.S. state of New York.

Plot summary

The novel revolves around two main characters: Anthony Malone, a young man from the Midwest who leaves behind his straight life as a lawyer to immerse himself in the gay life of 1970s New York, and Andrew Sutherland, variously described as a speed addict, a socialite, and a drag queen. Their social life includes long nights of drinking, dancing, and drug use in New York's gay bars. Though they enjoy many physical pleasures, their lives lack any spiritual depth. The "dance" of the novel's title becomes a metaphor for their lives. Malone is described as preternaturally beautiful; much of the plot concerns Sutherland's efforts to leverage Malone's beauty by "marrying" him to a young millionaire.

The book switches perspective often. Sometimes characters are tracked closely using more traditional omniscient narrative techniques. On other occasions (especially later in the book), the lives of Malone and Sutherland are seen from the perspective of bystanders in the New York gay scene — the book itself is literally written by the other dancers at the dance.

Major themes

The novel is known for its vivid imagery, lush language, and captivating depiction of gay men searching for love and acceptance in a harsh, dreamlike urban landscape. The novel was one of the first among gay fiction to portray the party atmosphere of Fire Island, a summer community on Long Island where many urban homosexuals celebrated drugs, parties, tea dances, and sexual exploration.[2]

The title of the novel is from the last line of William Butler Yeats's poem "Among School Children", which ends, "O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,/ Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?/ O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,/ How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

Influence

Published in the same year as Edmund White's Nocturnes for the King of Naples and Larry Kramer's Faggots, Dancer from the Dance is regarded as a major contribution to post-Stonewall gay male literature and it enjoyed a cult status in the gay community for a certain period of time.[3]

Discover more about Influence related topics

Edmund White

Edmund White

Edmund Valentine White III is an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer and an essayist on literary and social topics. Since 1999 he has been a professor at Princeton University. France made him Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.

Larry Kramer

Larry Kramer

Laurence David Kramer was an American playwright, author, film producer, public health advocate, and gay rights activist. He began his career rewriting scripts while working for Columbia Pictures, which led him to London, where he worked with United Artists. There he wrote the screenplay for the film Women in Love (1969) and received an Academy Award nomination for his work.

Faggots (novel)

Faggots (novel)

Faggots is a 1978 novel by Larry Kramer. It is a satirical portrayal of 1970s New York's very visible gay community in a time before AIDS. The novel's portrayal of promiscuous sex and recreational drug use provoked controversy and was condemned by some elements within the gay community.

Stonewall riots

Stonewall riots

The Stonewall riots, also known as the Stonewall uprising, Stonewall rebellion, or simply Stonewall, were a series of spontaneous protests by members of the gay community in response to a police raid that began in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Patrons of the Stonewall, other Village lesbian and gay bars, and neighborhood street people fought back when the police became violent. The riots are widely considered the watershed event that transformed the gay liberation movement and the twentieth-century fight for LGBT rights in the United States.

Literature

Literature

Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include oral literature, much of which has been transcribed. Literature is a method of recording, preserving, and transmitting knowledge and entertainment, and can also have a social, psychological, spiritual, or political role.

Source: "Dancer from the Dance", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, (2022, March 14th), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancer_from_the_Dance.

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Further Reading

Stonewall Book Award

Sarah Waters

Alan Hollinghurst

Emma Donoghue

Edmund White

Gay literature

Faggots (novel)

Andrew Holleran

Felice Picano

Lesbian literature

Robert Ferro

Season of Crimson Blossoms

List of gay novels prior to the Stonewall riots
References
  1. ^ "Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran; Out of the Shadows by Walt Odets – review". the Guardian. 2019-06-17. Retrieved 2022-02-09.
  2. ^ "Being a Gay Man Who Is Free: Reflecting on 'Dancer From the Dance'". www.out.com. 2018-08-07. Retrieved 2022-02-09.
  3. ^ Trušník, Roman (2008). "Dreams of the Past Gone: Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance Revisited". In Marcel Arbeit and Roman Trušník (ed.). Cult Fiction & Cult Film: Multiple Perspectives. Palacký University, Olomouc. pp. 87–98. ISBN 978-80-244-2126-1.
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