@internrachel @julia1

This morning I finished Andrew Holleran’s Dancer From The Dance (250 pages). I had mixed feelings about it. Holleran’s writing style tends toward the overblown (overblown in an often lovely way, don’t get me wrong), and I think I just don’t romanticize the experience of gay discos enough to be taken in by his extended riffs on the lights and the music and the beauty, etc.

The novel concerns Malone, a beautiful lawyer who throws away his respectable but miserable life for the pursuit of love/sex in early 1970s New York, only to become a so-called circuit queen and eventually jaded male escort. His best friend is the flamboyant Sutherland who eventually becomes his pimp and unsuccessfully tries to marry him off to naive young millionaire.

Aside from being super depressing, the novel is also suffused with a not-at-all-subtle racism. Sutherland and Malone are both white and privileged (boarding school, Yale, blue chip law firm), as are many of their friends, who are given names and occupations and feelings, but the book is also populated by scores of almost always anonymous brown-skinned people who exist only as objects of Malone’s lust and who are defined by their exotic ethnicity. It’s! super! uncomfortable!

I’ve now started Larry Kramer’s Faggots (I blush just typing that), which was released in the same year and covers a lot of the same territory but is way funnier/more satirical/generally more fun to read. Its cover also has a totally naked dude on the cover, and I haven’t been this self-conscious about reading a book in public since I took Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer to the beach circa 2002.