Holleran, by his own account, was enervated, even paralyzed, and came to question the value of art in the face of overwhelming tragedy. Kramer met the occasion with extraordinary energy: he helped to found Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP, and his play “The Normal Heart,” first staged in 1985, is one of the era’s enduring works. Teresa to lean out a window and impersonate an Italian prostitute in another, he halts a gay man’s maudlin monologue with what still seems to me an excellent remedy for homosexual self-loathing: “For heaven’s sake, don’t take it so seriously! Just repeat after me: ‘My face seats five, my honeypot’s on fire.’ ”Ī IDS put an end to the world that the books chronicled. In one, Sutherland interrupts his reading of St. In a novel characterized by twilit languor and ambered nostalgia-Holleran’s clearest influences are Fitzgerald and Proust-Sutherland blazes in hilarious scenes that have remained etched in my memory since I first read the book, as an adolescent. Andrew Sutherland, an erudite, speed-addicted, endlessly lovable Wildean queen, who teaches the book’s protagonist the ins and outs of queer life, counts among the glories of postwar American fiction. “Dancer” is beloved not only for the beauty of its sentences but for the brilliance of one of its central characters. In fact, the novel is clear from the start that its subject is “that tiny subspecies of homosexual, the doomed queen, who puts the car in gear and drives right off the cliff!”
Andrew Holleran’s “Dancer from the Dance,” by contrast, is bathed in melancholy gorgeousness, as attuned as any of its characters to “the animal bliss of being alive.” The book is so vivid in its portrayal of lives devoted to pleasure that Holleran has sometimes been charged with glorifying hedonism, or with suggesting that the world he writes about is the only one possible for gay men. Larry Kramer’s “Faggots” is a manic picaresque, radiating disgust in sentences that are as crazy with jitters as any of the strung-out queens he depicts. Both novels are, finally, morality tales, critiquing a life style that they see as empty, immature, dangerous, doomed both would later be hailed as prescient from the perspective of communities ravaged by AIDS.Īnd yet the experience of reading the books could hardly be more different.
In both books, men searching for love settle for ever more elaborate sexual scenes-floggings, fistings, crucifixions-and, in both, men throw away their lives: diving from heights on angel dust, sniffing poppers at the bottom of swimming pools, leaping, “like roaches falling from a hot oven,” out of upper-floor windows at the Everard Baths, where a fire killed nine men in 1977. In 1978, two novels appeared that covered remarkably similar, and largely unexplored, territory, documenting the drug-addled, sex-crazed circuit of bathhouses, dance clubs, and parties that, in the seventies, shuttled gay men between Manhattan and Fire Island, with occasional forays to San Francisco or the more exotic wilds of Brooklyn and Queens.