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Our story opens with the exchange of several mischievous and witty letters between two nameless queens: one in New York City, and one who has escaped to the placid Deep South. Just like me here at ObsidianBookshelf.com, you may think, what the hell? Especially when you see the signatures with which these men conclude their letters (Agathe-Helene de Rothschild, le Duc de Saint-Simon), and you realize that neither man is integral to the story. Have patience because the distancing effect is intentional. The author wants to steep you in the decadent and gossipy atmosphere of the burgeoning gay scene in 1970s New York City. He intends the central characters of Malone and Sutherland to have an epic quality emblematic of the entire doomed homosexual quest for physical beauty. Why is this quest hopeless? Because physical beauty never lasts. And so the small nobodies like these letter-writers are left to deconstruct the Malone-and-Sutherland myth in an attempt to figure out their own moth-like attraction to the fleeting candle-flame of … what? Beauty? Romantic love? The fountain of youth? All of the above. The first thing you should know is that the story is pre-AIDS, or you will never believe its Dionysian excesses. It begins in Chapter 1 (just past the italicized letter-exchange): in a novel-within-a-novel written by the New Yorker and sent to the guy in the South: it is autumn on Fire Island after the tourist season has ended. Fire Island is notorious for its summertime gay orgies. Now the novelist and his friends go to pack up Malone's clothes after his mysterious death. Each man can remember when he first laid eyes on Malone, the most beautiful man anyone had ever seen. Chapter 2 transports us to the Twelfth Floor, the first after-hours dance club in Manhattan in 1971. Robert Frost could have been stating the theme of this novel when he wrote, Nothing gold can stay. Soon the ordinary crowds who turn everything to mud will discover the Twelfth Floor. But for now only beautiful gay men dance and trance on its floor, and no one can outshine Malone. Sutherland, who is Malone's mentor, presides over the festivities in full drag and explains everything to sensitive young John Schaeffer, the heir to a fertilizer fortune (don't laugh). Obviously Sutherland hopes to hook up Schaeffer with the elusive Malone. Chapter 3 speculates about Malone's repressed beginnings. Chapter 4 theorizes about Malone's homosexual awakening, disastrous first loves, and first encounters with Sutherland. And so it goes. Eventually Malone turns into a prostitute and Sutherland pimps him to everyone – but especially to rich John Schaeffer who trembles on the brink of falling in love with an archetype. This sounds like jarringly grim territory onto which we've wandered from the fairyland (pun intended) of 1971 at the Twelfth Floor. But the novel's dazzlingly romantic tone never falters. Malone is a mystic who treats prostitution as just another step on his quest for love. Sutherland's flamboyant wit is supposed to balance out the fact that he is exploiting his friend. This leads you to the character of Sutherland himself. Malone is a romantic figure who could appear in any novel from any time period. On the other hand, Sutherland is a queen who could only exist in 1970s New York City. He dresses in full drag and refers to himself as "Mummy" and other gay men as "she." His overwhelming tragedy is that he has the smallest penis in New York City and perhaps even the world! He shows up at Fire Island, standing on the pontoon of a seaplane, clutching his spike heels and a daiquiri and wearing a bright red wig and tiny pearl earrings. Later he tells Malone (on page 205), "But don't you see that this is all there is? … Don't you know what it means to be a woman? My grandmother on her eighty-ninth birthday only wished she could walk down the street and be looked at!" It is enough to make you burst out laughing at his superficiality, and then to say, along with Malone, "Oh, God." Is a queen like Sutherland even relevant anymore? Well, he's kind of a hoot even while it's hard to overlook the fact that he pimps out his best friend. Sutherland functions best as a time-capsule personifying gay New York City back in the 1970s when it set the tone for the entire gay male world. You might run across a sentence (on page 195) like "Even Sutherland … was ecstatic as he stopped to talk, after an afternoon in the men's room at Grand Central, picking pubic hair out of his teeth" and think, Ewwwwww! But Sutherland is never boring. Dancer from the Dance offers no real sex scenes, and only the most fragile plot: the distant rise and fall of Malone and Sutherland who illuminate the gay scene for a few years in Manhattan. But what a rarefied scene! It is described in some of the most transcendently beautiful writing you're ever likely to run across. Dancer from the Dance is worth reading. |
Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran. 
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