Dancer from the Dance

Book excerpt: “An astonishingly beautiful book. The best gay novel written by anyone of our generation.”—Harper’s “Through the sweat and haze of longing come piercing insights – about the closeness of gay male friendship, about the vanity and imperfections of men. The more one reads the novel, we realise that what Holleran has given us is our very own queer (queerer?) Great Gatsby: its decadence, its fear, its violence, its ecstasy, its transience.”—The Guardian Andrew Holleran’s landmark novel of a young man's search for love and companionship in New York’s emerging gay world in the 1970s, with a new introduction by Garth Greenwell. Young, astonishingly beautiful, and tired of living a lie, Anthony Malone trades life as a seemingly straight small-town lawyer for the decadence of New York’s emerging gay scene—an odyssey that takes him from Manhattan’s Everard baths and after hour discos, to lavish orgies on Fire Island and parks after dark. Rescuing Malone from a possessive lover and shepherding him through his immersion in this life of fierce joys and cheap truths is the flamboyant Sutherland, a high-camp quintessential queen. But for Malone, the endless city nights and Fire Island days are close to burning out, and despite Sutherland’s abundant attentiveness and glittering world-weary wisdom, Malone soon realizes what he is truly looking for may not be found in these beautiful places, where life is crowded, and people are forever outrunning their own desires and death.