Malone is the personification of love and Sutherland, a leper in the gay world, is beyond the hope of love. Where Malone is beautiful, Sutherland is wise. The Virgil who leads Malone through this inferno is an outrageous transvestite called Sutherland. He is remembered, chronicled, debated: a mystery that remains deliciously unsolved. 'He liked to get rid of that money as fast as possible, spending it on things that left no trace.' The novel treats Malone as a legend - a mercurial and strangely moral figure - and builds the characterization The money he earns from impersonating so many sexual fantasies uptown isĭoled out to panhandlers. His delirium becomes a kind of saintliness he gives love to the ugly as well as the beautiful. Malone becomes a circuit queen, but an aura of innocence not odium surrounds him. 'He did not wish to be the man to whom nothing was ever to happen.' And on his 'errands of love,' a whole new sense of the city sweeps over him, and us. Gives into desire and becomes its prisoner. Holleran's narrative skill that he can make Malone's shift from the straight world so compelling. Malone gives up his passion for success to pursue passion itself. Handsome, generous, endowed with wonder at the subterranean world he has chosen, While the characters go through these sad rituals, they know that, as for Dionysus, a careerĪ meditation on ecstacy, 'Dancer From the Dance' is constructed as a memoir of one very special member of this world: Malone, a paradigm of the romantic ideal. As in all festivals, this orgy of energy holds the hope of renewal. Of ethyl chloride stuffed in their mouths to keep ecstasy from evaporating. 'We lived,' the narrator says, 'on certain chords in a song, and the proximity of another individual dancing beside you, taking communion from the same hand, soaked in sweat, stroked by the same tambourine.' Here men dance with rags JanuCamp Tales By JOHN LAHR Dancer From the Dance By Andrew HolleranĮw York is a tropical city,' observes the narrator of Andrew Holleran's superb novel about homosexual life, 'Dancer From the Dance.'Īnd erotic heat percolates through these pages: Men burn for love the metaphor for their obsession is dancing.

Dancer from the dance holleran