This post feels like it should be a benchmark of sorts wherein I talk about everything 2009 meant to me. But I’ll keep it brief and leave deeper introspection for another time. This was an awesome year. I finally got a publication!! Plus I launched my very own website and am damn proud of it. There.
I couldn’t do much writing over the past week with the holidays. In my little bit of free time, I started a “low impact” project: proofing THE REGISTRATION. Per a writer friend’s advice, I’m trying to cut 5-10 words from every page to get it into range for YA fantasy. So far I’ve slashed about 300 words. Only 4,000 to go!
I also caught up with my favorite podcasts and blogs. My dear friend Jerilyn Mettlin has a really fun podcast The Because Show that is kind of like The View for LA moms who like to shop and keep up with the trends. They recently did a plug for The Next Family, a resource for non-traditional families, the emerging majority—adoptive, interracial, same sex couples, etc. They’ve got a great looking site plus super cute photos of kids.
Another site I like is andrewjimenez.com. Andrew is a NYC-based musician, poet and unabashed romantic who I’ve been following for awhile. He writes about his everyday experiences, and there’s an intimate, honest quality in his work I really admire.
I’m still reading Felice Picano’sLike People In History as part of my self-directed, long overdue study of gay literature. I said last week I’d have a word or two to say about Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance. Here they are.
Holleran is an amazing writer. There are passages in his book that are some of the most lyrical and transportive prose I’ve read. The story takes place in the 1970’s where a group of gay men are getting laid like 10, 20 times a day on a quixotic mission to find beauty and love but more often coming up with STD’s and deep, angsty grief. This is a world before AIDS and the mainstreaming of gay culture, but there’s a gay archetype there that holds up pretty well today. I say archetype rather than caricature because caricature implies superficiality or falseness. Archetypes hold some level of truth; they tell us something about ourselves. So while I’m not crazy about this particular archetype, I think Holleran does a dazzling job illuminating a facet of gay male life.
Archetypes can be subverted, redeemed or catapulted to tragic ends. In any case, the important thing I think is that we learn something true about the human condition. In Holleran’s book, what’s revealed is the exhiliration yet impossibility of possessing perfection and I think the confusion between beauty and love, which is a problem not exclusive to gay men but certainly common among us in my experience. For Holleran’s characters, beauty is physical perfection and finding it is more intoxicating and more addictive than all the drugs they take and, of course, a fleeting experience.
About halfway through the book, I became impatient with this repeated cycle and wanted a reason to care about the characters beyond their hipster lifestyles. Especially the main character Malone. Besides Malone’s initial struggle to find his place in the world in the first quarter of the book (my favorite part), there’s not much to like about him. His journey is a downward spiral of the internal conflict variety so he becomes like that self-destructive friend who complains he can never find the right guy but subotages every potential relationship. I suppose the psychology should appeal to me as a social worker, but Halloran doesn’t give many clues to Malone’s psychic workings. Malone just wants to possess beautiful men. He’s given up on himself. I can get behind a character thwarted by personal hang-ups if I can relate to the hang-ups and/or feel a transformation has occurred by the end of the book. Like Neil McCormick in Scott Heim’s Mysterious Skin – Neil is certainly not the most likeable guy and puts himself in insanely dangerous situations, but I felt where he was coming from and was rooting for him to the end. This didn’t happen for me with Malone. There’s an open ending to his story leaving readers to guess his fate. I think he drowned intentionally trying to swim back to the mainland from Fire Island or got killed in the fire at the Everard Baths as many of his peers speculated. It came across as tragedy for tragedy’s sake – affecting like any suicide or preventable death, but it didn’t pack a bigger punch, similar to my reaction to Brokeback Mountain.
Now to close on a happier note…Santa brought me the perfect Xmas present: an autographed copy of Gregory Maguire’s Matchless!!
Happy New Year!!!
Thanks for the kind words. I read the beginning of Dancer from the Dance but never got around to getting any further than the first chapter or two.
That was my experience the first time around too, Andrew. This time, I kind of forced myself since I figured I must be missing something since DFTD is the at the top of every best gay novel list. I will say the writing enchanted me after a little while.