...B. So your next book, Dancer from the Dance, is less well known. The reviews talk about it as very evocative, capturing the spirit of an age, Great Gatsby-esque. Lost souls wandering around at parties off Long Island Sound…

JR: In my twenties I began to understand that I was gay. I did not want to be gay. I fought it very hard. And the reason for that was not that I was prejudiced against gay people, or thought it was a sin. It’s that I did not want to live in what I thought was the dark underworld of homosexual life in the 70’s and 80’s. One of the first books I read in that period was this book, Dancer from the Dance, by Andrew Holleran – which is actually a pseudonymous name. It was published in 1978 and is a very powerful, very poetic, evocation of gay life in the 1970s, pre-AIDS. And what it highlights is the extreme unsettledness of gay life - the transience, the fluidity of relationships. They’re not even really relationships in many ways. Just a lot of sex. And to me that was very scary. I didn’t realize it at the time but in hindsight what Holleran was depicting so vividly is a world without marriage, a world without family bonds and family commitments.

B. So for you this book was not about a halcyon period for gay men -indeed it elicited rather negative feelings.

JR. It is a poetic book and it is, in many ways, an affectionate book. But it captures a moment in history when you’ve got the emergence of an entire culture of people for whom free love is legal, but marriage is unthinkable. And family is, in many cases, rejected as a kind of bourgeois obstruction. It struck me much more as a dystopia than anything else.

Labels: culture, gay marriage, Jonathan Rauch, Marriage

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