Off Christopher Street

Our reverence for Andrew Holleran is no secret, and the appointed hour has arrived to talk about his 1978 masterpiece Dancer from the Dance, not just, as we argue, the best gay novel of all time but one of the best American novels. Despite remaining untaught in universities, unlike other classics of minority literature, and really having no institutionalized means of transmission, gay men still discover it 50 years later and see themselves in it.

A lot of us initially read Dancer as a sociological account of how gay men were in the heyday of the 1970s, or even of how they are in some timeless, essential sense. We discuss how our own readings have evolved over time in different phases of life. But we also try to sort out sociology from artistic invention, and argue for reading Dancer as a work of literature rather than either a journalistic report or a philosophical inquiry into the nature of gay men. We talk about how Holleran constructed the novel from his own experiences and dispositions, and how he sometimes projected his own big thoughts and emotions onto gay life. We piece together Dancer’s complex chronology and unique, elusive style of narration. We consider Holleran’s debts to Proust and Fitzgerald, the stylistic influence of his magazine writing, and the novel’s pervasive Catholic imagery.

None of that, of course, diminishes the novel’s powerful themes, which seem to perennially activate new generations of gay men: promiscuity, love, male beauty, aging, friendship. We talk about how Holleran uses the novel form to pose—yearningly, romantically—the search for answers to the Big Questions of gay life through his character Malone, and also to satirize the myopia of that quest with camp humor in the figure of Sutherland. We talk about the way Dancer is fundamentally a novel of gossip, and how gossip is a community-forming activity that holds the web of gay society together. And we ask whether the perennial doubts, anxieties, and questions that lead so many gay men to connect with Dancer are really what it means to be gay, or what it means to be human.

Watch the video version of this episode on our YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/watch?v=JwEz7iqW16 

Subscribe to our email newsletter and support the pod:
https://bit.ly/OCSnewsletter 

FOLLOW THE POD
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christopherstreetmag/ 
Substack: https://christopherstreetmag.substack.com/ 
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@christopherstreetpod 
X: https://x.com/OffCSPod/ 

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Novels by Andrew Holleran
Christopher Street essays by Holleran

Other sources

Creators and Guests

Host
Blake Smith
Blake Smith is a historian, writer, and translator. His writing has appeared in The Hedgehog Review, American Affairs, Tablet, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere.
Host
David Sessions
David Sessions is a historian and journalist. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, The Point, Dissent, The Daily Beast, Slate, and others.
Guest
Domenic DeSocio
Domenic DeSocio teaches German, the history of sexuality, and dance music and club culture and Northwestern University. He recently published an article on 'Christopher Street' in the Gay & Lesbian Review.

What is Off Christopher Street?

Historians David Sessions and Blake Smith gossip about the gay life of the past and the gay discourses of the present.

Domenic DeSocio:

We must say that this is probably one of the best American novels I've ever written.

Blake Smith:

Yeah. It's one of the best novels. It's one of the and and what's what's crazy is that, like, every homosexual, even as as David suggested earlier, ones who are barely literate, like, if they don't read any fiction, they will have read Dancer from the Dance, right? Dancer continues, you know, every year, like new gays are inducted into it without the benefit of a kind of university apparatus.

David Sessions:

Mhmm.

Blake Smith:

It's read, it's known, it's republished, and yet, I think somehow even the people who keep talking too much about Andrew Holleran I feel like he is not given proper credit as one of the the truly great like, this is not just our Great Gatsby, like, this this is a great great novel.

Domenic DeSocio:

Gay or straight.

David Sessions:

This is Off Christopher Street, the podcast about the gay life of the past and the gay discourse of the present. I'm David Sessions, and I am joined as always by my cohost and fellow historian, Blake Smith. Well, as promised pretty much since episode one, and just under the wire before Labor Day, our big episode on Andrew Holleran's classic novel, Dancer from the Dance, a book that gay men continue to discover and see themselves in a half century after it was written. I flew to Chicago so that we could record this one in person. We called in reinforcements from friend of the pod and fellow Chicago resident, Domenic DeSocio, has been reading Dancer every year for over a decade, so we are in very good hands.

David Sessions:

So you've probably already done your beach reading at this point in the summer, but perhaps you were one of the gays that discovered Dancer this year, in which case you will be all ready to hear this episode. I also think it can serve just as well as an introduction before you read the novel. There's really not a plot to spoil in our discussion. Should give you some orientation and background that will hopefully enrich your first reading of it, because obviously it's the gay bible, it's the gay Great Gatsby, you should be reading it over and over and over for the rest of your life. So Dancer is for us the pinnacle of modern gay literature, not only for its beautiful prose, skilled technical execution, but for the way it stages so many fundamental questions that gay men perennially ask about themselves.

David Sessions:

It tries out through its famous duo of Malone and Sutherland, different ways of living a gay life. Even though it can be a bit moralistic, it doesn't leave us with a definitive moral or the right answer to any of these questions. It pits, for example, the entrancing life of the circuit and the gay scene against fantasies of quiet domesticity, yearning sincerity against gay wit and camp, and it asks whether the always unfulfilled quest for meaning is part of being gay or just part of being human. Some themes come up that we've talked about quite a bit on the show. Some of the binaries that Holleran sets up, for example, being a slut versus having a boyfriend, or can you go out without it completely taking over your life?

David Sessions:

Yes, you know, you can do both of those things. But it's interesting how the novel kind of captures those things that continue to activate, you know, gay guys today. We talk about how this is a novel of gossip, and how central and important gossip is to gay culture. Gossip is good, so join us in the galaxy. Don't be a low IQ person who's moralizing about gossip.

David Sessions:

And we talk about what Holleran has to say through his characters about things like love, about male beauty, and perhaps most importantly, about gay friendship. Before we get started, as always, a quick reminder to subscribe to our newsletter at CHRISTOPHERSTREETMAG.COM, and when you do that you can also choose to support the show. Apparently, should have begged for money sooner because when I did that last episode we got the most paid subscribers ever, which is awesome. So thank you so much. We're not really expecting to make money, but your support does help pay for our production tools, which can be kind of expensive.

David Sessions:

Maybe someday an editor. So like for example, I can do less audio engineering and more research and coming up with new episodes. Also, don't forget to give us a rating on your podcast app. They are starting to pile up, which is cool. That really helps us reach more people.

David Sessions:

If we talk about something that makes you think of a friend, something you've talked about before, something you've talked about with your book club, please send it to him. It's one of the best ways for new people to hear about us. And so with all of that out of the way, we hope you enjoy our conversation about the best gay novel of all time, Andrew Holleran's 1978 masterpiece, Dancer from the Dance. Alright. We are back.

David Sessions:

And this time, we are live from well, not really live from. We are together

Blake Smith:

We're currently alive.

David Sessions:

We're alive

David Sessions:

We are in person together

Domenic DeSocio:

That's right.

David Sessions:

In Chicago, which means, as always, Blake is here.

Blake Smith:

Hello, David. Hello, listeners. Hello, Domenic.

Domenic DeSocio:

Glad to be back.

David Sessions:

Joining us once again is our friend of the pod, Domenic DeSocio. And we have a somewhat, like, irrational setup where we are all sitting next to each other, but you can't see that. You can only see our

Blake Smith:

Well, this side is also can't see hiding behind David is David's partner, boyfriend, lover.

David Sessions:

All of the above. Any of those will work. Lover. I call him my prince.

Blake Smith:

Okay. No. I don't care for prince. I am

David Sessions:

I am unabashedly cringe about being in love. Aw, baby. Yeah. So this is a kind of big moment that we have. I'm always saying that, but this is kind of a big moment that I have been looking forward to since we started the podcast.

David Sessions:

I knew it would happen eventually. People have even complained about how much we talk about Andrew Holleran, and a good whatever percentage of our episodes are based on

Blake Smith:

little do they know how much more we can and will talk about Andrew Holleran.

David Sessions:

But, yeah, which has kind of been an accident because, he just happens to have written about things that we want to talk about.

Blake Smith:

And so many other gay writers are untalented.

David Sessions:

Yes. Yes. There there there are so few, and but, anyway, this this is the big one. This is the one that we we knew was coming. We were excited to do.

David Sessions:

A lot of I think a lot of listeners will be excited because lots of people have read this book. We are going to actually talk about Lauren's novel, Dancer from the Dance. Lots of people read it at the beach in the summer, so we thought, like, in August would be a good time. And, yeah, we have we have already kind of brought it up many times. We have given you some back you you should know who Andrew Holleran is by this point.

David Sessions:

So one of the ways I was thinking about, you know, it's a it's a big novel, it's a big topic, a big conversation, you know, we have to kind of organize it somehow. One thing I was thinking of is Domenic and Blake did a conversation with Romanticon about kind of the romantic themes of Dancer from the Dance. And one of the things Domenic says in it that I thought was interesting and maybe can kind of organize the way we think about it is that that dancers often read sociologically, that it's read as a kind of sociological depiction of what gay men are like.

Domenic DeSocio:

Yeah. I think, a lot of the, reception of the novel, positive or negative, are people's reactions to what they perceive to be Holleran's purpose, which is to capture more or less a truthful depiction of what it was like to be a gay man in the mid to late nineteen seventies in New York City, especially in sort of the a list crowd. Right? The sort of upper sort of the 500 gays who would who would summer at Fire Island Pines, rent houses together, and then go off in the winter back to the city and party at legendary gay clubs like the Flamingo or the Saint. And people's reading from the novels skew either positively or negatively, critically critical or appreciative whether or not they belong to that set or be like that set.

Domenic DeSocio:

Right? They see themselves reflected in it, perhaps rather unflatteringly, or they see it as an affront to their various political orientations, what they wish the gay world was like, the various discontents about being a gay man themselves are projected onto the knothole because they presume it's more or less an accurate representation of what it was like.

David Sessions:

I know lots of lots of normal gay guys who are not, like, literature scholars or, like, or or whatever find their way to this novel. Like, I see lots of, you know, stories of people reading it at the beach. Do you have any sense of, like, the way that people today kind of connect with it? Or because I I I hear this, like, where people feel like and maybe it's the kind of people I associate with or where people often read it, and they're like, oh, it's it's still the same or, like, it's describing my life Mhmm. Today.

Domenic DeSocio:

Yeah. I think that's right. I mean, just rereading it now this week for this podcast, I was struck about how many resonances there are between now and then. Especially, I've been reading this novel since I was in my late teens, early twenties, and I feel like I'm now at opposite ends, acing my younger self, my older self of of my own reception of it. Right?

David Sessions:

"Opposite ends of an illusion."

Domenic DeSocio:

Of an illusion. Exactly. Correct. That's the quote. I felt like back when I was in my early twenties, was the Malone, right, fully in love with the idea of falling in love and nail beauty and finding that face, like, would haunt me forever. And now now I'm at a married middle age middle age middle middle of my thirties, gay man.

Domenic DeSocio:

I'm like, oh, the sadness, bit the melancholia, the sort of the futility of all this is actually much more present for me. So it resonates quite a bit. When I try to sell the book to friends who haven't picked it up yet, right, usually what gets them to read it is not you will see yourself in it, because I think for many gay men, it's actually quite scary to see themselves in literature, but rather it's a hot, sexy novel about the nineteen seventies, which is very unique. Right? This is the golden age of promiscuity of clubbing, disco music, and that usually is the tie in to get people into the novel.

David Sessions:

Yeah. So that it's interesting you say that. I was gonna say something about, like, my, like, evolving readings of it. Mhmm. Or maybe not yet.

David Sessions:

I think, like, maybe we should set it up a little bit and talk about the characters so it's not too abstract. But but, yes, like, the my progression from being in, like, ultra Malone the first time I read it to, like, the Sutherland part. Like, I think I kind of tuned out Sutherland, I think, the first few times I read by it.

Blake Smith:

But I mean, we should say who these people are, but it's very funny to me to, like, think I never for a moment thought about identifying who from above. No. That's not that's

Domenic DeSocio:

that's that's that's

David Sessions:

not not

Blake Smith:

I mean, didn't we talk, Domenic, can't remember if we actually talked about this or if we just talked about the idea of talking about it in our conversation last year, that like, the names Malone Male. Male, Alone, and Sutherland, and already cluing us into some aspects of her character. But, yeah, how how would we describe

Domenic DeSocio:

Anthony Malone. Anthony?

David Sessions:

We should we should set up the the way that you encounter characters. So you have you encounter the, like, the the correspondents first who are not either of these characters, and then that whole first chapter where this unnamed person goes back to Fire Island to go through Malone's stuff after he and Sutherland have both disappeared. That's not a spoiler. It's kind of, you you know, it's kind of just casually tossed out that that happens in the very first chapter, and we don't really meet them until, I think, chapter two or

Blake Smith:

Yeah. So we have I mean, we have the wonderful frame story of this epistolary correspondence.

David Sessions:

So when you open the novel, the first thing you read are these letters between two people who you don't know who they are. And one of them is has left New York and moved to the South, and is writing about, like, how glorious it is to, you know, just be grounded in everyday life, like, away from the gay seeking to have left it behind. And the other one is kind of reporting from New York, like, the the typical routine. You know, it's like, went out to the party last night, so and so sat on my face. Bob.

David Sessions:

Name is Bob.

Blake Smith:

The everyday life from which the New York, like, expat, like, has has, what they have installed themselves in is a Tennessee Williams fantasy. So, I mean, the have often thought of recommending this novel to people who are like entering gay life, but have usually not done it because I feel like the first three lines are gonna put some normal person off. And so it starts midnight, the Deep South ecstasy, comma. It's finally sprinkled down here on the Chattahoochee. So, this is like southern camp.

Blake Smith:

This is if you know stage directions from a Tennessee Williams play

Domenic DeSocio:

Mhmm.

Blake Smith:

The like arch, purple, baroque, over the top, like, silliness, extravagance of it. Like, this is how the novel starts. Right. And so it is very funny that people, like, this is how I encountered it in college, this is how think most people encounter it, as some like, I'm gonna tell you how it is or was about her being gay life. But it begins with this gush of midnight magnolia fancy.

David Sessions:

Right. In fact, the first time I picked it up and tried to read it, like, I read it and it was just so, like, not what I expected that I kind of just put it down.

Blake Smith:

Who are these Dixie faggots? Yeah. What is

David Sessions:

which is probably a good thing because I I ended up reading it, like, a year later after I had become more of a, like, circuit adjacent gay, and then I got it. Or, I kind of realized what they were

Domenic DeSocio:

talking about these two letters, right, between the correspondents, one in the South, one in New York City. At first, they're corresponding just about their lives, their in their respective cities, the goings on of rural Georgia and urban New York. And then the one in New York announces to his friend that he's writing a novel, right, about the doomed queens. The queens novel about the queens who just drive off into the off of a cliff. Right?

Domenic DeSocio:

The queens who, die for love, right, who are stuck in this sort of circuit that we're gonna be, encounter in the in the in the framed novel. And what's really interesting is that they begin to talk about not only what should be in the novel, but what the purpose of gay literature should be, which is a really illuminating conversation that they have.

Blake Smith:

Right. Mean, there's a lot of wondering

Domenic DeSocio:

Mhmm.

Blake Smith:

Who would possibly read this? Mhmm. And that it's a historical novel because the doomed queen is somehow already over, Like, it's the late seventies and new gays are indistinguishable from straights, no one dies for love anymore. Somehow both like we're gonna age out of the circuit, but also like romanticism is coming to an end. Does Holleran believe that?

Blake Smith:

She Holleran believe that? But it's it's put within this frame. It's the Mhmm. It's the point of view of the writer of this fictional novel that then is 95% of, the text.

David Sessions:

Yeah. And it's kind of teased. It comes back in the in the closing letters, you know, this correspondence kind of picks up briefly at the end of the novel, that one has to, and Lauren says this in his 1978 interview on the TV show Emerald City, he he brings this up, that he kind of believe he says this in a in a straightforwardly, you know, earnest way, I think. Like, he believes that the reason that everyone does this, you know, the going out, the trying on 17 different t shirts before you leave the house, trying to look perfect, and is all about finding love and finding a man so that you can escape the what he all all over the place calls the prison, you know, the boarding school of of the circuit. You know, the the boarding school with no no vacations.

David Sessions:

I think that part is in the letters at the beginning. And so it's kind of it's kind of like that. Like, finding a man, finding love is your escape from from this, And there's some it gets a little bit more moralistic at the at the end about, like, why you have to kind of reject the the circuit mentality to find that.

Blake Smith:

Well, and part of what makes this both, it was widely compared to Linked With Faggots when it came out. The park is both of them with the huge gay bestsellers of '78, sort of inaudurate gay literature is this thing that suddenly everyone in America is aware of. But they also seem to have a kind of similar, both like a world tour of New York day life Mhmm. But also a kind of moral about, well now, I'm in my late thirties and I want to find a serious relationship and everyone around me is too much of a slut to make that happen. Holleran being a better artist, he puts that point of view, like, from within the perspective of one particular character who writes the story.

Blake Smith:

Whereas, Kramer pretty much is his protagonist narrator shouting at the reader without much aesthetic distance.

David Sessions:

Right. Whereas whereas Holleran has both of his, you know, his personality splits into his, you know, two main characters and they're both kind of over the top and excessive, and so he has some of critical distance from both of them.

Blake Smith:

Right. So, I mean, there's there's all kind of doubleness. So, there's the two letter writers Mhmm. Who have somewhat different perspectives. The novel within the novel, Wild Swans, which is another kind of Yates reference Mhmm.

Blake Smith:

There are these two main characters, Malone and Sutherland. Mhmm. Neither of them is the narrator who is this weird shadowy figure who knows things that no one could possibly know, who was present in all sort of circumstances. There's something very I mean, don't know that Domenic and I have thought about this, but I don't know if we've ever gotten a handle on like, what's up with this narrator and is that like a brilliant construction on Halloran's part or is Is it a cop out? Well, it's surprising maybe not being a great novelist knows

Domenic DeSocio:

all the intimate details of Malone's childhood, for example. Right? His intimate feelings, his thoughts, his deepest fantasies and fears. Even though in the novel, the narrator presents himself as at most a friendly acquaintance of Malone. They live in the same building, on Saint Mark's Place.

Domenic DeSocio:

They run-in the same groups. They see each other at clubs, but they're never meant out to be in the narrative as best friends or someone would know this. Right? So the narrator has fabulated or has you know, it's a literary conceit that the narrator would just know about this because it's how a novel works.

Blake Smith:

So, yeah, like, does the narrator ever speak to Malone?

Domenic DeSocio:

Yes. They speak several times. Okay.

Blake Smith:

Yeah. Okay.

Domenic DeSocio:

But they speak in sort of a very artificially American friendly, making chitchat on the on on the stoop of their apartment building. The house sits for Malone once. Right? They share an evening on the beach on Fire Island, I perform Malone disappears, right?

Blake Smith:

We're meant to understand from the letter writers who framed the story, Malone and Sutherland are real people in their universe

Domenic DeSocio:

That's right.

Blake Smith:

Who inspire these characters in the novel within the novel, but how reliant they are presented. So Sutherland dies

Domenic DeSocio:

And comes back.

Blake Smith:

Right. So he dies in the novel within the novel, but he is alive in the frame story.

Domenic DeSocio:

That's

Blake Smith:

right. So we know that the novel in the novel, Wild Swans, is not totally reliable.

Domenic DeSocio:

Right. Which is why it can't be read sociologically. Right? But also, in the discussion the two letter writers have about the purpose of gay literature, they have an argument about whether or not Malone and Sutherland are representative of gay people in general or just a tiny, tiny, tiny element of a tiny slice of New York life, right, and have no greater purpose than in and of themselves. Right?

Domenic DeSocio:

Are they symbols or emblems, or are they just crazed individuals? And that's a that's a debate going on. Right? And we also see how it's not meant to be they sort of dismiss it as being a historical record. Right?

Domenic DeSocio:

They talk about is it is gay literature meant to be a history of the scene? And they're both pretty clear that that's not what that's doing. If anything, it's a history of Sutherland as a doomed mad queen and his double, Malone, who occupied two different they're always on opposite ends of whatever spectrum you can create. Right? There's optimism and cynicism.

Domenic DeSocio:

Each have opposite ends. Romance versus realism. Right? Sincerity

David Sessions:

Can versus sincerity, I think. Like yeah.

Domenic DeSocio:

They're always doubled in that regard. Right? And so even if they don't act even though we're made believe that they exist, even if they didn't actually exist, they make for excellent storytelling device because they are able to embody discourse and debates that gay men have with each other and with themselves as part of being gay.

Blake Smith:

And one could run, one one could construct somehow a certain, like, genealogy or a set. I have here in this pile, this great, although weird book, If Memory Serves by Christopher Castiglione and Christopher Reed. One, I love a couple who write a book together, I love a couple that have the same first name. Love. And, I don't know anything about how like they are as a couple, but they have a chapter on Will and Grace, Mhmm.

Blake Smith:

On Jack and Will's friendship, where they're thinking about Jack McFarland Mhmm. Very similar to Sutherland.

David Sessions:

That's right.

Blake Smith:

Where he and Will have a very somber relationship too. Right. Except Malone isn't as insufferable as Will True Man.

David Sessions:

Right.

Blake Smith:

Makes you think.

Domenic DeSocio:

That's right. True man. That's right.

Blake Smith:

Anthony Maloano. But the like, I mean, this is classic I guess kind of duo of like, the straight man, the funny one, the sad one, the happy one. But like a a gay best in character where, like, the dialogue between them is tracing out possibilities.

David Sessions:

You know, I fear we're making this sound like super complicated and abstract. It doesn't actually read that way, like, when you in a way, like, if I remember back to the first or even second time I read it, it kind of washes over you and maybe you don't, like, think it's intended to. Mhmm. It's you sort of you may even miss some of the, you know, things that are actually plot twists or, like, you know, plot points because they're so indistinct. You know, they just kind of float by you.

David Sessions:

Mhmm. And it it kind of gets you into this, like, looping language Mhmm. Which I think is somewhat intentional. But it act it actually is quite straightforward to read it. So it's not like this you know, it's not like a we might be making it sound like this complicated puzzle, but it's, you know, it's not actually.

David Sessions:

So let's maybe let's say who Sutherland and Malone are because they are the they have two main characters of most of what you read, which is, know, we're given to understand is a is a novel that one of these letter writers wrote.

Domenic DeSocio:

Sure. I mean, they're both denizens of what the writer calls, right, these groups of professional faggots is what is what what the narrator calls them. Right? They occupy this tiny slice of gay life. You even see that in the in the title, Dancer from the Dance, which is also from a Yeats poem, right, is how do you separate the individual from the group, and are they the same?

Domenic DeSocio:

Are they are they dissimilar? Which, again, talks about whether this is a sociological novel.

David Sessions:

Yeah. And there's I've always thought there's kind of a like, the the the intro sort of disclaims the idea that they're representative, and it's it's kind of like, there's plenty of other boring gays who, like, just go live normal lives, and we don't we don't care about them. They're not interesting. We wanna hear about the failures. But at the same time, like, I don't think the novel kind of actually lives up to that.

David Sessions:

Think it is kind of like It's

Domenic DeSocio:

an idea.

David Sessions:

It is projecting this onto, like, all gays and gay life, what kind of a capital g.

Domenic DeSocio:

I think it's asking the question at the very least. Yes. Right? It's how how how representative could these people be? Right.

Blake Smith:

So, I mean, Mublot himself is almost Andrew Halloran. It's Andrew Halloran who didn't write a novel. Correct. He's like a child of Trigglet, goes to the Ivy League, goes to law school.

Domenic DeSocio:

Goes to law school, unlike Andrew Halloran, who does not go to the Iowa workshop.

Blake Smith:

That's where their paths for when they transfer.

David Sessions:

I think of all the parts of the book though when I rereading this time, that was a part the the Malone bio chapter is the one I remembered the least and I forgot that it had all of those, probably because I didn't know this about Hallumann at the time, like, I didn't know his I had had the Aruba stuff and Yeah.

Blake Smith:

Yeah. Everything. But then those Halloran, truly biographically in the Malone character, are actually exquisitely educated.

Domenic DeSocio:

Yes. So he's Halloran had this sort of this Thomas and Berlin dank where he took Malone's sort of origin conflict is that he's the child of sober Northern European Germans and Protestants and fiery Irish Catholics.

Blake Smith:

The two bases. Exactly.

Domenic DeSocio:

And these two, the the the sobriety and sort of the central fieriness are in him, and that's sort of his central conflict from the get go. Like Thomas Mann and Buddenbrooks. Right? And so he like like like, however, he grows up in Aruba as a child of oil executives, comes back to The United States to go to boarding school, goes to the Ivy League, becomes a lawyer, goes to law school, and then realizes that law school and leading a career in law is, pointless and meaningless. And then goes, drops out in his late twenties to New York at the beginning of the 1970s to be what the narrator calls professionally gay or also a career in love.

Domenic DeSocio:

Right?

Blake Smith:

And so, real Holleran works in the seventies as a caterer waiter, which is what the narrator does Right. When he meets my love. So there's sort of distribution of Halloran's biography across these characters.

Domenic DeSocio:

Yeah. It's also very important Sutherland Malone and Holleran are also Catholics, because there's Catholic imagery dripping that the entire novel varies. Malone is compared to Jesus, compared to the Virgin Mary, the pursuit of love is compared to sort of the secular version of finding God.

Blake Smith:

Well, there's like, I don't think he's quit law school yet, or like Malone is back home for some reason, and the gardener, like the teenage gardener next door, back in the seventies when I guess your gardener could be Italian. I don't know what the last year that could be. But like, it's it's a real sort of religious experience of like, seeing this boy, I think even what they does he touch him? Like, does he

Domenic DeSocio:

they they garden together.

David Sessions:

This is so this is when he's, like, yeah, boarding with some woman outside of DC, and this is kind of the the and she hires this gardener, and and Malone kind of, like, works in the yard with him. And it's when he's going through his crisis, he goes out to the suburbs every night and sits in this empty house, and he's like, what is my life for? And then he starts seeing this boy in the yard, and they get to know each other. Then when the boy leaves to go to college or whatever, he's just, like, heartbroken, and he's like, what is this? You know?

Domenic DeSocio:

Right. So when he finally admits his homosexuality, right, he goes to a park and, the description that he sort of, his holy lips have been, you know, are now are now Defiled. Defiled because he sung sick for the first time. Right? And that's when he sort of begins with the fact that maybe he is gay, which he's not happy about.

Domenic DeSocio:

Right? He calls the book a curse and a gift that he's gonna live his life amongst these people, he calls it a sterile life, an artificial life, right, but moves New York nonetheless to try to find love. And so the novel the the the core of the novel is his adventures in New York after his upbringing. We get he get his biography, and then he arrives in New York, meets Sutherland, and their adventures begin.

Blake Smith:

And and Le Mode is, sort of unbearably earnest, serious. He's a bit of an eork. He's He's handsome.

Domenic DeSocio:

He's he's a blonde beauty.

Blake Smith:

Which is why people are putting up with this nonsense.

Domenic DeSocio:

That's right.

Blake Smith:

But, you know, we we've talked, not on on recording or in our interview last year, like, personally we talked about the like, the filming of Dancer, like someone has the rights, we wonder who, there there's often been talk about making some kind of movie or TV version. But I think it would be very hard in the way that like, you know, Will and Will and Grace sucks. It's very hard to make, you know, the earnest guy looking for love. People hated looking, people hated, you know, the the looking great character because like, you know, that's it's a boring problem.

Domenic DeSocio:

And Malone's this golden child from Ohio. He's the all American blonde postwar beauty, right, who represents the the best of American society and willingly gives it all up to live live this sort of dirty life of poverty on the Lower East Side to find love.

Blake Smith:

Right. Interesting because it's that he's both the perfect wasp, like catalog white, but also has this has Holleran's own exotic origin, very like special education. He's like the hot golden he's like if Angel Holleran were hot, like Andrew Holleran's brain and like a really hot guy's body. There's a certain fantasy there. But he has

David Sessions:

Although although he does, as a character, he does kind of like, it does make a big deal out of him, like renouncing his education or his knowledge and he's like, I'm gonna put all that aside. It's led me astray. I'm gonna go learn from like, the book of the world.

Blake Smith:

Whereas But even that is only like, this like, you know, I I

David Sessions:

don't know how Whereas Southerland is the one that's constantly signing books and supposedly writing

Domenic DeSocio:

By the way, you die and very stolidly.

David Sessions:

Despite being so unserious otherwise.

Blake Smith:

Yeah. So, I I had forgotten until just looking, again, recently that Sutherland is writing a history of religion. Right. And I I suspect this is a little link to like the Casabon character in Middlemarch, like the mythologist. But Malone keeps a journal, you know, he's still he's still writing, he's still sensitive.

Blake Smith:

There are many books within the book. That's right.

David Sessions:

So this is why this is why I identified with him so much, like, you know, when I've read it the first time, it's like, leaving behind his, like, knowledge, you know, leaving behind his life to go find love, journaling, all these

Blake Smith:

Are you are you a diarist?

David Sessions:

Well, yeah.

Blake Smith:

And you you leave it around

David Sessions:

for this one? I've recently, like, enlisted him as like helping me like write down write things down or remember things.

Blake Smith:

How much? This is lesbianism. Since really, this is a level into the scene that people were not staying.

Domenic DeSocio:

And Sutherland, right, is sort of the Virgil to Dante going through the circles of hell, right?

Blake Smith:

And and what is do we what do we know about his biography? Where does he come from?

Domenic DeSocio:

So Sutherland is sort of the the child of the sort of decayed, impoverished Virginian aristocracy, sort of Tidewater. Right? We don't know if he's educated. He calls himself as old as the civil war. He's been around in New York since the fall of Constantinople, he says at one point.

Domenic DeSocio:

Right?

David Sessions:

Although, I think it does I think I did see, like, one actual concrete a number of times, like fifteen years or something.

Domenic DeSocio:

Right. Okay. He's older than Malone.

David Sessions:

He's older than Malone. He's been around New York longer.

Domenic DeSocio:

So he's probably in his mid to late forties at one point. We know that, you know, that he had himself a mentor when he first arrived in New York through Stonewall that he had an old queen to teach him the ways. Right? He's sort of this crazy queen. Right?

Domenic DeSocio:

He's a speed addict. He's constantly taking pills and to to, you know, take take the edge off the speed.

David Sessions:

He is getting invited to tons of parties, like, going running around all over the city. You know, he's giving parties.

Domenic DeSocio:

That's right. He always wears women's couture. Right? He shoplifts from Bloomingdale's. And And it's sort of like the sort of like pre Stonewall, right, what what many people in the seventies sort of disparage as sort of this sort of this, like, you know, very she she, speaks in Frenchism, has also recherche illusions, that's sort of, like, a very aristocratic taste.

Domenic DeSocio:

Right? But also at the same time, jaded and cynical in comparison to Malone's earnestness and and sort of puppy eyed optimism. Right? But, also, interestingly, he I find him much more comfortable about being gay than Malone's, for example. He's much more at peace with it, even if it comes from a more jaded, pessimistic perspective.

Domenic DeSocio:

Well,

David Sessions:

I think there you know, I kind of noticed this more this time because there's this part, like, near the very end where it says you know, it goes on for a while about how, like, Malone and Sutherland are fundamentally the same, or they're both romantics in the end. And and it it I kinda felt this time, like, that Sutherland was less cynical than I maybe thought before, or, that it's a kind of it's a kind of cynicism or or or, you know, what you I think you said say something like this in your essay about camp, like, where it's it's kind of both a deliberate unseriousness. Like, I'm gonna reject this kind of morose, ruminating, turning everything into big questions and now trying to find the great truth

Blake Smith:

Right.

David Sessions:

Because there's no such thing and that's not interesting.

Blake Smith:

Know? And that's also just a symptom of the thing that it's purported to Right. Cure Right.

David Sessions:

Right. And and moping is boring, you know, grow up honey. That's kind of Sutherland's approach. But that doesn't mean he's like cynical about he takes the the life of the New York circuit very seriously. He says that in that first chapter like that.

David Sessions:

He hasn't even been introduced, but someone's quoting him or having reverie and remembering something he said in the past and it's something like, dancing is all we have to stave off death. And so he he take he takes all of this very seriously in a non cynical way.

Domenic DeSocio:

He's actually also a quite good friend. Right? We we we Malone Sutherland meet because Malone has just been beaten by his ex boyfriend, a violent Italian man named Frankie, because he had cheated on Frankie. Right? And Malone Malone flees.

Domenic DeSocio:

Sutherland rescues him, and, actually, he's quite tender and dutiful in tending to his wounds psychically and physically. And they're actually this is the one relationship in the book that is long lasting. They are friends for the entirety of the diegetic present. Right? They're friends for multiple years.

Domenic DeSocio:

They are the only two two men in the book who tell each other that that they love each other, right? And they both have this sort of they both believe the novel at at the same time, either they die or disappear.

Blake Smith:

Now the letter writers, at least one of them concludes by saying I love you poem.

David Sessions:

Yes. Yeah. Yes.

Blake Smith:

So there's there's there's a

Domenic DeSocio:

In the frame narrative.

Blake Smith:

Yeah. There's there's a like a love between friends in the frame narrative, there's there's a love in the story. But, you know, mean, I've I've wondered about their friendship because it sometimes feels like unlikely animal friends, you know, like Exactly. Pig and badger, where, like, what's what do they I mean, one would have to, like, look closely at their conversations, like, what are what are they really like, I I can see how it's, like, amusing for Southern Latoupe imagines Malone as his younger self That's right. Which seems like a bit of self flattery, like that seems like inaccurate.

Blake Smith:

And something is also grooming Malone to be Sure. Like a a whore that he could pimp out, so it's financially interesting. But does like Malone really appreciate Sutherland's wit and, you know, artificiality and his like, does does does Malone find it so we have a friend in common who is a bit of a tragic queen given to big questions and rumination. And I think that like when he calls us in a crisis, hi girl. He he appreciates that I'm like, you're being stupid.

Blake Smith:

What a dumb bitch. I I I think there's like a a mutual enjoyment there, but it does on the page, seems unlikely.

Domenic DeSocio:

Well, the the strange thing is for a main character that is Malone, he actually has very little speaking in the novel, he speaks quite quite less than any other character. Right? There is

David Sessions:

He's spoken for constantly, but, yes, you know,

Domenic DeSocio:

he's the focus of the narrative. The narrator is speaking about him, but he has very little speech and first person coming out of his mouth. Right?

David Sessions:

And and is a hot take, but there's a couple of moments. I I wouldn't wanna overread them and I don't really think this, but there's a couple of moments where it suggests he's made up, where, like, he's like the figments of everyone.

Blake Smith:

Yeah. Yeah.

Domenic DeSocio:

Correct. There is an interesting scene where they're having an argument in the park. It's it's in the middle of the night in the summer. They're on the Lower East Side. They're at the park on a bench watching the gay men cruise each other and have sex with each other, and Malone's fully disenchanted with the life he's been living.

Domenic DeSocio:

Right? And he tells something like, yeah. You know, this I've I've I've had enough. I'm tired of sleeping with people, this is the quote, and not coming out of it transformed. Right?

Domenic DeSocio:

It's the same thing over and over and over again. It's still the same person. Where is love? Where is the man? I I can't do this anymore.

Domenic DeSocio:

It has to end. Right? And Sutherland, in his way, camps about it. He's like, let's let's not talk about this. Right?

Domenic DeSocio:

Let's talk about the size of that person's dick. Want I have I have 400 Valiums in my pocket. Do want a Valium? And Malone stabs at him and tells him, you know, for once, I'd like you to be serious because this is a serious question. I'm miserable.

Domenic DeSocio:

Can you please just have a serious conversation? And Malone says, and sometimes says, I don't know what Wanda's serious about anymore. Haven't been serious in forty years, but I can't. What is? What is serious?

Blake Smith:

Which I think is also, like, I mean, from my own autobiography, think, like, that's the kindest response when someone is doing, like, a spiral without meaning. Mhmm. It's like, would you like to value it, honey? Conversely, there's a moment at the very end, which I love, where Malone enacts Sutherland. That's right.

David Sessions:

I would that's what I was about

Domenic DeSocio:

to say.

Blake Smith:

Is that like, I do

David Sessions:

think that's the appreciation is that, you know, Malone never really becomes campy, but, you know, he's still himself, but he he has adopted kind of Sutherland's perspective, or he he does his own version of it. He, you know, when he sees the younger gays, like, coming up in like Mhmm. Like a wide eyed deer to the to the party in Fire Island, he's like, you know, oh, honey, you know, just put that or he says that to his potential super John Schaeffer. Yeah.

Blake Smith:

I mean, it it is a truly camp. So John Schaeffer says, I love you. Mhmm. And he's like a young you know, Malone has now been in the city for several years, and so there's, as if this younger version of himself who has Right.

Domenic DeSocio:

But also a millionaire, importantly, because Saddam wants to sell him.

Blake Smith:

Yeah. I mean, Malone foolishly rejects this opportunity. Right. But using a Sutherlandian That's vocabulary, he says, oh god, those words, expunge them from your vocabulary, it will seem a lot of trouble. You don't love me.

Blake Smith:

I'm a professional faggot. Now, what other lessons can I pass on to you?

Domenic DeSocio:

Right. And it comes off very artificially in my in my opinion, right? It it sounds quite saccharine and bogus coming out of his mouth. Been out there other moments where Sutherland punctures the this incessant fraud search for meaning. Right?

Domenic DeSocio:

In another conversation, Malone's like, I need to leave. I'm gonna I'm gonna become a traffic control agent in in Key West, I'm going to become a a

Blake Smith:

This was pre Reagan, he didn't know there was no traffic

Domenic DeSocio:

he said that and was like, girl, you haven't been doing anything for ten years, you don't have a resume? He was like, you have been keeping a diary, other people have been keeping a resume, what could you possibly do? And then he says, quote, quote, you need to drop the whole mythopoetic fantasy of the White House, the Big Lawn and the fornicating fireflies because it's not real.

Blake Smith:

Which is Right. There's this wonderful passage, this is a good segue to the Emerald City interview, where Malone is on the train to

Domenic DeSocio:

Seadle.

Blake Smith:

And on the way is passing by, like, looking out into the lawns of these, you know

David Sessions:

Mhmm. This is right. This is in the first chapter before Malone has shown up. This is this this mystery narrator that's unnamed. He's kind of he's himself, on he's his way to Fire Island to go go through Malone's things after he disappears, and he's as he's going through Sayville to get on the ferry to Fire Island, he's, you know, it's kind of the off season, and he's, like, looking at the town and remembering all these things that Malone said in the past.

Blake Smith:

And like yearning yearning. What if I had a sprinkler?

Domenic DeSocio:

What if I had a daughter with pigtails playing playing volleyball?

David Sessions:

And this is where this is where Halloran uses the language of the prison, the boarding school, these these kind of carceral institutions. The the fags are being, like, shuttled in prison buses from Manhattan to Fire Island. Right. And he says in the Emerald City interview, he says, like, that's one of the images that he's most proud of.

Blake Smith:

So first of all, Dancer is a critique of the carceral state. Is an abolitionist. People think he's unpolitical,

David Sessions:

but He also says that, like, Malone's, like, reverie about Sayville, the town, and the white picket fence houses that he sees there, he explicitly says that, like, that's silly and sentimental, and so

Blake Smith:

Should should we say what is the Emerald City interview? What is this?

David Sessions:

So Emerald City was this, I think, quite short lived

Domenic DeSocio:

Yeah. It ran for three years.

David Sessions:

TV series kind of talk show that was on Manhattan public access TV channel. Like, if you watch it, it's like it's a time capsule kind of of the gay in nineteen seventies. It's, like, hard to imagine that it was on public TV in some ways. And, you know, they're often interviewing gay authors, and so Halloran goes on to promote Dancer from the Dance. The interviewer himself, you know, asked these kind of dumb questions, but Halloran says in just fifteen minutes, he kind of gives away a lot about how he wrote the novel, the part how he condensed, you know, things his friends told him into these scenes and paragraphs.

David Sessions:

And and so, yeah, it's it's quite revealing if you're interested in if you're interested if you read the novel, you're interested in kind of like, what did Howard mean by this? Or how how seriously should we take this? I think it he kinda gives a lot away. Yeah. I think

Domenic DeSocio:

that scene when they're going through a state of, you know, the the the mythology of this all American war fantasy. Right? Think I it really speaks for the central question in the novel, which is what do we do if we can't have that? Malone's whole shtick is that, right, he's been exiled more or less from this sort of paradisiacal garden of Eden in his head. Right?

Domenic DeSocio:

He's not straight, so he can't have these things. Right? He can't be respectable. He can't have kids. He can't have this lovely life.

Domenic DeSocio:

And so now he has to find meaning somewhere else. Right? And it's nineteen seventies. Gays are brand new. Was liberation.

Domenic DeSocio:

Right? Obviously, not historically brand new, but during this brand new historical period where they have to reimagine what it means to be gay in this new politicized identity. And the novel, I I think, is asking questions, testing some theories out about where do we find meaning? Is this the right thing? Like, should we be asking this question?

Domenic DeSocio:

First of all, can we find meaning in what it means to be gay to fulfill our lives? And if so, where do we find it? Is it through sex? Is it through love? Is it through dancing?

Domenic DeSocio:

Is it through disco?

David Sessions:

Through friendship.

Domenic DeSocio:

Friendship, beauty of the male body. I think the novel, interesting enough I think I don't want it to sound like a sociology experiment, but the characters try out different avenues, right, and they sort of weigh the pros and cons of different approaches to gay life.

Blake Smith:

Well, and there's always, like, Malone, the narrator, I mean, this is part of, I guess, the construction of the doomed queen, so often frame things as if, like, there is the heteronormative suburban family. There is like the full privileges of like nineteen fifty five American whiteness.

Domenic DeSocio:

Right. And all of it's perfect. And

Blake Smith:

having been excluded from that, one is then in a doomed quest for love that would somehow, like, a love that would somehow make up for that, but that one cannot find. That's right. So, it's as if we're still like in the city in the pillar, Giovanni's dream or something. But then there are all these hints. One, the novel begins with the non novel writer, like the one who moved to the South, talking about like sponge bathing his lover's grandmother.

Blake Smith:

Mhmm. So that kind of domestic scene, they're an interracial couple, you know. It's very Tennessee Williams, he's some kind of Mexican. And there are these moments throughout the novel where like Sugglund and Malone raise the possibility as if in horror, oh, could move to suburban Philadelphia and own a lamp shop with your lover. Disgusting.

Blake Smith:

One would rather be dead. And then, of course, like the beautiful idol, like those pages where Malone and Frankie are living together in this kind of urban pastoral Right. I think are so beautiful, so intense. And what exactly motivates Malone to throw it away to get with some identical looking Italian American guy and to write about it? Like, wants he wants to get caught.

Blake Smith:

He wants to destroy the relationship. I don't know. Like, one of the things that's really interesting about the novel, also the, like, having said we won't get sociological, but the sociological type of the yearner Mhmm. Which Holleran himself is Right. Where, like Mhmm.

Blake Smith:

You sort of organize your life around saying that you would like love, but of course you don't actually want like, a relationship could perfectly well happen, but it would not be as interesting as the unfulfillable quest.

Domenic DeSocio:

Right. And there are multiple moments in the novel where, you know, admits to it, even though he's still a part in the fantasy, right, where he has a conversation with other women and he goes, isn't it so strange? We spent all of our lives searching for that perfect beautiful face, right, the perfect man. And it always turns out to be some ordinary drip who works a nine to five, some schlub, and I and you just can't accept that. Right?

Domenic DeSocio:

And he said, you know, at one point that the partner we meet in real life never can make drops to the partner we have in our heads. Right? Because we have this

David Sessions:

I Yeah. And Lauren says that in the interview. He said, I was he said, I wanted to think about why do we have anger toward things that we love? And he's referring to Fire Island in that instance. Mhmm.

David Sessions:

And he's like he says this, like, I tried out to get out my anger towards something that I love. And like, you love it so much, you kind of get angry at it for not being perfect. Right. And he's talking about Fire Island and and the way that it's he loves going there. It's, you know, wondrous and beautiful Mhmm.

David Sessions:

But it also has this kind of shallow type of relationships or, know, whatever whatever else his critique of it is.

Blake Smith:

Oh, no. Everyone wants to fuck at the fuck island. That's really Yeah. So disappointed in the community. Yeah.

David Sessions:

Right.

Domenic DeSocio:

Yeah. And also, Malone realizes that you can't possess the beauty of another person. Right? He also often ruminates about how it it's all about faces. Right?

Domenic DeSocio:

He constantly sees faces that haunt him on the streets, at clubs, at parties, on the beach. Also, the narrator of the novel is haunted by Malone's face, which at one point he compares to the face of Jesus Christ. Right? And then Malone, at one point, has to admit that the tragedy of what he's doing is that he's searching to possess these people's beauty, and he can't. Nevertheless, he's still on the attempt that they can't give up the illusion that maybe he could one day possess someone else's beauty.

Blake Smith:

And that Malone that has this effect on others, so he, like, has the Right. The greater kind of in his spell, like, the narrator ends the novel by saying that we're all in love with Malone.

Domenic DeSocio:

He's the emblem.

Blake Smith:

He was the cipher that no one really knew anything about, so we were all obsessed with him. I mean, it's it's interesting that like, you know, in many ways, this is a reworking of the great Gatsby.

Domenic DeSocio:

Mhmm.

Blake Smith:

But, in Gatsby, like Jay Gatsby is in love with daisies, One person. One particular person enigmatizes everything that I wish I had, the American dream, yada yada.

Domenic DeSocio:

Here Everybody.

Blake Smith:

Malone doesn't have a target and then he generates around himself, like, he creates that problem for people who perceive him.

Domenic DeSocio:

Right. Well, the gag is, right, they don't he's a cipher, they don't know anything about him, but the narrator is able to write multiple chapters about Malone's childhood in great detail. Right?

Blake Smith:

So there is a way where I don't like this novel, I don't like him, but it kind of, there's something that reminds me about Dennis Cooper's The Sluts Mhmm. Where there's this RIP data, I which don't one's just ended, but there's this sort of data lounge, LPSG, Mail General kind of forum where people are writing about or also making up things about, this like kid prostitute who is like maybe gonna be murdered, you know, maybe a murderer or whatever, but there's a sort of collective fantasy. Mhmm. And, yeah, here I'm like Malone is this

Domenic DeSocio:

Projection screen.

Blake Smith:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like, maybe is an invented maybe is a character invented by the novel writer character, and even within the novel has this very hazy he's he's he's not the community bicycle because, you know, he's not maybe the biggest slut.

Domenic DeSocio:

He's a he's a ghost. He's he's haunting all of these scenes where Malone is.

Blake Smith:

It's hauntological.

Domenic DeSocio:

It's hauntological. Yeah. So I

David Sessions:

was there I was trying to in these early chapters, I was trying to put a name on this. There's a lot of emphasis on this kind of I won't say mimetic desire because that's like dumb Gerard shit, but like this

Blake Smith:

And you know who was on that is Brandon Taylor.

David Sessions:

Yes. But this kind of I was trying to think of a name for it, and what I came up with was social desire, which is this kind of, like, everyone collectively desiring each other. Mhmm. And, you know, I think Malone is like a a symbol or a a figment of that. The things that we connect to that are like the scene early, the very the famous funny scene where he says, none of these people in this room have ever spoken to each other, but they all know exactly what everyone else's dick looks like.

Domenic DeSocio:

That's right.

David Sessions:

So the and then there's this constant as well suggestion for early chapters of, like, numbers and excess, this kind of, like, blur of excess. I mean, there's so much, there's no there can be no distinction, or there can be nothing stands out, or,

Blake Smith:

like,

David Sessions:

the the lover or the the mister right can't emerge because he's in this background of undifferentiated people who are all kind of collectively desiring each other.

Domenic DeSocio:

Dan Sutherland says that, right, that one flaw that Madeline has that he still believes that there's a mister right when in reality, there is no mister right.

Blake Smith:

I mean, is an interesting contrast, I guess, again, with Faggots, which begins with this wonderful like, I think there are similarly well written passages in Faggots. And one is like, there are 1,700,000, like, I remember many Faggots in New York City. I'm like, they're here, they're there. Like, this this great Whitmanian enumeration with the specificity. And that nevertheless, the narrator of faggots and actual Larry Kramer is obsessed with one person.

Domenic DeSocio:

That's right.

Blake Smith:

It works out for Larry Kramer. He gets with the guy who Dinky is based on. Yeah. I I assume they were very happy for many years. Whereas here, yeah, like, object of desire does not really emerge from a lot.

Blake Smith:

Mean, he Frankie is so easily put aside.

Domenic DeSocio:

And Frankie becomes becomes a circus queen at the end of the novel. Mhmm. Right? And then at that point, neither of them had any interest in each other because they're no longer the fantasy that they have of of of they could be. They're just boring circuit queens.

Blake Smith:

Real life Angel Collarion had some short lived boyfriends, but I don't know anything about that.

David Sessions:

Well, I I mean, I think that's kind of what you know, I don't think he's he's very, you know, careful not to, like, advance a particular a thesis or like a judgment, and he said he reiterates reiterates that in the interview that he's, you know, some gays wanna do this. Some of them wanna be in the ghetto. It's fine. Like, I don't care. But it's clearly decided that the you know, he loves Fire Island.

David Sessions:

He loves the circuit. He admits in the interview that he's still part of it and, like, finds it enchanting still. But he's decided, you know, for some reason that this is these people don't actually want real real love or, like, to find their man, that they're after some this some unachievable spiritual quest. And I I think that's the way Halloran thinks about it, and he's just kind of projecting that onto everyone else. Yeah.

David Sessions:

Because yeah. And even the way that he talks about this, you know, he brings this up a lot, you know, this trying on 17 t shirts before you go out, and then trying to perfect in this. And he says, what's ultimately behind that is, like, you wanna find your man so that you get to escape from this. And that's, like, so such projection. Like, I and and I guess a lot like, he says that, like, people do this.

David Sessions:

They they they play this dress up. They have these closets of all these ridiculous clothes. Like, it's somehow like, just saying that itself is, you know, people will take that as being, like, super alienating and, like, that people are being conformist in this shallow way. Whereas, like, to me, like, I've never had any kind of complicated feelings about that. Like, yes, I wanna look perfect.

David Sessions:

Yes, I wanna

Blake Smith:

Also, you can have a man and still be a whore, you know, that's

David Sessions:

not And like, having a man has not made me want to look perfect any less. Like, it's,

Domenic DeSocio:

you

David Sessions:

know, everyone doesn't feel like morose and about this.

Blake Smith:

But, you know, we we we've talked before about this is across Holleran's work. I don't know what is the earliest age at which he was beginning to feel too old for everything, but what year is dark disco? It's also 78?

David Sessions:

'78. Yeah.

Domenic DeSocio:

I mean, Halloran doesn't actually like disco. The music he's talking about is like danceable soul and r and b from the early nineteen seventies.

Blake Smith:

That's when it was good. Commercial disco has ruined disco. Faggots have ruined faggotry.

David Sessions:

It's Clones have ruined clones.

Domenic DeSocio:

It's always over. Which is very decadent. It's very this is very where the romanticism comes into it. Right? It's always the golden age was before me or I experienced the very last of it and now that we're I'm of a certain age, the golden age has passed.

Domenic DeSocio:

Yeah. I'm always late to the party.

David Sessions:

Yeah. And he says that, like, he says something like super one of these, like, big, you know, metaphysical ideas. He says that in the interview, something like he's like, you know, the gay the Fire Island gays are, you know, what they don't understand is that what's against them is time, you know, like, and you imagine it Mhmm. Is with a capital t, as it is in Kingdom of Sand. Time with a capital t.

David Sessions:

And he's he is he loves that. Like, he clearly, like, luxuriates in this kind of painful nostalgic pleasure of this idea that something is just crumbling and passing away. The first chapter, there's this, like, he uses the image of the beach being washed away every season between, and this idea of a literal blur, this the beach is like erased, you know, literally, but also a blur of time where, you know, things are

Blake Smith:

And I mean, are many beautiful passages to that effect. What's what there's this wonderful one that ends with the line, like, don't grow old in a night. Like, he's getting ready to go out dancing and, you know, looking into the mirror and I am getting a little older, but I still have some years of enjoyment ahead. And, I mean, one of the things that's strange biographically is like, I really like that, I mean, Dancer, Faggots, these are both novels of gay middle age Mhmm. Which I think is really cool that like gay literature sort of begins with these great imagined works that are not about coming out and struggling with your sexuality that are like, well, do I even like this gay world?

Blake Smith:

Can I find a boyfriend in it? Like, like, these kinds of problems. But, yeah, Holleran just friends like well into their forties are continuing to go out and party like Stambolian, Denneny and Wyatt. Like, you know, they're older than us and they're still having fun and like getting into I mean, Wyatt especially continues to have way too much fun in the wrong kind up until the very end. On the one hand, like, they're they're keyed into these romantic themes that like go back to the beginning of literature about, you know, youth and beauty, like, can't hold on to them.

Blake Smith:

So, you try to turn them into art somehow. Right. I mean, there is a kind of like, yeah, Malone is a Holleran and he doesn't become a writer. I think there's a lot of there's a lot of priest in this. Mhmm.

Blake Smith:

There's a lot of Holleran having already decided to leave New York to take care of his mother in Florida. Mhmm. And somehow that's gonna be better for art. It isn't. But it it's odd because like these perennial themes of literature, in fact, a lot, like, people talk all the time about like gay culture being so youth obsessed, but here we are, some middle aged queens, you know, who are, no less messy than, fifteen or twenty years ago.

Domenic DeSocio:

Yeah. I think the novel has a really interesting perspective for cycles of gay time, which I think also maybe plays a role into why the linear narrative of the novel is such a mess. Right? If there are dates in the novel that don't match up. Right?

Domenic DeSocio:

Malone is in 1972, he's still closeted living in Washington DC, but then the narrator also saw him in 1971 on the dance floor in New York City, right, when he actually moved to New York, it's up for debate.

Blake Smith:

Shame, but he's trying to figure out, like, gay dance a.

Domenic DeSocio:

Correct. That's all I'd say that the novel plays with the idea of of the gay scene, the gay cycle, which we also see at the end of the novel when Sutherland and Malone put on this party on Fire Island in which Malone is is gonna be sold to this millionaire heir. Right? And at the party, he's looking you know, on balcony looking over the younger queens who are dancing on the floor, and he comments about how, you know, the face has changed. He doesn't recognize any of them.

Domenic DeSocio:

People have left the scene. They've gotten married. They've they've found partners. They've left to open up antique stores in the Hudson Valley, right, which is like the like like a nightmare for Halloween for some reason. Right?

Domenic DeSocio:

But then he says, no. Even though the faces are different, the what they're doing is exactly the same thing. They're all searching for what I was searching for ten years ago and realized that it's not, you know, worth a life. Right? And that the cycle continues.

Domenic DeSocio:

There's gonna be more people after them and after them and after them who continue to do the same thing in the circuit, in the scene, looking for that mister right searching for meaning in the face. And so even though the face has changed, the cycle structure of gay life is immortal and continues. And sort of, like, you know, it's not a linear sort of time frame rather than circle that comes over and over and over again where the the form of gay life remains the same even if the substance of it changes. Right.

David Sessions:

Yeah. And he and he says that where it's like, you know, the idea I had a fire island, you know, when I first started coming six years ago, now, you know, I I can't have that anymore, but, like, it it still lives on in, like, the next boatload that's, you know, arriving for the first time and feeling the same way about it.

Blake Smith:

Whereas Sutherland, you know, is like an ancient 45, but still going to a whole authority.

David Sessions:

Which is so and this is like, I think, this is what, you know, really defined this latest reading for me, is kind of seeing, paying more attention to Sutherland, like enjoying him. He's hilarious.

Domenic DeSocio:

Mhmm.

David Sessions:

And realizing more of what he what his role is in that. Well, we've kind of already said it. Like, it's to constantly sort of deflate, you know Mhmm. Malone's gaseous, you know

Domenic DeSocio:

That's right.

David Sessions:

Yeah. His gaseous kind of dreary romanticism. And like, I like, I I was so totally, you know, when I read it, I I thought this was funny, actually. I I remembered this. I had read it recently.

David Sessions:

I was when I first met Blake, I was kind of at a low point in my life, like, in every way, like, professionally, personally.

Blake Smith:

So were you employed really now? What was that?

David Sessions:

I was working at the bar then. It was like right before I got my job. But so and I had read Dancer, like, that summer, and I was, you know, I was kind of like I wasn't new anymore. The magic was starting to fade a little bit or, you know, the new because

Blake Smith:

you were, like, hormones age or older.

David Sessions:

Yeah. About. And I had very much had this kind of, like, wonder, you know, sense of wonder and romanticism about it. And then and then what like, after I first met Blake, I was like, oh, he's a Sutherland. It's like, anytime you try to get too serious, he just, like, deflects it with cam.

Blake Smith:

And then

David Sessions:

and it first, like, kind of irritated. Like, I I have other friends who, like, do that in a less intelligent way, and I've I'm just like, oh, I hate those people. They will never be serious, like he says. And and and then, like, you know, as I got to know you, and especially doing this project, like, saw that, like, that was that was

Domenic DeSocio:

a

David Sessions:

considered position, like, that you that you were doing that, that that was a form of seriousness to you, or kind of a statement about like, that we what kinds of questions are interesting or not.

Blake Smith:

I I I like this this is also, guess, that Domenic also has a bit of this, is that like, as if the sweetest thing that you could do toward the humorous would be discovered that it is in fact serious.

Domenic DeSocio:

Mhmm.

Blake Smith:

That would be the highest tribute. I

David Sessions:

must I must say that it, like, kind of interacting with you and, like, reading your stuff and talking to you had had kind of has made it has moved me more, I think, and maybe also just my life getting better Mhmm. Like, away from or it's it's allowed me to, like, cultivate a a sense of, like, getting over myself or, like, stepping back for, oh, no. This this is this all the smoking is not very interesting. It's not deep. It's not interesting.

David Sessions:

It's just super repetitive and boring. And so I think I was ready this time to read Sutherland and be like, oh, I've kind of learned something. I've kind of, like, I kind of I'm more like this now. Mhmm.

Domenic DeSocio:

Yeah. And that perhaps you see, like, this the story is is anything it is a celebration of gay friendship of that kind of role between two people.

David Sessions:

Right. Yeah. Oh, and it also made me so the the first time I read it kind of, like, slightly tuning Sutherland out a little bit, you know, maybe not zoning, you know, re skipping past some of his paragraphs. So I had this very Malonian vision of Holleran, I think. Like, Holleran is Malone, you know, that kind of yearning is which I think it is, but I think he's also Sutherland.

David Sessions:

Think he's

Blake Smith:

You know, I I have not spent much time in his presence, but we had like lunch in Gainesville, Florida a few years ago and he, mean, he's he's a hoot. He's very he's very like, I he's very

David Sessions:

think he's a sad, particularly sad person. I think he's like super well, you know, has tons of friends and has constant contact with people, like, he's funny, like, don't I don't really think he's, you know, think he's like, you know, has thoughts, has big thoughts, but I don't

Blake Smith:

So, I think the thing

Domenic DeSocio:

is that

Blake Smith:

he's better educated than most of the other guys in the gay world Mhmm. And actually, like, smarter and more thoughtful. But if you look at like, you know, Ed White has so many pedantic essays that are warmed over Susan Sontag, which are themselves, like, warmed over Thomas Mann. So, it's like pretending to be a third rate European intellectual. Colin has, you know, he's he's read his Gates and Santoyanan and James and Proust and, you know, he he knows the references.

David Sessions:

Mhmm.

Blake Smith:

But he feels like he doesn't need to beat you over the head with the fact that he knows them. Right. He's very, like, relaxed. So, I think Keith has the Sutherland boats within himself, but also though, he had this close friend who was very Sutherland, so he could quite sort of borrow that voice and ventriloquized through it. I do, I wish we had a more gay, they're they're the terrible Ethan Morton buddies models.

Domenic DeSocio:

I like those.

Blake Smith:

Domenic and I also have an ongoing discussion of, Domenic, like, whenever, like, we see, like, some totally mid guy, Domenic is like, wow, if I would.

David Sessions:

I never know what to do with friends like that. It like I was like, should I like, I feel like I'd be destroying your innocence if I, like, pointed out that, he's not in your league.

Domenic DeSocio:

Wow. Okay. So this

David Sessions:

is so another thing to say about, like, about Sutherland's, like, role in the novel, and maybe I was thinking about this because we're gonna do a a discussion about camp and because I read your essay about it. I read read, like, the Charles Ludlowan essay about it. And one of the things that I think the the structural roles that that the plays in the novel is is as a can't figure, as a kind of, you know, where Lauren's talking about or who we're gonna tell you as a little bit a little preview of who we're gonna the playwright we're gonna talk about on the next episode. He kind of uses satires of classics or even classics in their own words to sort of mock them or mock their self seriousness and mock them. Mhmm.

David Sessions:

And Blake says in his essay, that's to like make it give us an act, you know, satire as a way of giving our camp as a way of giving us a fresh access to something that is like culturally culturally worn out, even if it's a classical form. Mhmm. And that's exactly what I feel like everyone's doing in this novel.

Blake Smith:

I mean, one thing also, Domenic and I talked about, you know, just in our personal correspondence is like, if in some ways Dancer is about, you know, these cycles of gay life and a kind of education into gay life of like, the sexual codes, we both love the scene of applying a cream, It's like very specific construction on the face, how to dress, how to talk, how to fuck. But how does one get inducted into this gay levity, this gay humor? You have suggested, Domenic, one is born with it or not. That there are the incurable cases. But I think it's learned.

Domenic DeSocio:

It's always both.

David Sessions:

I would I would point to our archive as evidence that I have, like, gradually I'm still not funny, obviously, but but I have I have gone from, like, super, like, reserved and serious at the beginning to, like, learning to say what pops into my head, you know, there.

Blake Smith:

I guess one could be going through your your diary. One could one could really be keeping receipts.

David Sessions:

I think it yeah. I think it kind of what what Holleran's doing with Sutherland, a kind of you know, he clearly feels this, like, yearning romanticism, but he's also skeptical of it, and he wants to kind of make fun of it just to be sure. And so I think that's something you can cultivate. Like, can cultivate, like, an ironic distance from your own Yeah. You know.

Blake Smith:

Well, and Holleran and Ferro teach each other to do this. Farrow is not a great writer, he doesn't have access to it in his novels. But from the days after they graduate from Iowa, like '64 to '65, Andrew Holleran and Robert Ferro, gay novelists, are at Iowa writer schools together. Not out to each other, but they start even then writing these ultra campy Mhmm. Letters teaching interested each other to write with these personas.

Blake Smith:

So, in the frame to this, like, you know, they're writing as like, Madame de Metterno, it's like the Duchess of whatever. The

David Sessions:

Glendale. Yeah. Every letter they have a different, like, you know, pseudonym.

Blake Smith:

And Holleran does this in his correspondences first with Ferro and then later in life with George Stambolian and Ethan Mordden. And actually, those letters are the funniest and best things that he has written. Like, they like, one day, it will make for a wonderful collection. Whenever she passes me, she put a thousand years, but

Domenic DeSocio:

And I mean, and and they're gossiping in those letters to a large degree. I think Yeah.

David Sessions:

And I think that comes through, like, when you've read, maybe some I haven't read a ton of the letters, but the letters or the essays where he's kind of clearly, you know, being a little bit silly and and, you know, or gossipy. Mhmm. And then you see that you see those same techniques used in Dancer. And and sometimes you notice that even when it's, you know, one of these sprawling list paragraphs of list of listed items, even if it's like kind of a sad or melancholy thing, you can tell he's like he's, like, amping it up to 11 in this kind of, like That's right. Deliberately silly way.

David Sessions:

And and, you know, so there's a kind of humor underneath it even though it's

Domenic DeSocio:

I think the humor is, like, exactly that. It's, like, he's incredibly gifted at bringing the high and the low together, and that distance between them finding the humor. Right? It's, like right. He's having conversations about sort of, like, at death is we're all confronted with our vanity at death.

Domenic DeSocio:

Right? But then at the same time, he's talking about how he was so depressed. Well, I'm, in fact, so depressed that last night while Bob was sitting on my face, I began to think about how futile life is. Right? No matter what you do, it all ends in death.

Domenic DeSocio:

Vanity, vanity, vanity. Right? Or another part, when Stanford sent me a questionnaire asking what was the peak experience of the past ten years of my life, a voice inside answer without hesitation, sucking Alfred onto Baldi's cock. Right? So these highly, you know, you know, these philosophical questions, these big questions about meaning with a capital m, and then answers always something extremely deflating and funny, and that just I think he had a lot of his humor.

David Sessions:

Right. Which is that which is exactly what Sutherland always does, and and the reason I think that, like, that is also just as much as the the mellow and yearning like that is Holleran too. Mhmm.

Domenic DeSocio:

Yeah. I mean, the gossiping is interesting. I think we're talking about how do you learn how to do this. I think the gossiping is a way to do that, either by letter writing or by talking to each other. The book is a book essentially a book of gossip to a large degree.

Domenic DeSocio:

Right? The narrator is constantly gossiping. Right? The characters are gossiping about each other. There are these beautiful scenes where it's just chains of gossip where one gay couple, like, at the club, they're sitting on a couch, one duo comes, they're gossiping, then they leave, and then another duo comes, and they gossip about the people who just left, and this is the the daisy chain of gossip.

David Sessions:

Yeah. And then and then there's one of these, like or no. I think it may be Sutherland that's overhearing it in that scene. Right. Or it's one of these anonymous people who's, like, mysteriously narrating somehow.

David Sessions:

That's right.

Domenic DeSocio:

That's right. And the community is formed through the gossip. Right? This is a gay world. They don't know any about each other particularly.

Domenic DeSocio:

They don't talk to each other. They're just faces, but they're all gossiping about each other, and that's sort of how they form this community, and hence, they get to educate each other, think, to a large degree is by gossiping.

Blake Smith:

Well, think it's true that, you know, won't like to hear it, but I've been thinking a lot about this via Avatar Ronnell, has some very interesting thoughts about gossip. Okay. Gossip is with music, it's her poor thing. No. Not.

Blake Smith:

He harasses

Domenic DeSocio:

more than gossip. That's why don't

Blake Smith:

sexually harass via email. That's stupid. Do it do it word-of-mouth. You know? Where does this go?

Blake Smith:

That yeah. You have to learn how to gossip. Because part of gossip is like, how do you ornament the Like, you won't believe. And, you know, that it both has to be zhuzhed up, but it also Tell a story. And and it can't just be like, oh, my friend has cancer.

Blake Smith:

That's not gossip. Right. Like, it's got like some something that's like bad, dramatic, but but given enough artifice and levity. Yeah. There has to be both an urgency and a levity and an ornamentation to it.

Blake Smith:

So, yes, somehow gossip is already close to camp.

Domenic DeSocio:

Right. And by gossiping about them, right, you the narrator says that we possess the people that we gossip about in a certain way. So even if you're not, like like, none of these characters are actually sleeping with each other. Right? They all desire each other.

Domenic DeSocio:

Their desire is never really fulfilled, but they all that's how have supplemented and possess each other through the gossip. For example, like you said, they all know to the millimeter, the length of each other's cots. Right. One of the fun

David Sessions:

that's one of the fun things about you know, maybe all commune communities of gays do that, but, like,

Blake Smith:

the ones

David Sessions:

the ones who go out or ones who go out or, like, are are, you know, circuit adjacent, like, they very much do this. And that's one of that's part of

Blake Smith:

part I'd say hung and wait to be told about it.

David Sessions:

And then also That's part of the fun of it is is not that not that you're actually gonna sleep with these people or you

Domenic DeSocio:

Why don't know about that?

David Sessions:

But, like, knowing what they're doing In bed. How their body is changing, you know, often

Domenic DeSocio:

Also, if you if you're on the apps, you've seen all of your friends' dicks. Right? So it's like, you do know what what they all look like.

Blake Smith:

Virtually, I mean, I'm I'm always singing the praises of LPSG, data lounge has passed, but I was just telling Domenic about one of my favorite influencer content creators, current former whores who has just become a yoga instructor and I have never met this person but somehow, you know, know his name and real address.

Domenic DeSocio:

Employment history.

Blake Smith:

Employment history. And I mean, I have spent some real time getting the facts on this. I love to find out how old a whore is.

Domenic DeSocio:

And now he's part of your community.

David Sessions:

I have I have a couple of, like, insta gays or insta gay couples that I've been this way about. And the interesting thing is I do actually see them in person or like I

Domenic DeSocio:

Have you spoken to them?

David Sessions:

Yeah.

Domenic DeSocio:

Like,

David Sessions:

yeah. I mean, in passing, kind of, like, I don't know them, but like

Blake Smith:

because Boston is not big.

David Sessions:

I mean, like, in province town or New York, usually. But, yeah, I'm always when I find a place find someone from where they're from, I'm like, oh, tell me tell me.

Blake Smith:

Well, because this this this is what he has he has some like totally think, like, or who whose tweets did you embarrassingly read?

David Sessions:

That is a big l. I'm gonna take a big l on that because he's so I read him as like positively, which is fine, you know, he's fine. But I didn't I didn't realize quite how dumb people think he is or like how often he is made fun of.

Blake Smith:

This is I went I went down in a rabbit hole and he has a lengthy LPSG where all these girls were like, and who knows if this is real? It's very Dennis Cooper's The Sluts, it's very like Malone, and the stories around him, but there were all of these like, I met him at a party at such and such, and he was like the most annoying bitch. People had so many finely described micro interactions.

David Sessions:

So I also I I it turns out I was just listening to podcast with two current OnlyFans boys, and they were talking about it was about LPSG, and that was about how much they hate it and how terrible it is. And they were basically, like, everything on there is fake. Like, it's all made up. It's just fan fiction about people like us.

Blake Smith:

That's what I said. So that's even better than, like, the old me, or, this this woman running for, city council in New York who's like the DSA girl who had tweeted about how you shouldn't date outside your race. Mhmm. When she was confronted about that recently, she said, that's the politics of the past. And I thought that's such a great, like, that's how old me.

Domenic DeSocio:

But that's the politics of the past,

Blake Smith:

but also That's fan fiction. That's my, you know, my haters are out there inventing fan fiction.

Domenic DeSocio:

But then eventually, they get passed along so much that it ends up becoming fact anyway. Right? These are the facts about gay worlds.

Blake Smith:

So I would love a version of Dancer that's a little more because it's like the the legend around Malone is itself quite yearning and morose. Yeah.

Domenic DeSocio:

If you got

David Sessions:

a little

Blake Smith:

bit more of like, oh, that girl. I thought she died. That is how it is. Like, isn't she in Thailand now? Isn't she a rice queen?

Domenic DeSocio:

Isn't she a Singapore?

David Sessions:

There is a I was gonna bring this as an example of where this this kind of social this this web world that's held together by a web of gossip, this kind of social desire gets in brought into which Holleran kind of repeatedly suggests is, like, maybe alienating it somewhat because it's fake or, like, it's it's kind of in everybody's imaginations, but, like, they don't actually have real relationships or but then what struck me this time was the scene where Malone goes and is in the hospital

Blake Smith:

Mhmm.

David Sessions:

Where his his arm or leg gets broken by a hookup, by a client or whatever. And then all of those people come into the hospital, and the narrator is like, almost shocked. It's like, oh, these people exist. They exist in the daylight. They do actually care about Malone.

David Sessions:

They do actually know each other. Like Yeah. And then they're all, like, in the hospital room. Like, it's just, again, another one of these, like, waves of gossip. Like, a new group comes in and it's more gossip.

David Sessions:

Yeah. And it's kinda it's almost like a little bit saccharine or, like, heartwarming. Yeah.

Domenic DeSocio:

I mean, it's Holleran. I feel like for Holleran, nothing's ever just one thing. It's always this and this. But at the same time, I think he's quite he partakes in himself, also, I think, not not celebrates but appreciates the role of gossip has, right, as bringing these people together. He also describes it at other points as his gossip, as you were saying, as being suffocating almost to a certain degree, right, where it's like he describes certain certain micro characters who are mentioned just as cameos, right, where they consider committing suicide because he couldn't deal once again of being the great moody, F.

Domenic DeSocio:

Allen Pines.

David Sessions:

Or he presents with the with the try on t shirts thing, he presents this sort of obligation to perform for other people. Right. The story continues to beautiful as this kind somehow oppressive and and alienating instead of fun, which is actually what it is.

Domenic DeSocio:

And and I think Monk when the lone wishes for a hurricane to just sort of wipe this all away because it there's this there's this there's this feeling in both this novel and in Faggots that by the late seventies, this is too much and it needs to end. It cannot go online anymore. What could possibly we've gone so far in our sexual perversions and our, you know, terrorization. It just can't go on. It has to end.

Blake Smith:

So there is something very strange about, like, the construction in both of these novels and and and the culture more generally. This is an every night fever Mhmm. That, like, they could sense these possible off ramps, like, could move up Hudson Valley. Right. You know, nothing is stopping you from having an antique store.

David Sessions:

Right.

Blake Smith:

Except the market is saturated. Maybe in the seventies it was, So you that they that they see these offerings, you could get in a couple, you know, you could move to Connecticut. Yet somehow, you know, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. It's easier to imagine like the hurricane

Domenic DeSocio:

Right.

Blake Smith:

Than actually coupling up. This is, you know, they were hard times, so I can't blame him. But it's a shame that Holleran didn't write an AIDS novel. So, like, Nights in Aruba hinted at the very very end, and it's a terribly written novel. It's like Dancer but with no structure.

Blake Smith:

And then Beauty of Men is a beautiful wonderful novel, I think. But like

David Sessions:

Mhmm. Okay.

Blake Smith:

It eludes dealing with like, well, what happens in Dancer when Hurricane really does hit? Right. And actually, are over for real and not just some kind of melancholic fantasy. Fantasy. Right.

Blake Smith:

And like, I would love to read like Andrew, like Andrew Holleran has some great, I think it's, it's a really beautiful essay about Carl Jungans, No, Ernest Michaeler, dying with AIDS in '87, '88, and like this hospital scene, which is like really, like, the priest comes in and gives the last rites, but he's wearing rubber gloves. But he doesn't I mean, think he has like a big kind of writer's block around organising a novel around this. Mhmm. But I think there's also like a disjuncture where this is already so full of foreboding and a sense of like, finitude that when actually, there is a real problem. Mhmm.

Blake Smith:

I don't know. Something about, like, the the techniques of agglobulting him fails.

Domenic DeSocio:

Well, a quite technical novel in that regard. Right? Where it's like, things are better. We're now in a moment of decay. This can't go on forever.

Domenic DeSocio:

Something must wipe this away, a disease, a hurricane, and then the disease comes. Yeah. Right? And this entire framework of thinking around the novel doesn't doesn't doesn't hold up for it.

Blake Smith:

So, not that everyone has to be Proust, but I mean, of the greatness of Proust is, like, the end of the novel includes World War one and then we fly ahead into the future and we see everyone, like, wizened and ruined and transformed. Right. And and then, the narrator has to like, and write his novel. But like, in a way, this is like, we we never get Holleran and extending this. Already in the '78 interview with Ortlub, and this is something that Denneny says, like, the late seventies, early eighties, there's a wish in the Christopher Street network that Holleran and write a kind of sequel that moves this forward a tie, even before AIDS but to be thinking Yeah.

Blake Smith:

More like well, it's supposed to be historical about the doomed Mhmm. Queen about today. Yeah. Well, it's next. And he's sort of a bit like, he just keeps writing about Florida people.

Blake Smith:

Mhmm.

Domenic DeSocio:

That's one of the greatest tragedies to American gay literature that his mom fell and they had to move to Florida.

Blake Smith:

Then, okay. So the beauty of men, like every other page is this woman that's saying, please go back to New York.

Domenic DeSocio:

He didn't want him to.

Blake Smith:

Yeah. And I just wanna watch my stories.

David Sessions:

I also have I feel like I've gotten the sense over the years that he was actually not in Florida as much as his characters were. Like, he spent more time, like, out back in New York or

Domenic DeSocio:

Yeah. He kept his apartment and visited quite frequently. So he didn't permanently decamp to Florida till well into the eighties or nineties.

Blake Smith:

I get I have a very strong sense of him being in Florida because all of the letters that he writes are from Florida. Mhmm. So, like, the court you know, when he's in New York, he doesn't have to write letters to people who are in New York, but so the correspondence is all, like, from Keystone Heights. And he's writing the letters because it's cheaper than calling and he doesn't want mom to listen to his phone calls. He's not out to his mom.

Domenic DeSocio:

That's right.

David Sessions:

That's what's built.

Domenic DeSocio:

That's the pseudonym. That's the pseudonym.

Blake Smith:

Oh, right. We haven't mentioned that this is yeah, this is a pseudonym. He's not out to his

David Sessions:

his Germans. Emerald City, he he mentions these gays who are, you know, and this is always something that's very good coded in horror and it's like, being integrated into the cycles of life. You know, that's a contrast to the the circuit gays are ghettoized, and they only live this one kind of way and this one this half life, they're shades, they're ghosts, you know, they're half alive. Prisoners. And then other gays who escape from it, they're more normal because they're integrated with their families in these cycles of life.

David Sessions:

And the the the interviewer is like, are they out to their families? And he's like, you know, I certainly hope so. And like, you know, it's just poof.

Blake Smith:

I mean, wonder, like, not such a talented novelist, but Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley. Holleran was very good friends with the Farrow Grumley's Mhmm. Who I I don't know about Grumleys family, but certainly they're out to pharaohs Italian American family, very integrated in that. Mhmm. And then the two of them are out trolling for black dick every night, like, uptown, and writing about their search for black dick and UFOs.

Blake Smith:

They are domestic but they are wild and shit. Like, they have like a crazy fucking lie.

David Sessions:

Yeah. And they're also and they write it off, like, novels about it too. I Yeah. That was actually one of my when I first started when I read fair one of Pharaoh's novels and I started kind of relativizing Holleran a little bit and reading him like less sociologically. Like, is not the one way that gays had to be at the time, like

Blake Smith:

There is nothing to stop you. So they have this wonderful, I had it somewhere, Atlantis, a real and psychic journey where Robert Farrow's dad lends in a boat so they can go like off the Florida Coast looking for the ruins of Atlantis and like, that's a gay, domestic journey. Like, that's fucking they're having very different thoughts.

Domenic DeSocio:

That's right. That's right.

Blake Smith:

What to what sort of conclusion are we working with these insights having established?

David Sessions:

Well, we could do a conclusion that's like just a different point entirely. That's why I wanted I wanted to comment, like briefly comment on how good Halloran and I feel like he doesn't get because he gets people talk about the the themes of the novel, like the tech you know, even the technique to some to some extent. Feel like he never gets credit for how good he is at describing dancing itself or like dancing itself, music, the climax of a DJ set.

Blake Smith:

Yes. Someone has made an intercomerary playlist, right?

David Sessions:

So this is I wanted to kind of like read this passage where it's a little bit long, but

Domenic DeSocio:

Yeah. Go ahead.

David Sessions:

And then and then comment on it as a okay. So he's describing, like, it says, this is in the sec or the first actual chapter or second where he's he's kind of he's kinda it's almost like a starts as a trend story. He's like, you know, before the journalists discovered disco, the disco text, this is what was happening. You know, and it's yeah. It's kinda like one of these New York bags.

David Sessions:

Like, this is what's happening in the disco. So like, it's it's these, you know, collective narrators gossiping about what's happening.

Blake Smith:

You know, but we haven't we haven't talked or I and I certainly haven't even thought about, like, he starts writing the Christopher Street column after the novel, but this is already somehow shaped by, like, the voice of magazines. Like, there are magazine type messages. Yeah. Yeah.

David Sessions:

And then he yeah. He goes on to write several kind of columns about disco and whether it's over or not. Is it over in San Francisco? Is it over? But but anyway, so he's described this a lot of this chapter is describing just the club itself.

David Sessions:

So this is, you know, this is kind of his portrayal of the gaze as a collective and also, like, what happens on the dance floor. Within this larger group, for some of them came but once a month or twice all season, was a core of people who seemed to have no existence at all outside this room. They were never home it seemed, but lived only in the ceaseless flow of this tiny society's movements. They seldom looked happy. They passed one another without a word in the elevator like silent shades in hell, hell bent on their next look for a handsome stranger.

David Sessions:

Their next rush from a popper. The next song that turned their bones to jelly and left them all on the dance floor with heads back, eyes nearly closed, in the ecstasy of saints receiving the stigmata. They pursued these things with such devotion that they acquired after a few seasons, a haggard look, a look of deadly seriousness. Some wiped everything they could off their faces and reduced themselves to blanks. So I I like this palette.

David Sessions:

So I he has this more broadly, he's setting up this thing where, like, the circuit is somehow, like, almost outside of time or, like, it's in this this, you know, this this under you know, I I I think the use of shades there is, like, really evocative. It's it's like this underworld where it's halfway between heaven and hell or something like that. Mhmm. I like that just because it's it's kind of like a nod to like if you've ever been in those environments, they're often like literally underground. There it's dark in there.

David Sessions:

They have, like, sketchy red light. And and when you walk through the halls, people are, like, shadows or Mhmm. Or, like, even on the streets of of P town, like, after the club's closed. Or maybe you have, like, a haze of ketamine or something, and, like, everyone looks like ghostly figures or or zombies. Mhmm.

David Sessions:

So just that language I thought was cool. And then but then and he and he kind of uses that to capture their their alienations.

Domenic DeSocio:

Like Mhmm.

David Sessions:

The more you do this, the the longer you are in these places, the the more drugged you are, the more just kind of blank and worn down you become. And then it's like totally switches register to like almost saccharin. Mhmm. There was a moment when their faces blossomed into the sweetest happiness, however, when everyone came together in a single lovely communion that was the reason they all did what they did, that occurred around 06:30 in the morning when they took off their sweat soaked t shirts and screamed because Patty Jo had begun to sing, make me believe in you, show me that love can be true. By then, the air was half nauseating with a stale stench of poppers broken and dropped on the floor after their fumes had been sucked into the heart, the odor of sweat and ethyl chloride from the rags they clamped between their teeth, holding their friends' arms to keep from falling.

David Sessions:

The people on downs were hardly able to move and the others rising from the couches where they had been sprawled like martyrs who have given up their souls to Christ, pushed onto the floor, and united in the cries of animal joy because Patty Jo had begun had begun to sing. That just kind of description of, like, the, you know, the climax of a DJ set in, like, the last, you know, hour, you know, how it kind of no matter, like, what you're you've maybe, like, already had your crash from drugs or you had a, you know, low mood at some point, but it kind of, like, brings everyone together. Mhmm. I love that.

Domenic DeSocio:

Yeah. It's super evocative. I mean, the Catholicism in that passage passage is insane.

David Sessions:

Yes. Yeah. Didn't even comment on that. I didn't even know exactly what to do with that.

Domenic DeSocio:

It's like it's like they're they're they're sacrificing themselves for the trans this momentary transcendence. Right? They're sort of martyrs for the music. Right, their love for the music transcends whatever pain and whatever sort of alienation and affliction that that their gay lifestyle gives them. It's a gorgeous way of describing it.

Domenic DeSocio:

Mhmm.

David Sessions:

I mean, yeah, and it goes, like, the the way it goes back and forth from, like, shades or ghosts to saints or, Saints, you know exactly.

Domenic DeSocio:

Is the stigmata, sign of, you know, they've been marked with with with holiness, with Christliness. I mean, the the club that's described the 12th the 12th Floor is based on a real club called the 10th Floor, right, which existed, which Halloran meant to all the time in the early seventies.

David Sessions:

And there's a line in that very maybe the first page of that chapter where he says, basically, the year that it opened, when we were the first people in, before it got popular, and before disco went mainstream, it was the best thing that has ever been that ever was or has ever been since.

Domenic DeSocio:

Yeah. And It was, like, 1971, '72, disco doesn't exist yet. So what he's dancing to is, like, I was saying, like, slow, back down tempo r and b. Patty Joe song is not a disco song. Right?

Domenic DeSocio:

Also, I was learning more about the 10th Floor, which is what the club is based on, and it was an all white You know? Club. It it was a club that was a stat of what I'm reading was was a members only club, so the first sort of elite dancing institution in New York, and they purposely made it because they wanted to exclude black men because even though they only listen to black music, all the music is by black artists, obviously.

Blake Smith:

And, like, I I mean, maybe I have not listened on the right drugs, but when I try to listen to the stuff that, like, he promotes, like, in this or in dark disc, like Zuleika.

Domenic DeSocio:

It I'm not that bad.

Blake Smith:

It it doesn't it doesn't click for me. It's not it's not Donna Summer.

Domenic DeSocio:

It's all down to me. It it it's it's all sleaze, which is the down tempo down tempo, melancholic, highly emotional media that you would play at five to 06:00 in the morning where everyone's coming down on their drugs and before we're leaving. That's the kind of music that he's describing.

Blake Smith:

I'm not in the right chemical state, I'm not hired enough.

Domenic DeSocio:

That's right.

Blake Smith:

You know, the the the southerly part of me, you know, and deflate. I I there are so many great little lines where he recognizes that, of course, lots of people go to the club like once a month, or like sometimes. Right. Many people are not in fact like slaves to the rhythm.

Domenic DeSocio:

Right.

Blake Smith:

And I've mentioned I think on the pot already, like, love the scene at the end where one of the letter writers is thinking back to, maybe not the first, like an early day pride parade and realizing that like, oh, right, there's like a million of agates in New York City and the ones that I know from my very particular life are just a few people.

Domenic DeSocio:

And they're all summering on Fire Island and they're not marching in the streets.

Blake Smith:

Right. Right. Which which I mean, we we've mentioned this a similar line in Holleran's essay on Pride, where he's like feeling smug about all of his friends who are on Fire Island and not marching in the parade. And, I love this moment where the narrator meets Malone, maybe for the first time, this is, you know, the unreliable timeline, but he's working as a caterpillar. Mhmm.

Blake Smith:

So there's like one scene of labor, cause like otherwise it's not clear how someone works. Is also like, people have jobs in Faggots or in Nocturnes of the Kingdom Naples, I guess, but otherwise they're like living in a world of fantasy, of fucking, of running around, of nightlife, and, like, these little moments where someone actually has to do something.

David Sessions:

Yeah. And I guess you see from Ed White's memoirs of that time, it's like, you had to do very little work to live in New York at

Domenic DeSocio:

the time. So Malone is a sex worker for most of the novel, but also this is before Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, so cash welfare still exists.

Blake Smith:

But, Ed White had money, and as as did Andrew Hallerton.

Domenic DeSocio:

And Kramer.

Blake Smith:

But that like, Andrew Hallerton's real life, so he's like living somehow like Malone, he's like partying all the time, but he also is holding down a job and writing a novel. So like, Malone's life is like, of the work extracted from it. So it's this pure, religious, ecstatic and then depressive. And in some way, like, you know, Sutherland is there to provide like a counterpoint or a counterrhythm, but another counterrhythm would be like, oh, also I had to go to the grocery store. Yeah.

Blake Smith:

Also I have my shift now. And I feel like, you know, we've talked about this before but like, oh, what's this? Adam Lawrence Jones, think is good at a domesticity. David Leavitt, who I hate, is actually kind of good at gay domesticity but like, gay Oh, the lip read of him did not suggest there would be good stuff. What so tell me more about

Domenic DeSocio:

He's just really good at at, writing about middle class domestic Boston gays.

David Sessions:

Oh. I've never even heard of this.

Domenic DeSocio:

Yeah. You should look into me. He lives in Cambridge.

Blake Smith:

But the, I mean, this is part of what makes Dancer so like wonderful and intense, but then, what Halloran does in other novels like describe everyday life, it's subtle, bleak, and flat, and awful. Like, the scenes of watching television in Kingdom of Saiyan, I mean, they're very realistic.

David Sessions:

Not in a way you want them to be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's that's I think, you know, maybe to circle back to the beginning, like, the one of the dangers I think of reading sociologically, like, think the you know, when, you know, I I think I read it this way or like that

Blake Smith:

Sure.

Domenic DeSocio:

I think I did too.

David Sessions:

And it's what's wrong with this kind of metaphysical, like, approach to these type of questions that Malone exemplifies. And and I think a lot of people, like, pick up the novel, and there's like, oh, this is what gay men are. Like, we're this is what we are. This is how you know, we're still playing out these these things, and we're just doomed to be like this.

Domenic DeSocio:

They are being gay. At one point, Sutherland says, or Sutherland I think one of the letter writers at the end of the novel says, the problem is not that they're gay. The problem is that they despair at being gay. That is Malone's true problem. Right?

Domenic DeSocio:

So, also, you could read the novel as a self hating, internalized, homophobic narrative.

David Sessions:

Right. I guess. So, one thing

Blake Smith:

to puzzle over is like, are the letter writers, how are they constructing Malone? They're imagining Malone as this doomed Queen. Is that also like a self diagnosis? Yes. How are they like gossiping about him and projecting something onto him or how are they like, complicit in the types of their imagining?

Domenic DeSocio:

Well, the one writing the novel does say in the opening letters that he is a doomed queen as well. Like, he belongs to the scene that he is describing, the one who stays in New York.

Blake Smith:

Right. So then I wonder like, I mean, as the one who has left New York for the pleasures of sponge bathing Ramon's grandmother, is is which is close to Holleran's life except there's no Ramon. We haven't even talked about, by the way, Hispanicity, latinidad, in this novel, which is very important. That's a big running theme is

David Sessions:

But I think the I think the the southern letter writer who's in the South, who's left New York, and at the end, is the one who tells the one who's writing the novel and is still kind of enthralled and blown. You know, he tells him, like, come on, honey. He was just a circuit gay at the end of the day. Like, he was

Domenic DeSocio:

To me, the take home message is that the search for meaning is not a a bug in the system. It is what life is. Like, Malone's Malone's problem is that he takes the search for meaning at some sort of pathology that's afflicted him because he's gay. Yes. I I think the I think the ambivalence to me in the novel points to the fact that that is life.

Domenic DeSocio:

Right. You're constantly searching for something and becoming at peace with that, not becoming too too therapy psychological here, but, like, I think that

Blake Smith:

is I need to be a therapist, by the way. So he needs he needs those hours. He needs those practice hours. That's one

Domenic DeSocio:

of the important take home messages, that that is life. Life is searching for something and being okay with the fact that you will not find it and having to compromise is that is life.

David Sessions:

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think Halloran even says that explicitly in the interview. It's like, I wanted to sort out, like, is this about being gay or is this just life?

Blake Smith:

You know, Proust has a similar thought at Sodom and Gomorrah, like book five of the Rosherich, where he's, you know, thinking about, you know, the homosexuals of his day appeal to, you know, the the gays of classical antiquity, and he says, but the difference, reader, between, you know, them and you, is that you're a loser. Yeah. So, you know, right, like Maloney's Maloney's in some way doomed, he understands his doomness as his, you know, I'm doomed because I'm a queen. But yeah, mean, people continue to generate, I am unhappy because I am gay, I can't find a boyfriend because of the way gay culture is, blah blah blah blah. Yeah.

Blake Smith:

And it could be that you personally are just a doomed loser or that, you know, I mean, the nature is such that no one is happy but you were trying to theorize it for a particular position.

Domenic DeSocio:

And there are, there are, you know, there are, what's the word? There are things that make, you know, that if that is life, there are things like friendship or dancing and that brief there there are brief moments of transcendence or of ecstasy that do not solve the problem. They do not give you the answer to the question, but they allow you to continue because they give you respites from this endless search.

Blake Smith:

But you could try writing a brilliant, funny novel.

Domenic DeSocio:

Right. We must say that this is probably one of the best American novels I've ever written.

Blake Smith:

Yeah. It's one of the best novels. It's one of the and and what's what's crazy is that, like, every homosexual, even as as David suggested earlier, the ones who are barely literate, like, even if they don't read any fiction, they will have a red dancer from the dance. Right? Right.

Blake Smith:

And it's it's interesting that gay guys are not encountering this through college, right? Like it's not

Domenic DeSocio:

No one no one teaches gay lit.

David Sessions:

You haven't created the the historically gay college and university.

Domenic DeSocio:

No. Lavender University.

Blake Smith:

Yeah. You know, are all sorts of authors where like, like Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison are like assigned in every university, like, you know, I mean, I'm sure they would still be read in some way if not, but that like, Dancer, he like, continues, you know, every year, like, gays are inducted into it without the benefit of a kind of university apparatus.

David Sessions:

Mhmm.

Blake Smith:

It's read, it's known, it's republished, and yet, I think somehow even though people are talking too much about Andrew Holleran, I feel like he is not given proper credit as one of the the truly great like, this is not just our Great Gatsby, but this this is a great great novel.

Domenic DeSocio:

Gay or straight?

Blake Smith:

I mean, novels would I want people saying, like, oh, it's a great gay novel as if that's like ghetto wise. I mean, obviously, a gay novel is better than That

David Sessions:

That seems like a great is that a good declaration?

Blake Smith:

It's a final word.

Domenic DeSocio:

Yeah. Final word. Sorry.

David Sessions:

Okay. Well, it's yeah. We had to we actually had to turn the air conditioner off. So we have ended up with an environment in here that is very sultry like the pros of Dancer from the

Blake Smith:

I think you should lean into it. I sent David, I don't remember if I sent Domenic. Some d list gays husband has a podcast where, you know, they're talking about whatever issues of the day, but their feet are visible. And I was thinking that's so smart, like, lock into a particular demographic and maybe sweaty middle aged. Okay.

Blake Smith:

Well, yeah. I mean,

David Sessions:

that was why I was I was doing my part. I was like, more of my tank top today. I was gonna show piss.

Domenic DeSocio:

You

Blake Smith:

just you find a body part that hasn't been commodified.

David Sessions:

Yeah. When you gotta flaunt it. Alright. Thanks guys. It was fun to be here in person.

David Sessions:

Thanks for having me.

Blake Smith:

To see my widgets paint Venmo me $5.