In the winter of 1978, Eric Garber returned to his parents’ home in central Florida, to try once and for all to finish his novel. He had spent the better part of the previous decade in New York City cruising and writing, attempting to become the professional writer he always saw himself as. That winter, he wrote two novels — the first about a writer’s workshop, which, he jokes, shows just how desperate he was, and the other the celebrated Dancer from the Dance, which he published under his now-famous pseudonym Andrew Holleran 40 years ago this May. It has since become one of the most iconic pieces of gay fiction that almost never was, about a young man searching for love in New York City’s opulent 1970s gay scene.
Holleran describes his younger self as overly conventional, “very, very what you’d call bourgeois, I guess,” he says. After graduating from Harvard in 1965, he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, then went to University of Pennsylvania Law School because he felt he needed to be realistic about the future. You couldn’t possibly support yourself as a writer, he reasoned. After a year and a half of law school, he realized he was spending all his time writing a novel on the side rather than doing his school work, so he dropped out.
Around that time, he discovered Philadelphia’s gay bars, and he became obsessed. “When you first came out and you discovered the bars, the bars were absolutely paradise. You felt you’d finally found the world you wanted to be in, and I could stand in those places for hours,” he says, reminiscing about getting home and savoring the smell of cigarettes a long night in the bars left on his shirt. “I was so wrapped up in being gay. It was wonderful. But on the other hand, the thing that kept me writing was the bourgeoisie part,” he tells me. “You know: I must get published, I must have something to show for this, I must get a book.”
In 1971, Holleran moved to New York since, well, he wanted to cruise more: “It was basically because there were more men, more bars, more baths — it was sex.” In order to support his passion for it all, he did what a lot struggling gay artists had do to keep themselves afloat in the city. He worked for a catering company, serving canapés at art galleries, and temped as a typist across Manhattan, fingers tapping 80 words per minute.
His writing at the time was void of any sort of queerness. “You couldn’t write about gay life,” he says. This was a time when gay writers had to change pronouns in their stories if they wanted them to be published, obscuring the same-gender romances originally at their cores. “There are exceptions,” he adds, referencing people like Gordon Merrick, “but in general, there was so much gender changing.”
He says the straight stories he wrote at that time had such dreadful plotlines that he can barely remember them. One, about young women on the New York subway, has come to stand for all the non-gay stories he was made to tell. He didn’t write about the divinity of sex — how at 12 years old he was looking up in awe at Jesus on the cross but at 28 he was being looked down at in ecstasy by a man in the baths. And he didn’t write about how he found faith in music either: “It really was sex and music. They both had a religious quality in my feeling about them and certain songs would come on and you’d just, you know, die.”
These were the sorts of things that would come up later in Dancer from the Dance. “When I first discovered the baths and the bars and Fire Island, it was just dazzling and wonderful and interesting and mysterious, and then after having gone to them all for that period of time I began to be critical and I began to see all the things that weren’t so nice about it,” he tells me.
Holleran had been sitting on a goldmine of provocative thoughts regarding the New York gay experience. He just didn’t know it yet. After 10 years of writing, with no real success aside from a short story published in The New Yorker — a big feat, but the only one he'd had during that time — Holleran soon became resolved to the possibility that he would have to stop writing.
“[That moment] was bleak, but it was cushioned by the fact that I could go home to my parents and have a bedroom and I could write. My parents were incredibly tolerant and they never pushed me,” he says. In the winter of 1978, he went to his parent’s home in Florida to give himself one last chance at writing before giving up for good. During his visit, he was getting long, campy letters from a friend back in New York and became inspired by their style. “I thought, why don’t you start a novel with just some letters?” he says. “And that’s how it began.”
A few months before that, while he was still in his “young-girl-in-the-subway-story phase,” he wrote a short piece about a character who would later become central in Dancer from the Dance, Andrew Sutherland. He can’t remember the details of that particular story, but he also attributes it to the inception of the book, claiming that it was an entry point into broaching gay subject matter. And although he had stayed away from gay content while living in New York, in Florida he had nothing to lose, which he felt was a wonderful freedom. If this didn’t work out, he was done writing, so he went for it.
“It wasn’t until I wrote about gay life that suddenly I had material: things I felt, and things that I had thought about, and things I had observed,” he says. He realized he needed to write about his own experience to make something that felt alive. “What happened to me was coming out in New York and being gay, really in retrospect, and that’s what Dancer was all about.”
About three months later, Holleran had a manuscript. Soon after returning to New York, he ran into Larry Kramer at the westside YMCA. Kramer had somehow heard about Holleran’s book, and he suggested that he show it to his agent. One thing led to another, and in no time Holleran had a book deal with William Morrow & Co.
Holleran knew that any reader of the book would know its author was gay, and while he wasn’t personally concerned if people knew about his sexuality, he was worried for his parents, retirees in small Florida town. If the wrong people found out about him, he feared they’d use the information against his parents. His editor told him that the wrong people are always the first to find out. “She said, ‘If you feel that way, get me a pen name by five o’clock.’” A friend of his from school was named Andrew, and he’d always loved that name. Another old schoolmate had the last name Holleran, so it was settled: Andrew Holleran.
How or why Dancer from the Dance has become the iconic piece that it is today, Holleran can’t say. Some might point to the fact that the novel depicts a golden era in gay history, which has since been lost and romanticized: 1970s New York City. That’s probably a big part of it, but perhaps it’s beloved more because it’s a story about the gay experience that’s so truthful in its telling that it continues to resonate a generation or two later.
