unmorality 's review for:

Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran

4.0

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An alternately hilarious and bleak depiction of a strain of gay male life in 70s New York. The characters are fun and the prose is quite gorgeous but the overall impression for me was of a sort of hopelessness that comes with living in an intensely homophobic society. Malone is unable to let go of his heteronormative expectations and the nomadic, fast-paced lifestyle he falls into with Sutherland in New York isn't enough to convince him there is more to a moral life. It's kind of ingenious put that way actually: the belief that gayness is inherently immoral and lesser than straightness leads Malone into mortal turpitude. Some of it is questionable (take a shot every time there's a weird statement about Black or Puerto Rican men) and I came to find the constant hagiography of Malone a bit repetitive, but I really enjoyed reading it.