Dancer from the Dance

Anthony Malone is a handsome young lawyer, raised in the Midwest and abroad, who walks away from a respectable straight-passing life to lose himself in the gay world of 1970s Manhattan. His guide is Andrew Sutherland, an aging, brilliantly bitchy queen who presides over the discos, the drugs, and the summer scene on Fire Island. Malone chases love with an intensity that never quite finds its object, moving through a dazzling and exhausting circuit of parties and lovers. Written in 1978, before AIDS had a name, Holleran's lush, elegiac novel now reads as a portrait of a community at its most alive on the eve of catastrophe.