Page 12 HIGH GEAR

entertainment

Two gay novels

By George Brown

DANCER FROM THE DANCE. By Andrew Holleran. William Morrow & Co. 250 pages. $9.95.

FAGGOTS. By Larry Kramer. Random House. 304 pages. $10.95.

During the latter part of 1978 two gay novels of major proportions appeared. Different in style and tone, "Dancer from the Dance," by Andrew Holleran and "Faggots" by Larry Kramer, both of them first novels, are nonetheless similiar in theme and identical in background.

Here is the contemporary New York City gay scene. The writers take us to the homosexual gathering place of the Big Apple: bath, disco, street, park, and warehouse; and each devotes substantial space to the revelries of Fire Island. Both writers observed the same scene at the same time, with both mentioning the actual fire at the Everard Baths in 1977. The reader has the feeling that each writer is also giving his version of some of the same people, and one minor character in each novel emerges as the same. Alonzo Moore in "Dancer" and Miss Rollarette in "Faggots" are surely drawn from the same real life "character," kookie drag queen who roller skates about in a ball gown waving a wand.

"Dancer from the Dance" is basically the story of Anthony Malone, an unusually handsome blond young man who after resisting his homosexual yearnings

until he is well into his twenties, abandons a promising law career to pursue the gay life fulltime. He soon finds a handsome ItalianAmerican lover, and they set up housekeeping; but Malone's promiscuity destroys the relationship.

Malone continues to search for love and sex, but he no longer. searches for the one person; instead he makes "a vow to sleep with everyone just once." Although Holleran over romanticizes him, Malone becomes merely a call man, whose pimp is a bizarre and articulate drag queen named Sutherland. But like the whore/prostitute with a heart of gold, Malone is able to keep a certain purity. He even develops a great compassion for his gay brothers, for at the famous Everard he begins to reject

the other handsome men who constantly pursue him and himself approaches the ugly and desperate on which to bestow his sexual favor, while at the same time continuing to survive in a squalid apartment on New York's Lower East Side by ministering to a wealthy clientele. By the time hereaches his late thirties, Malone has the opportunity of nabbing, through Sutherland, a young and wealthy Princeton graduate who in his innocence is greatly in love with him; but Malone exerts his integrity and vanishes, becoming an immediate legend, something of a gay saint, to the gay New Yorkers who knew him.

Holleran describes all this in

magnificent prose, making his sections of New York City, and Fire Island, come vividly alive. Regarding his literary structure, it is significant that Malone is seen through the eyes of one of his admirers. The novel begins and ends with a series of letters between a campy gay on New York's Lower East Side and another campy gay who has taken refuge from the New York gay scene in Louisiana, with the New Yorker sending his completed manuscript to Louisiana for the exile to read. Thus is Holleran able to write this semipoetic novel about a highly romantic and mythical figure and make it work. Because of the motif, Holleran can't be accused

of being unrealistic, even fully serious about Malone, for he is presenting the manuscript of a fictional character.

"Faggots" is the story of Fred Lemish and his feverish existence during the several days preceding his fortieth birthday. Fred, who still is sulking from his unsatisfactory life with his Jewish parents, had hoped that he would find the love of his life before his fortieth birthday, but now zero hour is approaching and he hasn't found the love. Fred is in love with, or highly infatuated with, Dinky Adams, an unresponsive thirty-year-old, Adonis, who psychologically is a wasteland. Lemish, a film writer, is a man of some sensitivity, surely an undisguised parallel of Kramer himself, who has written screenplays. Lemish runs from bath to disco to Fire Island, and

when the reader isn't with him in those places, he is without him in such places as a fashionable Manhattan apartment for a wild orgy or a Manhattan warehouse for stealthy sexual encounters.

Some minor "Faggot" characters are Richard "Boo Boo" Bronstein, who ends up in in'cest with his fifteen-year-old nephew, a hustler with a ten-inch cock; Duncan Heinz, the handsome model famous as the Winston Man; Timothy Peter Purvis,

Nimoy plays Van Gogh

Leonard Nimoy, who achieved international recognition for his role of Mr. Spock in the television series STAR TREK, will perform his onean enormously handsome six-man show VINCENT as the third non-series event at the Play House teen year old who arrives in Manthis season. The show, which critics have proclaimed a "must see" will hattan from Mt. Rainer, play seven performances only March 21-25 in the Drury Theatre. Maryland, and immediately, while still in the bus station, is thrust into the core of the city's gay life; and Patty, Maxine, and Laverne, three men who run a disco, and one of whom perishes with his newly found lover in the Everard fire. There is a large number of minor characters, most of whom are not well enough characterized for the reader actually to pinpoint when a roster of their names appears at the end of the novel.

As Vincent Van Gogh's brother Theo, Nimoy will present a view of the famous painter's life from the 1870's when Van Gogh was in his religious period, through his years in Paris, his stay in a mental hospital and finally, returning to the point shortly after the artist's death. A series of 200 slides of Van Gogh's paintings and sketches will form a backdrop for Nimoy's performance with music by Don McLean.

Lemish, of course, reaches forty alone; and after a night of revelry on Fire Island, we are given the impression that he has reached a new plateau of selfawareness--or has become resigned. "I'm not a faggot," Lemish says at the end. "I'm a Homosexual Man." Whereas Malone disappeared on Fire Island, Lemish is still existing on Fire Island,and he will leave it to cope with a complicated society, including its intriciate gay subculture.

Kramer's prose is lean and effective. His tone is humorous, but it is mock humor, often approachng the macabre, that jabs us into keen awareness.

"Faggots," of course, is strong satire, perhaps sometimes even a burlesque, whereas "Dancer" is something of a wryly romantic tale, perhaps with allegorical overtones; and "Dancer" is not lacking in humor. Neither novel is realistic, and yet both are painfully realistic. The two main characters and those around them search for love without finding it. They are people obsessed with sex, with the sexual scene constantly looming-in all its unattractive aspects. Both writers (con't. page 13)

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