I'm not a fan of compilations since they tend to be uneven and often predictable but this one is an exception to the rule. It is by turns affirming and profoundly sad. The themes of conflict and acceptance, shame and forgiveness have rarely been touched upon in such a sensitive way. I found it terribly affecting and emotionally honest without it being sentimental. The sort of confessional, self-revelatory writing sometimes runs the risk of sounding preachy or self-rightous; this book succeeds precisely because it does neither. I'd recommend it to parents, gay or straight, as well as to their children.

This book book is great. Over the holidays I had a chance to read it (some of it twice). I have to say i didn't expect it to be such a captivating read. As it turned out it was the kind of thing where you cant just read one story - you have to get the next one in and then the next - staying up way past bedtime!! It was fun - in places dark, in other very funny. I am always amazed at how many different points of view there are on the topic of parents. It is amazing what some parents are capable of. It was fascinating to see how people had come to terms with their lot in life and managed to rise above, forgive, and so on. I also think it is a treasure in the sense that things are changing quickly and that in 20 years, folks might write quite differently. A must for every library. Enjoy!

This is a great collection of true stories written by gay men about their relationship with their fathers. Some are mundane, some are shocking, some are tender and some are thought-provoking. It would be great to see a follow-up volume written by not-so-famous gay men, just to see what would result. I suspect the same kind of wisdom, love and heartache would be present. Required reading for all fathers and all gay men.

Andrew Holleran has written some of the most beautiful prose I've ever read about his experiences as a gay man, and I had the opportunity to meet him at a book signing once and found him to be congenial and friendly. That's why I wish I could be more enthusiastic about this book, a collection of his short stories. Holleran seems to have a fascination with rather affected characters, like Sutherland in Dancer From The Dance; that type of character appears in almost every one of these stories, and they quickly become not only tiresome but interchangeable. You feel you're reading the same story over and over. Holleran is more effective, I think, when writing about his interior experiences, as he shows here in the title story, and his introduction of one bitchy character after another eventually seems intrusive.

Much better writing can be found in Holleran's underrated Nights in Aruba, and in some passages from The Beauty of Men (notably those about growing older). I'd recommend those books but perhaps not this one.

This is a brilliant collection of stories, one of the strongest I've read ever. Each story is a marvel, the prose, the emotions, the characters. Holleran has a brilliant sense of place and he is very specific about the period of time that he writes about. Aids is barely mentioned in these stories, although the disease does appear towards the end of the collection. The saddest thing for me as a reader is that Holleran is still being marginalized as a writer. Certainly is area of knowledge and interest is the gay demi-monde of New York/Fire Island circa 1970 +...but which great short fiction writer throughout history did not have his favourite epoch that he wrote about over and over again. Is HOlleran any different then an Updike or a John Cheever or even the master himself Anton Chekhov? This is a collection of great short fiction that speaks to all readers who adore brilliant prose. This book has become one of my favourites of all time.

Andrew Holleran is an example of why I read books. _The Beauty of Men_ will always be with me, I suspect, somewhere in the back of my mind, as the measure of what writers are "supposed" to do with their art. This collection of short stories I loved almost as much. Mr. H can, technically, set up sentences that are complicated and still lucid. Artistically, he can designate a character with an amazing minimum of details; it's like he knows just the right characteristics to show you to make his characters stand out. None of his characters are perfect, and most are struggling with growing older and being lonely, but I cared about all of them. Joshua, in "Blorts," for example, was hilarious. Morgan, in "Petunias," was self-absorbed and afraid, but struggling to rise above it all and even though the story is tragic, it still ends on a mystifyingly hopeful sentence. Mr. Holleran might not churn out novels every year, but when he does put one out, I'm always deeply affected by it. I wonder, though, why no author's picture on book jackets?

...it would be Andrew Holleran's beautiful, wickedly funny, decadent freshman novel, "Dancer from the Dance". The appelation has been given to many books, but "Dancer" is for me the all-time greatest gay novel. While a plot-and-character summary would make it sound like a narrowly focused, thinly disguised documentary of gay hedonism in pre-AIDS New York City, "Dancer"'s images and dialogue are uniquely evocative and memorable. Holleran's prose has a rare expressive quality, and his descriptions truly haunt the reader.

Guiding the reader through the wreckage and beauty of 1970s New York are two brilliant characters, Malone and Sutherland. Malone is a fallen Adonis, a well-bred WASP young man who, after a moment of unexpected passion in his Manhattan office late one night, begins gorging himself on the overripe fruit of the city's sexual life. After his first romantic disaster, Malone is rescued, taken in, and mentored by the bitchy, high-camp, mad-genius Sutherland. As they careen between raunch and glamour, Sutherland dispenses Wildean aphorisms on life, love, and sex. While every step of the way serving as Sutherland's accomplice in drugs, dishing, discos, and designer demimondes, Malone the whore retains an all-Middle-American vision of finding true love.

Truly, Malone and Sutherland are two of 20th-century literature's most memorable protagonists. But it is Holleran's unparalleled ability to evoke lasting images of New York City during a halcyon period for gay men that makes "Dancer" an unforgettable and absolutely necessary read. If you're gay and have a pulse, read this book.

I've read "Dancer" at least a dozen times and it never fails to provoke both laughter and tears.

I've had the privilege of chairing several literary-discussion groups that dealt with "Dancer from the Dance," one with all gay men, another with gay men and lesbians, a third with straight women. Everybody liked the book, but it means different things to different people. For the generation of gay men born between about 1940 and 1955, it is the story of their life, the pain of coming out and the lyricism of finding that first love as an adult. For younger gay men and lesbians it is partly a period piece but the emotional impact still holds true, as it does for the straight readers.

The novel about the misunderstood, middle-class gay boy who grows up absurd, sublimates himself in a career, and then comes out with a bang in his mid-twenties is a cliche among gay American fiction, but I can think of no books that do it as well as "Dancer from the Dance." To know this book is to love it.

Often cited as "the" gay novel of the post-Stonewall generation, "Dancer From the Dance" is a lyrical account of the frenetic life of gay men caught up in the hard-partying "circuit" of Manhattan and Fire Island in the mid-1970's. Hollaran's enigmatic protagonist, Anthony Malone, is a man of nearly unearthly masculine beauty who has left his unloved profession as a lawyer to pursue a life of lust and pleasure in his personal, endless search for love. Poetic, and often moving, the novel paints a colorful picture of a pack of driven hedonists, endlessly in quest of "the perfect man", moving through discos, bars, bathhouses, and parties of almost baroque proportions. The book is levened with comic moments, largely supplied by Sutherland, Malone's outrageous, advice spewing friend, mentor and den mother, who moves effortlessly between the heady worlds of the heterosexual jet set and the gay demimonde. Malone's wistful longing to recapture his one successful male-to-male relationship with the married, violent Frankie is hauntingly described. Overall, a very satisfying novel, vivid and vital despite the passivity of Malone. And the equivocal ending stays with one. Holleran's subsequent books have not been nearly as satisfying, but so profound an impact did "Dancer From the Dance" make on the gay community that, for years after its publication in 1977, anonymous graffiti appeared throughout New York's Greenwich Village, plaintively proclaiming: "Malone Lives!" Read it and see!

This was a great collection from Holleran. I think it's first printing was limited as it was even a little hard to get a first edition when it was published. Anyway, this collection is both funny and heartbreaking. Similar to Feinberg's collection, but I think he says more with laughter and tears than Feinberg did with anger. Highly recommended.

This book is at times stunning, at times difficult to read, always worthwhile. It can be compared to David Feinberg's brilliant, scathing "Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone," especially in the hard-hitting gallows humor of the essay "Fashion 1985."

These essays are similar to Holleran's effort in the late John Preston's anthology "Personal Dispatches." Although Holleran is most famous for his short stories, and the novels "Dancer from the Dance" and "The Beauty of Men," this may turn out as his most enduring work -- witty, angry, heartbreaking.

The first time I read this book, I was moved enough to read it through in one sitting. Re-reading it two years later, I am conflicted about it. It is incredibly well-written, has many crucial observations to make about gay life in the late twentieth century (as Holleran always has), and has a distinctive, authoritative voice. Yet, the same things that will make some readers love this book will make others want to hurl it through a window. The protagonist is unsympathetic, whiny, pretentious, dolorous, self-pitying and even at times self-hating in the extreme, and repetitious (parts of the book feel inadequately edited; you will read certain details in one chapter only to run across them in almost exactly the same guise a chapter later, which appears to be a case of a novel having been cobbled together from what could have more successfully stood as a novella or a group of vignettes). The author tacks on the usual disclaimer about no resemblance between the story being told and events in real life, but an essay he has included in a more recent anthology is a transparent re-write of the same story he tells here, down to the details of dialogue he exchanges with the object of his obsession. Thus, any protest that this is fiction is almost irrelevant. But what the book does do, even if it is not truly a work of fiction, is cast a discerning light on the way a number of men in Holleran's generation, the set of urban gay white men who came of age in the late seventies, view life now that they are no longer the kings of the mountain. The sentimental, often self-indulgent tone of this vantage point will be resonant to some, but to others, particularly those who did not participate in the grand guignol of "Dancer from the Dance," it will grate, and it will sound like a serious case of sour grapes. The essayistic exposition that the narrative breaks into does not help matters. Again, it feels as though parts of this book could have been edited out, parts could have been more successfully trimmed to a novella, and parts could have been more useful as essays. Nonetheless, a lot of what the book says, even if it could be better told, rings shockingly true, and is stark witness to the way gay life continues to be, even at this late date, a life of lies, secrets, and despair for many who live it.

In view of the title of this book you could easily think this is a story about gorgeous young gaymen. But no way. The physical beauty of these men has deserted them long ago. They were beauties in the seventies but AIDS and ageing destroyed it. If one has anyway survived AIDS then loneliness and bitterness occur. The most hard thing is to hold on to mental beauty besides remembering ones own physical beauty. Lark, the protagonist in Andrew Holleran's third novel, is constantly in search for love and company to attain some structure in his life. Next to cruising Lark takes care of his old mother for whom he especially moved from NYC to Gainesville, Florida. Only one person is happy in Lark's point of view, a former lover who now lives a life of suburban bliss. I frequently asked myself: why do I keep reading a book on ageing, losing and dying as it's main themes? Well, the cold rationalism of the described scenes and the grim logic of the plot kept my attention from the beginning untill the end. In order to appreciate this book Holleran forced me to face my own obstinate thoughts on getting old. No other author has done this for me before in such a straight way.

Andrew Holleran usually chooses an elegiac tone for his writing, and this novel is no exception. Lark, living in exile in Florida, visits his elderly, infirm mother almost daily in her nursing home, brings her home on occasional weekends, and mourns for the lost, fast-lane life of 1970s New York and his friends from that time, most of whom have died since he moved to this small, rural town. Lark also pursues an unrequited, somewhat imaginary relationship with Becker, a man some 15 years younger whom Lark picked up once at a local boat ramp. Some critics have accused this novel of employing self-pity and pathos--Lark does have a rather negative self-image and he persists in mooning over Becker when most would have written off that affair with disgust--but the writing is gorgeous. Holleran is peerless (among the gliterati, anyway) with his evocations of time and place. One can smell northern Florida's pine forests and hear the wind through the branches just as one can smell the unpleasantly antiseptic nursing home and hear its senile chatter. Holleran's wit veers toward the sarcastic, but he's often dead-on hilarious, as in the chapter entitled "Il Paradisio," where Lark ventures into a bathhouse. I recommend this book for anyone who likes tight, concise yet lush writing--and doesn't expect a political manifesto in a novel.

What a bunch of self-pitying tripe this book is. The main character sees everything, does most of it, and resolutely refuses to learn anything from his experiences. He looks for love, finds it, and tosses it out the window without anything so unglamorous as motivation. And then he wonders why he is so unhappy and why his life has not amounted to anything. Has Holleran ever heard of developing believable characters, or even of cause and effect?

Ok. A few decades back like in the 50's, even 60's it was glamourous to be miserable and disfunctional. Boys in the Band, Tea and Sympathy, any Judy Garland biography. I loved Dancer from the Dance, author's first book. In fact, I still own an old worn-out copy of it on my shelf. I bought it during my coming out years, I was glad to read it and I still remember the excitment of reading it: The writing was fresh, wonderful, clever, wry. But when there is no plot, and when you are fascinated with gloom, nothing could save Nights at Aruba for me. This book left me sad, empty and unsatisfied.. It was exciting to start it, but very soon, I started wondering: is there was a point to this at all. Why does not he just get a job or something? I wondered.. Suddenly, much of Holleran's beautiful writing did not matter and was lost in vain for me. Sadness is interesting, but when there is no point to it, I reach out for Zoloft ...

This is a story about Paul, who's looking back on his early years living in Aruba. He's getting older and discovering not only the emptiness of one-night stands, but also that he's not as unlike his parents as he would like. Holleran's sense of wry humor and his astute observations about growing older as a gay man are strong in this work and make it shine. This is a novel about the inner world, so apparently the lack of outside action aggravated some reviewers. I think Andrew Holleran is one of the best writers of gay fiction, so.