“Dancer” was released the same year as Kramer’s cheeky satire, “Faggots”; both were cautionary tales about the moth-to-flame nature of g...
“Dancer” was released the same year as Kramer’s cheeky satire, “Faggots”; both were cautionary tales about the moth-to-flame nature of gay nightlife, and both climax on Fire Island. But where Kramer was polemical, Holleran was poetic — more quietly political, Kushner said, but political nonetheless as a pioneer of literature for a post-Stonewall era.
“I don’t believe Larry’s work was inferior in any way,” Kushner continued, “but in ‘Dancer,’ there’s a certain sense of confusion about how a community is formed from that wood. particularly twisted of humanity, which I think was a big question at the time.
Holleran was surprised by the attention the book received. Today, Johnson said, it amounts to “our ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ the book you read when you’re young.” But since its publication, Holleran has been talked about more than seen. Widely described as likeable, quite funny, and seemingly immune to literary bickering, he is also extremely shy. He was relieved to learn that the pandemic would limit the amount of publicity he would have to do for “The Kingdom of Sand.”
Edmond White, a former statesman of gay literature — and, like Holleran, a member of the Violet Quill, an informal 1970s collective — called him “rabbity.” “It’s kind of going to appear and then disappear,” White added. “And if you get too close to him, he gets a little nervous. In New York, he was a huge part of the Fire Island scene, and I saw him years ago in gay bathhouses. But he wouldn’t have sex; he would just watch.
Over the decades, Holleran has dived in and out of town, on his terms. His family had moved to Florida in the early 1960s, to the small town outside of Gainesville where he now lives. “We never understood why my father chose this place,” he said. “But I’ve been here on and off ever since. It’s long; for Florida, it’s like three ice ages.
He had also built a life as a writing professor at the American University in Washington – “a very married town”, as he described it, where he mainly went to the National Gallery of Art and to the gymnasium – but the pandemic recently kept it limited to Florida. He could have left permanently any time before that, but never did. Writing “The Kingdom of Sand,” he said, was sort of an exercise in finding a reason.
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