Andrew Holleran’s 1978 Classic, Dancer from The Dance, begins where all Fire Island stories must:
at the Sayville Ferry.
A soggy harbor reeking of brine, where Long Island high schoolers have escorted throngs of queers across the Great South Bay for generations.
Dancer chronicles the descent of one tragic, romantic hero: Malone, set against the backdrop of the post-Stonewall Gay disco scene- just before the explosion of the AIDS epidemic. Malone is one part Gay Gatsby, one part Holly Gofuckyourself. The unidentified, Voyeuristic narrator takes us on Malone’s adventures, from glittering Manhattan discotheques to Sailor’s Haven, and everywhere in between.
As someone who dearly loves Fire Island, I took it upon myself to dig into its literary canon. Truman Capote authored Breakfast at Tiffany’s one summer in The Pines. Poet Frank O’Hara was killed on Fire Island in 1966, when he was run over by a Dune Buggy*. Felice Picano discoverd The Joy of Gay Sex on that skinny barrier island- the last little holdout of American soil upon the edge of the Atlantic. And in 1978, Andrew Holleran gave us Dancer.
(*Vehicles are no longer allowed on the Island.)
In Anthropology, kinship is defined by “shared substance,” which is relative across cultures.
In Dancer from the Dance, the characters live to move their bodies on the dance floor, to lose themselves in the music. Dancing together is how they break bread, and thus, the music that they dance to is their “shared substance.”
While I was reading this book, I found that I didn’t recognize any of the songs named by Holleran, which made much of the novel feel decontextualized. So as I read, I began to make a playlist of every song mentioned in this book, in order. (Including Bach arias that serve as Malone’s inner sountrack.)
This playlist is a snapshot of life at the gay dance parties, the Summer of 1978 on Fire Island.
Plus some Bach.
Enjoy.
“Now of all the bonds between homosexual friends, none was greater than that between friends who danced together. The friend you danced with, when you had no lover, was the most important person in your life; and for people who went without lovers for years, that was all they had.”
-Dancer from the Dance (1978)
About the Author:
Sarah Penello is a Senior Editor at Creatrix. She makes Playlists, and she LOVES Fire Island.
