Dancer from the dance

Andrew Holleran perteneció al Violet Quill Club, un grupo de escritores gays que también incluía a Edmund White, entre otros (en su mayoría desaparecidos por culpa del sida). No sé cómo se me había pasado esta novela. Leí hace poco que deprimió mucho a Gerardo Vera cuando la leyó allá por los ochenta. No sé si Gerardo era una jadded queen harta del circuit por entonces (yo le veo más bien una size queen), como tampoco sé si a mí me ha deprimido o no (demented queen). Lo único que sé es que a veces pasaba por sus páginas como si el libro fuera un traductor automático de mis pensamientos al inglés. A mí me encanta que me reduzcan a un estereotipo cultural, pero tanta identificación me ha dejado como cuando llegas a una fiesta y alguien más joven y más mono que tú te ha copiado el modelito. El libro está traducido al español (El danzarín y la danza. Ed. Odisea), pero he leído que la traducción es muy mala.

But then a smile is always a shriek: a soul screaming at you.

Then he might have fallen victim to the great homosexual disease: the sanctity of the face seen and never spoken to.

He was one of the few homosexuals in New York who went home with people because he did not wish to hurt their feelings.

We live in a rude and dangerous time in which there are no values to speak to and one can cling to only concrete things, such as a cock.

The accumulated wardrobe of fifteen seasons on the circuit.

The friend you danced with, when you had no lover, was the most important person in your life.

What queens we were! (..) In the perfect silence the telephone would ring, thrilling, joyous, and we would slip into the stream of gossip as we would slip into a bath, to dissect, judge, memorialize the previous night and forecast the one to come. The queen throws on her clothes, discarding at least ten shirts, five pairs of pants, innumerable belts before she settles on her costume, while the couple next door throws things at each other. She has her solitary meal, as Spartan as an athlete’s before a race (some say to avoid occlusion of the drugs she plans to take) (…) We lived for music, we lived for Beauty, and we were poor.

He spent two hours a day in a local gymnasium, and his tits were now bigger than his mother’s.

And the only way you know you’re older is that you (once loved by older man) now find yourself loving boys younger than you…

You stand there on the floor moving your hips, wondering if there is such a thing as love, and conscious for the very first time that it is 3:25 and the night only half-over.

Someone said he never wipes his ass, he goes out dirty on purpose. Now that’s confidence.

Five years before, this person would have stabbed him in the heart, engendered such despair that he would have obsessed Malone the rest of that day and night; and he would have gone out to the bars or baths hoping to find someone of his type.

If he reads one more book, is going to ruin his complexion.

And being people who live on the surface of the eye, they cannot be expected to have minds of hearts. (…) Do not expect anything else, do not expect nourishment for anything but your eye, and you will handle it all beautifully.

For the same reason a man as reasonable as Malone goes out into the street at night:
because he is handsome, infertile, and lonely.

You can’t love eyes, my dear, you can’t love youth…

What lover could possibly have matched what Malone had stored up in his imagination?

Queens loathed rain at the beach, small cocks, and reality. In that order.

What is so incredible about homosexuals is that, if they live as homosexuals (that is to say, as women: beings whose life consist chiefly of Being Attractive to others), they die much sooner than heterosexual men.

At least we learned to dance.