‘Nipples Are In Vogue This Summer’

How gossip and trendspotting shaped Andrew Holleran’s ‘Dancer from the Dance.’

As vaguely promised, my essay “My Lavender Marriage” is now online at The Point. It’s about how lavender marriages went from something seen as regrettable or tragic to a cute social media trend that is progressive and “queer,” interspersed with the story of my own mixed-orientation marriage. The personal part is largely about how I rationalized going against my desires, which has a strange parallel with the sad, paranoid sex and romance discourses of our moment: arguing with your desire, trying to shove it into the narrow logical frameworks of Online rather than feel it, follow it, become it. Read it here.

The Cultural Gossip of Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance

In our latest episode of Off Christopher Street, we continue our Andrew Holleran obsession by going deep on his first novel, the nearly unchallenged classic of modern gay literature and possibly the only novel besides The Great Gatsby that I have ever read more than twice, Dancer from the Dance, which has powerful debts to Fitzgerald and is loosely patterned on Gatsby. But I actually read them in succession this summer in preparation for this episode, and was left in no doubt: Gatsby is great, but Dancer is better. It is without question the best gay novel, but if it is better than Gatsby, and I mean purely on aesthetic and technical terms, subject matter aside, then it’s time to consider whether Dancer is actually the Great American Novel, or, if you want to Hannah Horvath it, a Great American Novel.

If one is aware of Holleran’s debt to Proust and Fitzgerald, we hear considerably less about the distinctive way he combines those authors’ nostalgic apprehension of time with the more immediate facticity—and humor—of gossip and the cultural trend journalism. In preparation for this episode I also rewatched Holleran’s appearance on Emerald City, an almost-impossible-to-believe gay channel that had a short life on Manhattan public-access TV and is now a time capsule of New York gay cultural life in the late 1970s. I watched it a few years ago, probably after I read Dancer the first time, and didn’t think it more than the typical author interview or a gesture at some of the novel’s themes. A few things stand out a lot more now, especially after having read so many of Holleran’s Christopher Street essays.

There’s what seems like a passing exchange that is in fact revealing about an aspect of Holleran’s craft:

BRANDON JUDELL: You talk about Malone, who’s the lead character, in his Fire Island house, he has “32 plaid shirts, a bureau filled with jeans faded to various shades of blue, and forty-four shoehorns.” Are many of the closets like that out there?

ANDREW HOLLERAN: No, obviously it’s a literary exaggeration. The shoehorn story was a friend of mine who went home with someone on the…possibly the Upper West Side, but that doesn’t sound like a shoehorn neighborhood to me, that’s more like the Upper East Side. But I remember his coming back and telling me the next day and saying this man had X number of shoehorns, and I just loved that detail. I wanted to give this sense of the fact that we do all that. A lot of our lives is dressing, dressing for each other. I kind of took many people and put it all in one closet for Malone.

The closet scene is from the first chapter, when the unnamed narrator returns to Fire Island to go through the clothes of the disappeared main character Malone. The part that Judell quotes, or rather misquotes—it’s “shoe trees” in the novel, not shoehorns—comes from the very first use in Dancer of one of Holleran’s signature techniques: the list. Holleran constantly deploys the paragraph-long list for different purposes: in the first chapter, lists capture the sartorial practices of the “circuit” gay (the inventory of Malone’s closet), to catalog the social diversity of the dancefloor, and to sum up the previous season in the Pines by combining, in one almost two-page paragraph, a laundry list of trends in music, fashion, drugs, and sex acts with a host of increasingly campy, exaggerated vignettes. I’ll quote this last one (almost) in full since it’s particularly virtuosic:

The whole long, mad summer came back in the warmth of that pale, distant sun burning high above the deserted sea. The summer gym shorts had become fashionable as bathing suits, the summer Frank Post (who each spring contemplated suicide because he could not rise to the occasion again—of being the most voluptuous, beautiful man on the Island, the homosexual myth everyone adored—but managed to go to the gym, take his pills, and master yet another season) shaved his body and wore jock straps to Tea Dance, and his lover died of an overdose of Angel Dust and Quaaludes. The summer “I’ll Always Love My Mama” lasted all season and we never grew tired of it. The summer that began with the Leo Party and ended with the Pink and Green Party (which Sutherland had given, and from which Malone had vanished). The summer nude sunbathing began, the summer Todd Keller, from Laguna Beach, was the “hot number” and Angel Dust was the favorite drug. The summer Kenny Lamar was arrested in the bar for sniffing a popper, the summer certain people got into piss, the summer his guests threw a birthday cake into Edwin Giglio’s face, they all loathed him so, the summer Lyman Quinn’s deck collapsed at the Heat Wave Party, with two thousand people on it; the summer a whale beached itself near Water Island in July, and a reindeer appeared swimming offshore in August. The summer Louis Deron dressed in gas masks, the summer Vuitton became pretentious, along with Cartier tank watches, and Lacostes were out. The summer the backpacking look began, the summer the grocery store changed hands, and people began to worry about the garbage floating three miles out in the Atlantic Ocean, the summer Renfrew took the Kane House and built a new pool for the Esther Williams Party, the summer the new policeman drove everyone crazy, and Horst Jellaby began flying the country of his lover for one week: One only had to see the flag of Argentina to know he had snared the gorgeous physician visiting from Buenos Aires, or the flag of Colombia to know the coach of the national soccer team was in his bed at that moment. The summer two Cessnas collided in midair and the sky rained bodies into a grove over trees where everyone was in the middle of having afternoon sex. The summer some nameless ribbon clerk died trying to sniff a popper at the bottom of a pool…it was a blur, all of it, of faces, and parties, and weekends and storms; it vanished, as did all weeks, months, years in New York in one indistinguishable blur, life speeded up, life so crowded that nothing stood in relief, and people waited, as they had one autumn weekend here, for a hurricane to provide some kind of sublime climax that never came.

In reference to the forty-four shoe trees, a real-life detail a friend had reported after a hookup, or references to particular New York clubs in which the dates in the novel didn’t line up with reality, Holleran says, “It was artistic license, you wanted to get a lot of stories, and you had to condense it.” Holleran’s “lists” decorate passing time with concrete social detail while also flattening it into a “blur.” They are also a way to assemble the gossip he has accumulated from friends and informants. We talk on the pod about how Dancer is a novel of gossip, featuring not only scenes that feature elaborately structured chains of gay gossip but also these chunks that blend camp invention and sociological reportage.

We’ve referred several times to Christopher Street’s cultural trend stories, the sort of which New York was then and is now still the mainstream torch-bearer, and the way Holleran’s columns in particular function as a platform for gay cultural gossip and trendspotting.¹ Blake has compared this to Carrie Bradshaw’s episode-framing columns in Sex and the City, which pose a “bullshit question” and then poll lovers, friends, acquaintances, and strangers about it in order to assemble a sociologically revealing snapshot of discourse. Holleran is an avid observer of cultural trends of all types and loves to declare things he once loved over, hopelessly bowdlerized and trampled upon by the late-coming hordes (disco, casual sex, etc). Even as he’s given to grand metaphysical reflections on Time (which, in his 2022 novel The Kingdom of Sand is capitalized like so), he also tends to grasp time through the rise and fall of cultural trends, as in his 1982 reflection on the gay “clone”: “A clone was as quaint as a hippie by 1982. His clothes hung on racks in Saks in expensive versions by Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein: the real death knell of street fashion.”

In one of his early Christopher Street columns, titled “Nipples” (1979), Holleran almost seems to be parodying this aspect of his own writing:

The sense of communion after dinner is even stronger: the candlelit faces, the wash of the surf, the dog indifferently dozing, the burning cigarettes in hands suspended in midair before a magic circle of bronzed chests. The words which emerge are these: “Have you been noticing nipples?”

“Yes!” someone says instantly, as if he has been wondering about the same thing himself. “Nipples are in vogue this summer,” he says emphatically.

“Really!”

We sit forward at the announcement of a trend.

“Absolutely. I’ve been noticing them for some time now. They’re getting much larger, more cultivated, more distended, more prominent. I’ve noticed nipples becoming more . . . distinct, on several of my friends.” Everyone is suddenly abashed, their nipples quite clearly the objects of some attention. “Have you seen—?” and here he names several people whose nipples, we have all noticed, protrude from their chests like heads of yarn. “Do you enjoy your nipples?” someone asks.

Whether or not nipples are suddenly in vogue seems like the ultimate bullshit question in much the same way that dating the beginning of nude sunbathing to Fire Island in the 1970s is the ultimate bullshit statement. These sorts of declarations are recognizable in our own day, even if they are now hurled into digital maw today with too great a frequency for them to have any basis in reality or to structure a moment of humorous subcultural reflection. To take only examples from this year: Is there a “top shortage” (This one is somehow still going.) Is gay hookup culture over again, like Holleran said it was in 1979? Are men posting bush on main? Is chest hair back, or is it, rather, the summer of the “hairless he-man”?

Holleran’s lists are not all humor and camp; they often capture the passage of time in a regretful or nostalgic register, and thus are one of the technical engines of the novel’s famous atmosphere of yearning sadness. But this dimension of them: their grounding in community gossip, their connection to magazine trend reporting, is a part of Holleran’s craft that constantly intertwines with and undercuts his tendency to grand, Proustian morosity, giving Dancer its elusive, dialectical doubleness.

1. Another example of this blurring of gossip-reportage and fiction might be the Ethan Mordden’s short stories that would become his Buddies novels, which were often presented on the cover of Christopher Street as if they were trend stories rather than fiction.