Generic Gayness: Andrew Holleran's <i>Dancer from the Dance</i> and a Not-So-Grand Theory of the Gay Novel

Abstract The novel has been widely acknowledged as a historically significant factor in the construction of gay identities, and the novel is central to queer literary studies. Yet the genre of the gay novel is curiously undertheorized. Scholars seldom address the transformations wrought on the novel by engagements with queerness, generally treating it as simply a delivery system for queer representation and queer affect. This essay addresses this gap in queer literary studies through an analysis of Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance (1978) as a hyperparadigmatic example of the gay novel. Deploying novel theory and genre theory, this article argues that Dancer indicates how gayness transforms the novel and how the novel enables the lived experience of gay identity. Dancer, and the gay novel generally, complicate novel theory's assumption that the genre always privileges the individual over the collective. The “marked” form of individuality that is gay identity is often suffused by collectivity in a way that is not the case in novels with “unmarked” protagonists. The simultaneously personal and collective dimensions of gay life are also evident in the reception of gay novels. Like other examples of what Lauren Berlant calls the “minoritized arts,” Dancer provides “a complex of consolation, confirmation, discipline, and discussion about how to live as an x.” Dancer has been the focus of intense and enduring forms of “discussion about how to live” as a gay man, and it therefore provides a particularly informative instance of the gay novel's cultural work.