Errands of Love

Blake: Dancer, we agree, is the great novel of American gay literature. None of Holleran’s rivals of the 1970s and 80s, when the category of the “gay novel” was being invented (Edmund White, Larry Kramer, to say nothing of the many forgotten contenders) approach his talent, or his ambitions for making himself the equal of canonical authors of previous generations. But for the uninitiated, what is Dancer, anyway?