Andrew
Holleran is the pseudonym of Eric Garber (born 1944), a novelist,
essayist, and short story writer. He is a prominent novelist of
post-Stonewall gay literature. He was a member of The Violet Quill, a
gay writer's group. The Violet Quill included other prolific gay writers
like Edmund White and Felice Picano. Holleran, who has historically
been very protective of his privacy, uses "Andrew Holleran" as his
pseudonym.

This
is the thirty-fifth post in a series highlighting the best gay and
lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that
period) who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay
people telling what life is, and was, during an important time of
history.

Holleran
has tenaciously guarded his anonymity, which makes it difficult to
determine precise biographical details. He was probably born around 1943
and more than likely comes from an upper-middle-class background. In an
interview granted to Publisher's Weekly in 1983, Holleran admitted that
the relatively affluent white characters depicted in his two novels
Dancer from the Dance (1978) and Nights in Aruba (1983) largely reflect
his own life

.

The
pseudonymous Andrew Holleran has placed his homosexuality at the center
of his commercially and critically successful novels.


Paul Morton features

Excerpts From An Interview with Andrew Holler
For complete interview go to    https://www.bookslut.com/features/2007_03_010776.php

Andrew
Holleran graduated Harvard in 1965, was drafted to the army during
Vietnam and posted in West Germany. He dropped out of law school at the
University of Pennsylvania, went to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and from
there to New York, where he spent nearly a decade temping and bartending
until his first novel, Dancer from the Dance, was published in 1978. A
satiric story of an eternally kind, eternally gorgeous saint in
hedonistic '70s New York, it became one of the most popular novels of
the then relatively new genre of gay literature.

You haven’t really done anything like Dancer from the Dance again.
(laughs) To my misfortune.
You
use camp talk in Dancer to describe an exciting urban world. Since
then, particularly with your last two novels, The Beauty of Men and
Grief, you’ve moved toward a bleaker realism. Is this just a product of
getting older?
The language I can explain very easily. You’re right
in saying [Dancer] was an exercise in camp. I was here in Florida. I was
away from New York. I was writing letters to friends who were in New
York. It was the time before computers and people would write seven,
eight page letters and going to the mailboxes was really an exciting
thing. And I had friends who were writing in this very campy way and I
noticed when I went to gay bars that there would be these giveaways
often with columns by drag queens. And I said to myself, “I really love
this language. I wonder how you could write it. How could you use it in a
book?” So I started Dancer by writing those letters in that campy way.
And the rest of the book kind of extruded itself from those letters.
Why
haven’t I used camp language since? I don’t know. I love camp language.
I’d like to be able to use it again, but I just haven’t. As for the
bleak thing… I don’t know what that’s about. It’s not just about getting
older because the book that immediately followed Dancer was Nights in
Aruba and that was written in a completely different tone and that was a
serious book. I feel I have been atoning for Dancer, like I had
glamorized things and that I must do the opposite.
You felt guilty for glamorizing hedonism?
In
my mind Dancer is a critical/satiric book. It’s not a glamorization of
gay life. It was a younger person’s book so it came out with a certain
element of romanticism that has something to do with temperament and
false ideals. I do feel I’ve been in the grip of bleak realism for a
long time now. I really got to let it loosen because that’s not the only
viewpoint in life and I feel like I’m stuck in it. Grief, I think, was
the end of that. Grief, I think, was about as far as I could take it.

In
Nights in Aruba, the character based on you comes across as very pious
at a very young age, though his parents don’t take religion seriously at
all.
Well my father was very agnostic. He was raised a Lutheran, but
he really evinced no religious opinions or activity of any kind. My
mother, because there was nothing to do in this little town, started
going to church more for a social opportunity. There was just less
opportunity for worldly life in this little town in Aruba. I was the
religious nut in the family. I was the only one who caught the virus. My
sister escaped it totally.

Nights in Aruba felt like a second novel. To be honest, of all your novels it’s the least well-structured.
It
falls apart in the very beginning when the flashback happened. There’s
no reason for that flashback. And that book drove me to write the column
for Christopher Street because after that book I asked myself, “Why
wasn’t this a memoir? Why wasn’t this nonfiction? What’s the difference
between autobiography and making up?” And I just said, “I’m just going
to write a column, a nonfiction column. Let’s see if there’s any reason
at the end of that to write fiction." The differences between the two,
it’s taken me a long time to figure it out.

One of your
characters in Grief says, "I used to think that the eighties were like a
very nice dinner party with friends, except some of them were taken out
and shot while the rest of us were expected to go on eating."
Is that in Grief? I’m glad you told me. I was about to use it again [laughs].
It struck me, because I think Grief and The Beauty of Men are very funny books, but the jokes are hard to laugh at.
Thank
you! It worries me that people don’t get the humor of the books. If you
can’t get the humor, I don’t think you can get the books. I once saw
Lily Tomlin doing a thing on TV years ago. She did these sketches that
you could only describe in the way you just did. They were right on the
line. I didn’t know whether to laugh or not to laugh. And it annoyed me
at the time. I just wanted to laugh. But I fear that’s how I’m ending
up.
There aren’t that many great works about the AIDS experience.
Edmund White covered it a little at the end of The Farewell Symphony and
in The Married Man. Alan Hollinghurst looked at it at the very end of
The Line of Beauty. But there’s no great work of the experience in and
of itself.
Well, there are people who consider Paul Monette’s
Borrowed Time a good book. And another book a friend of mine holds in
really high regard is Alan Barnett’s The Body and Its Dangers. But you
are right for the most part. You’re saying no one has written the great
AIDS book. Maybe not a lot of time has passed, even though some time has
passed. Ed’s [Edmund White] theory is that gay writers are, in a way,
lucky to have AIDS as a subject, because it is a big subject. And
straight writers don’t have that.
Maybe the best writers were killed.
I
thought there was an awful Faustian bargain with AIDS when it began. I
thought the only people who had a right to write about AIDS were the
people who were infected. And yet, as you say, those were the people who
died.

There doesn’t seem to be much about homophobia in your
books. If it’s there it’s on the sidelines. Your books seem mostly to be
about gay people in a vicious cycle of hurting themselves and each
other. They don’t need straight people to do anything to destroy them.
That’s
good. That’s true. I think I’m writing for an enclosed world. I’m
writing for a primarily gay audience. Either I’m lying to myself and
it’s their (heterosexuals) view of me that is influencing my own view of
me or I really don’t care about them so I would rather deal with issues
in my community. I just hope I have more time to write because I feel
I’m coming more to questions like that. It is coming down to a question
of shame and why was I obsessed with writing about my gayness.
But didn’t you have straight friends? Were you living in a world where being gay was the only subject?
Well,
this goes back to a writer’s obsessions. It has been clear to me at
many points in my career that if only I would write non-gay books I
might have a wider audience, I might be taken seriously in a way I
wasn’t. If only I introduced straight people into the mix, to make it
more than just a gay book. But I couldn’t. I had to write about
something that mattered to me and that’s it. For whatever reason, my
literary energy, whatever makes me write is somehow bound up with my
sexual orientation.
But does that reflect your life as it’s lived on a day-to-day basis?
Do
you mean, am I someone who lives in the gay ghetto, only does gay
things, only has gay friends? No, obviously not. I’m the opposite of
that. I can’t stand provinciality of any kind. I think the gay ghetto
was wonderful when I was young because it was like going to college. You
went there and you learned a lot and I loved those years, but I never
want to confine myself to that world, because life is more interesting
and bigger and various than that.
It goes to something Henry James
once said about how we have nothing to write about in the United States
because we have no feudal system, we have no history, we have no
society, we have no social classes... It’s very hard for a writer
anywhere to zoom in on a closed culture that is your little universe
which offers a human scale and which you can then write about. Think of
how many writers have tried to write about just America on the John Dos
Passos sense. You can’t do it. And I felt lucky that I had that little
gay society. It was small enough to be able to write about and to
inhabit, to make one’s little court. And now as a “homosexual emeritus” I
guess I am looking for ways to combine the gay theme with larger
themes. I’ve seen other writers doing this. Larry Kramer is doing this
huge book called The American People. It’s just that. It’s a huge
history of the American people.
In Grief you coin the term “homosexual emeritus.” Do you consider yourself one?
I
do and I’m glad the craziness diminishes. It takes up an awful lot of
time when it’s in full force. I don’t regret that. But I’m not one in
the sense that I’m still interested in gay things, my friends are gay, I
write gay books and I’m giving an interview where I’m talking about it
right now. But in the sense that I don’t go out anymore looking for sex,
the emeritus thing is true.
It leaves you much happier.
It’s a
tradeoff. When you’re young and you’re in the hormonal cloud, it’s
thrilling in a way. There are highs and there are lows that are very
intense. I used to think while walking in New York some days that this
is what the saints felt. It’s like I’m on a drug. Everything was
eroticism and life was incredibly intense and such an adventure. But you
get a very nice thing in exchange for it. There’s a terrible thing in
gay life that you can’t get old, but that’s not true at all.
You have
several scenes in your books in which an old single man looks at an
older, practically married gay couple with envy. Do you have that
experience?
I heard a doctor on Terry Gross today saying that
loneliness was a form of suffering and I do think that ending up alone
does cause a certain amount of anger and suffering at times. You wonder
what did I do wrong to end up like this. On the other hand, there are
times where it doesn’t matter at all and that it’s kind of what you
want. I had a friend who told me he had a shrink who would always get
patients coming into the office saying, “I don’t have a lover. I want a
lover.” And the shrink would say, “No, you don’t want a lover. Otherwise
you would have one.” And when I look at the friends of mine who are
partnered I think, “They wanted this arrangement, it was important to
them and they got it.”
Have you ever had a relationship?
Never to
the formal extent of the friends of mine who lived together 30, 40
years. I’ve had three or four people I’ve been attached to.


Where did the fascination with Mary Lincoln come from that takes up such a big part of Grief?
I
just read these letters [of hers] and tried to figure out how I could
splice it into my narrative. I didn’t want to write a historical novel
about her. I just wanted her language. She’s very vivid and very
theatrical. She would use dashes, commas and exclamation points. It
wasn’t just her punctuation. It was her. She was high strung and
emotional. And then she was in a situation that gave her a reason to be
emotional. Even when she was in Europe, when she was obsessed with
getting a pension and she was intense and heartfelt, it came out in the
language. I would love to go on tour with letters.
I was at a gay party the other night and told people I was going to be interviewing you.
Yeah… And no one had heard of me.
Well,
no one had heard of anyone. Edmund White, David Leavitt, anyone. Do you
think gay culture lost something when it got more freedom and became
more dumbed-down?
Well that’s the thesis of the Daniel Harris book,
The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, that the ostracism and the oppression
was the basis of our culture and there may be a lot to it. I don’t know
if gay culture or the culture as a whole has dumbed down, just by moving
from print to video.
It doesn’t bother for the most part, but it
bothers me in the sense that it would bother any person who is in the
arts. The idea that a song or a dress or a painting or anything they
created is forgotten in favor of the generations that has succeeded
theirs and their contributions don’t exist anymore. But that’s a
complaint anyone can make.



Works
Dancer from the Dance (1978)
Nights in Aruba (1983)
Ground Zero, essays (1988)
The Beauty of Men (1996)
In September, The Light Changes, stories (1999)
Grief: a Novel (2006)