“Andrew Holleran is our Fitzgerald and Hemingway but for one thing: he writes better than both of them.” – Larry Kramer
Between 1980 and 1981 a group of gay writers assembled in New York City to form the Violet Quill, a brief, informal, but enormously influential writing club whose membership was dedicated to the creation and promotion of gay literature. American novelist, essayist, and short story writer Andrew Holleran (pseudonym) was a member of the Violet Quill, and his writing has come to define post-Stonewall literature. Much of Holleran’s work is autobiographical, and the echoes of his lived experience reverberate throughout the novels that are now housed in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division.
Born on the island of Aruba in 1944, Andrew Holleran spent his childhood in the Dutch Caribbean, where his father worked in the oil industry. When his father retired in 1961, the family resettled in northern Florida, a place that would figure prominently in the author’s later writing. Holleran graduated high school and entered Harvard College where he studied literature and American history, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1965. He then moved west to Iowa, where he attended the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop and earned a Master of Arts and Master of Fine Arts. He briefly attended law school at the University of Pennsylvania but was drafted into the US Army which was then fighting in the Vietnam War.
Holleran was never deployed to Vietnam but instead was stationed in West Germany where two momentous life events would take place: first, he sold one of his stories, “The Holy Family,” to The New Yorker, which was published in the January 2, 1971, issue; second, he went to a gay bar for the first time. Reality did not meet expectations, however, and he was disappointed with both events. The young author thought The New Yorker would begin to publish his short stories regularly, but seven years passed before he was published again. The visit to a gay bar resulted in a sexual encounter that left him feeling depressed, so he returned to the closet for another year. After completing his military service, Holleran moved to Philadelphia to begin law school. The lure of gay nightlife pulled him in, and, soon, he was frequenting the city’s gay bars most nights. His enjoyment of urban nightlife only intensified when he dropped out of law school and moved to New York City with its plethora of gay bars, clubs, and restaurants.
It’s not surprising, then, that Holleran’s first major published work, Dancer from the Dance (1978), follows the character Malone, who is a young and beautiful man who seems to live a glamorous life. Led by a wise and experienced drag queen, Malone journeys through New York social circles, nightclubs, parties, and bathhouses. The book was a best-seller and soon became a must-read, especially among gay men, but, quite notably, Dancer from the Dance enjoyed widespread popularity outside of the gay community.
Around this same time, the Violet Quill formed. A group of seven gay men — some friends, some lovers, and some enemies — would gather together to discuss the mechanics of writing a gay novel and provide critiques of one another’s work. Authors Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White, and George Whitmore emerged as a new generation of gay writers after the Stonewall uprising and before the AIDS crisis.
In addition to discussing the form and content of their work, the group also developed strategies for overcoming corporate publishers’ reluctance to publish gay-themed novels. Although Holleran, Picano, and White had already been published and Picano had founded his own press, the SeaHorse Press, major publishers were still wary of publishing gay content for fear of being sued for distributing “pornography” and violating obscure indecency laws. At that time, even the most benign gay content could be classified as “pornography” and risked being banned by authorities. Besides, major publishing house executives lacked experience in marketing books to gay and lesbian audiences. Unfortunately, within a decade, four of the Violet Quill writers — Cox, Ferro, Grumley, and Whitmore — would succumb to AIDS, cutting short the lives of writers who were just starting to enjoy mainstream success and recognition. Holleran, Picano, and White have since emerged as major American authors.
In addition to New York and the community he belonged to there in the city, Florida and its confines became a highly influential locality for Holleran’s later writing. Holleran traveled to Florida in 1983 when his mother fell and broke her neck. He remained to help care for her. After his mother’s death, he briefly moved to Washington, DC, where he taught creative writing at American University for a few years before moving back to the Sunshine State. Much of what Holleran writes is informed by these life experiences, such as the work Nights in Aruba (1983) in which the narrator spends his youth on the Caribbean island, serves in the military, and settles in New York while negotiating familial relationships. In The Beauty of Men (1996), his third novel, Holleran writes about a middle-aged gay man living in Florida and caring for an ailing parent while yearning for unrequited love back in New York.
In Grief (2006), the narrator, again a middle-aged gay man who has just moved to Washington, DC, grieves the death of his mother, as well as friends in New York who were lost to the AIDS epidemic. The Kingdom of Sand (2022), Holleran’s latest novel, tells the story of a gay man advancing in age who lives in his deceased parents’ house in Florida and is forced to confront his world and “memories of another time … visions of parties filled with handsome young men, the parents he chose to spend his life beside, the generation he once knew, struck down by AIDS.”
In addition to his novels, Holleran is well known for the numerous pieces he had published in serials, as well as his collections of short essays, both fiction and non-fiction, such as In September the Light Changes (1999) and his series of contemporaneous essays on the AIDS crisis in New York City, later compiled into the single volume Ground Zero (1988).
The Rare Book and Special Collections Division collects the works of the Violet Quill writers, including Andrew Holleran, and holds the first editions of their works in the Gene Berry and Jeffrey Campbell Collection. Many copies are signed and/or inscribed by their authors, and all retain their original dust jackets. These materials are available for research in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. For more information, send a query to the reference staff via Ask-A-Librarian.
Sources:
Bergman, David, ed. The Violet Quill Reader: The Emergence of Gay Writing after Stonewall. New York : St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
Bergman, David. ”The Violet Quill at Forty.” In Gay & Lesbian Review. Boston : Gay & Lesbian Review, January-February 2021.
Metcalf, Meg. LGBTQIA+ Studies: A Resource Guide. Library of Congress, 2022.
Wikipedia. “Andrew Holleran.” Last updated 28 April 2024.
Further Reading:
Bergman, David. The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture. New York : Columbia University Press, c2004.
Canning, Richard. Gay Fiction Speaks: Conversations with Gay Novelists. New York : Columbia University Press, c2000.
Greenwell, Garth, “Revisiting Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance: The Novel that Introduced a New Post-Stonewall Gay Sensibility,” Yale Review, December 4, 2023.
Shapiro, Gregg, “Postcard from Florida: an interview with gay writer Andrew Holleran.” Philadelphia: Philadelphia Gay News, July 12, 2022.
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