Andrew Holleran

I__ in mid-passage, darling,_ he said, beginning to talk like a queen so as to demystify himself, so as to destroy the very qualities John Schaeffer had fallen in love with, ____ menopausal, change of life, hot flashes, you know. Wondering how much longer I can go without hair transplants and whether Germaine Monteil really works on the crow__ feet. I__e had it, I__e been through the mill, I__ a jaded queen. But you, dear, you have that gift whose loss the rest of life is just a funeral for__hy else do you suppose those gray-haired gentlemen,_ he said, nodding at his friends on the floor, __ake money, buy houses, take trips around the world? Why else do they dwindle into a little circle of close friends, a farm upstate, and become in the end mere businessmen, shop-owners, decorators who like their homes filled with flowers and their friends flying in on Air France and someone pretty like you at the dinner table? It is all, my dear, because they are no longer young. Because they no longer live in that magic world that is yours for ten more years. Adolescence in America ends at thirty.

Now of all the bonds between homosexual friends, none was greater than that between friends who danced together. The friend you danced with, when you had no lover, was the most important person in your life; and for people who went without lovers for years, that was all they had.

He did not wish to be the man to whom nothing was ever to happen.

But Malone was thinking now and as he watched the men lighting cigarettes for each other in the dark, having sex beneath the trees, he turned to his friend and said in a wondering voice: __sn__ it strange that when we fall in love, this great dream we have, this extraordinary disease, the only thing in which either one of us is interested, it__ inevitably with some perfectly ordinary drip who for some reason we cannot define is the magic bearer, the magician, the one who brings all this to us. Why?

You know, we queens loathed rain at the beach, small cocks, and reality, I think. In that order.

Living for beauty is all very fine, but it__ a hard regimen and burns up the heart very quickly.

We lived only to dance. What was the true characteristic of a queen, I wondered later on; and you could argue that forever. __hat do we all have in common in this group?_ I once asked a friend seriously, when it occurred to me how slender, how immaterial, how ephemeral the bond was that joined us; and he responded, __e all have lips._ Perhaps that is what we all had in common: no one was allowed to be serious, except about the importance of music, the glory of faces seen in the crowd. We had our songs, we had our faces! We had our web belts and painter__ jeans, our dyed tank tops and haircuts, the plaid shirts, bomber jackets, jungle fatigues, the all-important shoes.

For that is the curious quality of the discotheque after you have gone there a long time: in the midst of all the lights, and music, the bodies, the dancing, the drugs, you are stiller than still within, and though you go through the motions of dancing you are thinking a thousand disparate things. You find yourself listening to the lyrics, and you wonder what these people around you are doing. They seemed crazed to you. You stand there on a floor moving your hips, wondering if there is such a thing as love, and conscious for the very first time that it is three-twenty-five and the night only half-over. You put the popper to your nostril, you put a hand out to lightly touch the sweaty, rigid stomach of the man dancing next to you, your own chest is streaming with sweat in that hot room, and you are thinking, as grave as a judge: What will I do with my life? What can any man do with his life? And you finally don__ know where to rest your eyes. You don__ know where to look, as you dance. You have been expelled from the communion of the saints.

They were bound together by a common love of a certain kind of music, physical beauty, and style__ll the things one shouldn__ throw away an ounce of energy pursuing, and sometimes throw away a life pursuing.

For the fact was drugs were not necessary to most of us, because the music, youth, sweaty bodies were enough. And if it was too hot, too humid to sleep the next day, and we awoke bathed in sweat, it did not matter: We remained in a state of animated suspension the whole hot day. We lived for music, we lived for Beauty, and we were poor. But we didn__ care where we were living, or what we had to do during the day to make it possible; eventually, if you waited long enough, you were finally standing before the mirror in that cheap room, looking at your face one last time, like an actor going onstage, before rushing out to walk in the door of that discotheque and see someone like Malone.

There was a moment of silence and then Sutherland breathed, __ut, darling! Gossip is the food of the gods.

They faced each other at opposite ends of an illusion.

Indifference is the greatest aphrodisiac.

For you cannot live in New York City very long and not be conscious of the niceties of being rich__he city is, after all, an ecstatic exercise in merchandising__nd one evening of his visit to Venezuela Sutherland sat straight up when he read a line of Santayana__: __oney is the petrol of life.

What, we may well ask, is there left to live for? Why get out of bed? For this dreary round of amusing insincerity? This filthy bourgeois society that the Aristotelians have foisted upon us? No, we may still choose to live like gods, like poets. Which brings us down to dancing. Yes,_ he said, turning to Malone, __hat is all that__ left when love has gone.

During those snowy New England winters, besides learning to rise at five to study calculus and trudge two miles through the drifts for breakfast down the road, he had suppressed some tremendous element in himself that took form in a prudish virginity. While his life was impeccable on the surface, he felt he was behind glass: moving through the world in a separate compartment, touching no one else.

I can__ help its being gay. I have been a full-time fag for the past five years, I realized the other day. Everyone I know is gay, everything I do is gay, all my fantasies are gay, I am what Gus called those people we used to see in the discos, bars, baths, all the time__emember? Those people we used to see EVERYWHERE, every time we went out, so that you wanted to call the police and have them arrested?__ am a doomed queen.I would LIKE to be a happily married attorney with a house in the suburbs, 2.6 kids, and a station wagon, in which we would drive every summer to see the Grand Canyon, but I__ not! I am completely, hopelessly gay!

He saw in that instant a life he could not conceive of opening before him, a hopeless abyss. Either way he was doomed: He did what was wrong, and condemned himself, or he did what was right, and remained a ghost.