Quotes by Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“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, i...”

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

“We lived only to dance. What was the true characteristic of a queen, I wondered later on; and you could argue that forever. What do we all have in common in this group? I once asked a friend seriou...”

“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 w...”

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

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

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

“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: Isnt it st...”

“Im 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, Im menopausal, change of ...”

“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 ...”

“A moral man is essentially dumbfounded when confronted by a man who is amoraleverything the latter does is met with a certain disbelief.”

“Try not to be self-conscious [] or so critical. Dont mope around looking for someone else to make you happy, and remember that the vast majority of homosexuals are looking for a superman to love an...”

“Never forget that all these people are primarily a visual people. They are designers, window dressers, models, photographers, graphic artists. They design the windows at Saks. Do you understand? Th...”

“The more beautiful the sky, the more hopeless the neighborhood.”

“There are three lies in life, Sutherland said to his young companion, whose first night this was in the realm of homosexuality and whose introduction to it Sutherland had taken upon himself to supe...”

“Love is a career with its own stages, rewards, and failures . . . a vocation as concrete as a calling in the Church, worth giving a lifetime to.”

“Malone had been raised by a lady both Irish and Catholic, in a good bourgeois home in which careless table manners were a sin, much less this storm in his heart.”

“The point is that we are not doomed because we are homosexual, my dear, we are doomed only if we live in despair because of it, as we did on the beaches and the streets of Suck City.”

“They were the most romantic creatures in the city in that room. If their days were spent in banks and office buildings, no matter: Their true lives began when they walked through this doorand were ...”

“You know, when people who were once religious no longer believe in God, they never really change; they just go on, hunting for the ecstatic food, trying to satisfy that hunger.”