“Dancer” was released the same year as Kramer’s brutal satire, “Faggots”; both were cautionary tales of the moth-to-flame nature of gay nightlife, and both culminate in Fire Island. But where Kramer was polemical, Holleran was poetic — quieter politically, Kushner said, but politically nonetheless as a pioneer of literature for a post-Stonewall era.
“I don’t believe Larry’s work was inferior in any way,” Kushner continued, “but in ‘Dancer’ there is a certain sense of confusion about how a community is formed from this particularly crooked wood of humanity, of which I think it was a big question back then.”
Holleran was surprised by the attention the book received. Today, Johnson said, it comes down to “our ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ the book you read when you’re young.” But since its publication, Holleran has been talked about more than seen. Widely described as likeable, quite funny, and seemingly immune to literary feuds, he’s also intensely shy. He was relieved to learn that the pandemic would limit the amount of publicity he would have to do for “The Kingdom of Sand.”
Edmund White, a fellow longtime statesman of gay literature — and, like Holleran, a member of the Violet Quill, an informal collective in the 1970s — called him “rabbit.” “It will appear for a bit and then disappear,” White added. “And if you get too close to him, he gets a little nervous. In New York, he was a big part of the Fire Island scene, and I saw him in the gay baths years ago. But he wouldn’t have sex; he would just observe.”
Over the decades, Holleran ducked in and out of the city, on his terms. His family had moved to Florida in the early 1960s, to the small town outside of Gainesville where he now lives. “We never understood why my father chose this place,” he said. “But I’ve been here occasionally since then. It’s a long time; for Florida, that’s three ice ages.”
He’d also made a living as a writing teacher at American University in Washington — “a very married town,” as he described it, where he usually only went to the National Gallery of Art and the gym — but lately the pandemic has been holding him back. against. limited to Florida. He could have left permanently at any time before that, but never did. Writing “The Kingdom of Sand,” he said, was kind of an exercise in coming up with a reason.