A Haunting Laugh

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
Ben Hecht
US author & dramatist (1893 - 1964)


A haunting prayer, a diseased cackle; why live anywhere else except the centre.... But it was all best summed up by the author Andrew Holleran, who's Dancer from the Dance, a must read in the 1970s about gay life in New York. Later he wrote an achingly sad and lonely book called The Beauty of Men, which went on to detail the end game; the legions of talented young men dying of AIDS, the queens high in their lonely apartments, guarding their porn collections as they bounce in and out of hospital. He flees to some nothing Southern town to look after his dying mother; makes a fool of himself falling in love with a young bloke down the road; and finds his love moments in public toilets; glory holes the centre of his sex life. But back then the world was shifting on its axis, every dance, every club, every drug, every encounter, were blows for the revolution; for an assault on the smothering of the prevailing consciousness. We were going to change everything.

But there were other ways to preserve one's sanity. Instead of Southern towns there was Australia; and after the transforming nature of the London bars; reaching deep and instantly into some other culture, he cried fowl. Just like his cars his body betrayed him, falling apart when there was so much else to do. He had always sought the ultimate refuge; not just a place where he could be safe but the place where there would be enough time and security for him to write the books that were his destiny; the episodic narratives; the lyrical descriptions of personal pain, the stories that would capture a generation. It never happened. They would arrive at one beach on the south coast of Morocco, only to discover that the best beaches were further on; down past the Sahara, where the dunes met the sea.

And the transcendental moments; of love for his partner; of humiliating lust for the local lads; it all caved away as he pounded out masterworks that would never see the light of day. The times changed utterly; with the arrival of computers and wave after wave of younger, brighter, more intense people. If he couldn't be at the centre he wouldn't be anywhere; and his consciousness disintegrated under years of substance abuse. The clattering fall; the dying moment; the ecstatic shout as they pumped their hands in the air on the most central; most sophisticated dance floors he had ever been on; while outside the stolid blocks of the London buildings, the doors that allowed no entry; the ancient queens who carried with them the traditions of centuries, who lived in the high security, humble in reality bedsits; who's wit and self deprecation made them all laugh; as their eyes swept the bar; stripping every new comer before turning back to their gins and warm beers and stub filled ashtrays.

Appreciate it now, it won't last, someone tried to tell him through the alcoholic mist, and he laughed, a haunting laugh. He knew better. Of course it would last. Of course he would be fabulous, from here to eternity; of course it was destined for some to be gorgeous and for others to watch. And he would be the centre of the dance; and he would take the attention and the declarations as entirely his due; and the music would pound and he would lean over, whispering into the ear of the handsome young man from New York; this is the centre of everything, you are the centre of everything; and they laughed and they danced and embraced; as the sky outside lightened into dawn and workers picked their way through the ancient streets; on their ways to entirely different lives.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.glbtq.com/literature/holleran_a.html

Holleran's first novel, Dancer from the Dance, one of the first major breakthrough novels...chronicles the life of "that tiny subspecies of homosexual, the doomed queen, who puts the car in gear and drives right off the cliff!" The novel documents the life of an enigmatic and beautiful man, Malone, who becomes subsumed by the frenetic gay social circuit of Manhattan and Fire Island.

Holleran is regularly lauded as a great prose stylist, and this somewhat trite plot line becomes an occasion for weaving a poetic myth of identity around and within the bars, discos, and house parties that typified a certain segment of the gay world in the late 1970s. This is a gay Great Gatsby, with East and West Egg replaced by Fire Island and the Pines....

Nights in Aruba was published in 1983, only two years after the New York Times published its first story about a mysterious cancer found in forty-one homosexuals. Yet the impact of AIDS is already felt strongly in the novel. At one point, the narrator tells us that "by this time I was wary of disease," and later laments that "celebrities of our sexual demimonde were dying of bizarre cancers."

http://www.smh.com.au/news/whale-watch/hostilities-resume-after-activists-released/2008/01/18/1200620211153.html

Andrew Darby in Hobart
January 19, 2008

THE Japanese whaling factory ship Nisshin Maru has fired up its water cannon as hostilities resume after the release of Sea Shepherd activists in the Antarctic.

The mother ship returned to its fleet yesterday as the crew tried to get their hunt back on track after the crisis sparked when activists boarded a catcher boat.

The Nisshin Maru was last night steaming towards the Sea Shepherd vessel, which had already attacked another of its ships, the Institute of Cetacean Research said. Activists had tried unsuccessfully to tangle the vessel's propellers with ropes.

When the Nisshin Maru stopped to refuel the Yushin Maru No.2, the boat at the centre of the detention crisis, they were buzzed by Greenpeace campaigners in small boats, and the high-powered water cannon were turned on. The expedition leader, Karli Thomas, said the campaigners trying to record the refuelling escaped a wetting.

Since it was tracked down last Saturday, the factory ship had tried to shake the Greenpeace ship, Esperanza, off its tail on a long run into the southern Indian Ocean. It turned back only when the Australian Benjamin Potts and Briton Giles Lane leapt over the rail onto the Yushin Maru No.2, left behind in the Antarctic.

Mr Potts, 28, said three of the whalers tried to heave him over the side and into the icy ocean, but he clung to a rail and the crew gradually calmed down.