By Rijn van Well
“They were tall and broad-shouldered, with
handsome, open faces and strong white teeth, and they
were all dead. They lived only to bathe in the music, and
each other’s desire, in a strange democracy whose only
ticket of admission was physical beauty.”
Dancer from the Dance – Andrew Holleran
Dancer from the Dance is often referred to as a classic of gay literature. It is about a thirty year old man entering the gay circuit in New York in the 1970s. Under the tutelage of an older drag queen he becomes a “professional faggot;” cruising in parks, dancing in discotheques, and partying on Fire Island (Holleran 236). Although it is a fictional narrative, the book is often read as a kind of historical document on gay life in the 70s as the narrative refers to real places and practices of that specific period in ‘gay’ New York; a time and place that have gained a kind of cult status in both gay and popular culture. However, while the story is about gay men living their lives in the 1970s, all I could think about while reading the book was gay men losing their lives in the 1980s.
Clearly, in my mind gay promiscuity in the seventies is inextricably linked to the AIDS epidemic of the eighties. This cognitive link is largely due to the crisis narrative (re)produced in cultural products of and about AIDS, which in turn shape the cultural memory of AIDS. Yet, my reading experience could be completely different from other readers’ experiences. This made me wonder to what extent other readers of Dancer from the Dance were influenced by the cultural memory of AIDS. This answer is best answered by performing a reception analysis. Therefore, I have gathered a large set of online reviews of Dancer from the Dance published on Goodreads between 2015 and now which will serve as the reception material.
Before diving into the many online reviews of Dancer, it is important to first establish what cultural memory is. Cultural memory is a type of collective memory, meaning that it is a memory shared by a group of people which lends this group a collective cultural identity. What differentiates cultural memory from other types of collective memory is that it is “exteriorized, objectified, and stored away in symbolic forms” and therefore requires “institutions of preservation and reembodiment” (Assmann and Czaplicka 110-111). This means that cultural memory is transmitted from one generation to another through media such as books, films, and museums (Assmann 13). The cultural memory of AIDS has largely been shaped by what Kagan et al. term the crisis discourse and post-crisis culture (Kagan et al. 7, 27). This discourse posits a teleological link between the promiscuity of the 1970s and the emergence of AIDS in the 1980s. It imagines AIDS as the inevitable punishment for the hedonistic lifestyle of gay men during the era of sexual liberation (205). This contrapasso link between gay sex and death is founded on the initial political and cultural reactions to AIDS, which were based on preexisting ideas about homosexuality as pathological and fatal (8). These reactions were a large part of the mediation of the AIDS epidemic.
The post-crisis culture came about after the AIDS epidemic ended in the Global North after the introduction of antiretroviral drugs (Kagan et al. 9, 17, 24). Although ARV drugs ended the crisis era of AIDS, the disease still had massive effects on the gay community; “the traumatic experience of mass deaths, the enduring anxiety at the possibility of contracting HIV and the gnawing guilt associated with the knowledge that ongoing AIDS-related deaths were tragically occurring in so many parts of the world” were sentiments that haunted the post-AIDS generation (204). These sentiments caused a kind of AIDS phobia in post-AIDS generations which shaped the post-crisis culture. The foundational tenet of the post-crisis culture is the notion that AIDS was caused by the promiscuous lifestyle of gay men in the 1970s. This notion, which echoes the crisis discourse, helps to assuage anxieties about AIDS because it places AIDS neatly into the past and seals it off from the present. This clear demarcation between the past-with-AIDS and the present-without-AIDS provides an imagined prophylactic distance between the disease and contemporary gay life (204). Additionally, this notion identifies a hedonistic and promiscuous lifestyle as the cause of AIDS. By identifying a specific cause of AIDS, the narrative eases the anxiety surrounding the contraction of AIDS. If a specific lifestyle causes the disease, all one has to do is reject that lifestyle in order to protect oneself from disease” (204).
Another tenet of the post-crisis culture is the notion that AIDS has caused the gay community to become mature by presenting gay men with the consequences of their actions which fostered (sexual) responsibility and rights-based activism (Kagan et al 203). This notion creates a divide between the ‘infantile’ hedonistic pre-AIDS era and the ‘mature’ monogamous post-AIDS present, which again puts an imagined prophylactic distance between AIDS and the post-AIDS generation (203). By evoking the maturation process of childhood to adulthood through the use of terms such as ‘infantile’ and ‘mature,’ this notion imagines AIDS to be a necessary part of the maturation of the gay community. In this way, this notion reestablishes a teleological link between the promiscuity of the 1970s and the emergence of AIDS in the 1980s.
Dancer from the Dance describes the lives of precisely the type of gay men, lifestyle, and locals which have been causally linked to AIDS by the crisis and post-crisis discourse. This might be the strongest indicator as to why various reviews mention experiencing a sense of eerie sadness while reading the book as the cultural memory of AIDS has made it “virtually impossible to think about or celebrate gay liberation without knowing what was coming next – after the orgy. There is no seeing the beaches of Fire Island at that time without the sobering biblical story of paradise interrupted – the fall of Eden, the Genesis flood, Sodom and Gomorrah – when the inescapable penalty for mankind’s crimes ensues” (217). At first glance, such readings could merely indicate that the readers have the historical awareness to make a chronological link between the events of the 1970s and those of the 1980s. However, it is doubtful that a novel about straight junkies, hemophiliacs, or Haitians living in the 1970s would trigger the memory of AIDS, yet these groups of people were just as likely to contract AIDS as gay men (Surviving and Thriving). The same could be said for a story about gay men living monogamous lives in a non-urban environment. However, due to the shape the cultural memory of AIDS has taken, AIDS is primarily remembered as a disease that affected promiscuous gay men living in large urban areas. Therefore, remembering AIDS when reading about gay men in New York City engaging in a lot of anonymous sex is not based on ‘neutral’ historical linking, but a behavior heavily (re)enforced by the cultural memory of AIDS.
The cognitive linking between the people, places, and times described in Dancer from the Dance and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s is an example of the cultural memory of AIDS implicitly at work in the reading experience of the reviewers. Some reviews, however, more explicitly refer to one or more of the foundational tenets of the crisis and post-crisis discourse and thus reveal that the cultural memory of AIDS had a significant influence on these readers’ experience. One reviewer describes the novel as “Holleran’s sketching out this sort of marked-for-death beauty of young gay party life.” Two terms stick out in this description: “marked-for-death” and “young,” as these terms refer to the two tenets of the cultural memory of AIDS discussed previously. By describing the promiscuous gay lifestyle depicted in Dancer as “marked-for-death,” the reader indicates that the gay men who lived this lifestyle were destined to die, that AIDS, and its fatal consequences, was an inevitable conclusion to these men and the lives they lived. This notion directly refers to the tenet of AIDS’ cultural memory that posits a teleological link between this lifestyle and the fatal event of the AIDS epidemic.
Similarly, by describing the “gay party life” described in the novel as “young,” the reader echoes the same tenet of the cultural memory of AIDS as mentioned above but this time by casting the history of the gay community in terms of the maturation process of an individual. Just like children have to grow up and learn to become responsible adults so the gay community had to grow out of their immature, infantile phase. Within the discourse of the cultural memory of AIDS, the AIDS epidemic is understood as the necessary catalyst for this maturation, as a kind of necessary evil needed to foster the sense of responsibility in the gay community necessary for this community to come-of-age and “become grown up, responsible, ‘mature’ citizens of the state” (Kagan et al. 205). Notably, there are various reviewers who use similar age-based language to describe the community Holleran describes in his novel, using words and phrases such as “adolescence,” “naivete,” and “coming of age.”
Notably, while a substantial amount of reviews reproduce aspects of the crisis and post-crisis discourse central to the cultural memory of AIDS, there are some readers who explicitly grapple with the problematic nature of these discourses. One reviewer writes that “[i]t’s also easy to see how a contemptuous cishet society would link gay holocaust to the types of behaviors portrayed in this book” and that “as a factual matter I don’t think you could say those statements were wrong.” The reader has thus integrated the link between AIDS, notably referred to as a “gay holocaust,” and the promiscuous behavior of gay men as depicted in the book as a natural fact. In this instance, it becomes clear how the cultural memory of AIDS, which represents AIDS as a specifically ‘gay’ disease, has become naturalized into a natural fact.
However, AIDS as a disease of promiscuous gay men is a politically and culturally construct which ‘unremembers’ that AIDS is a virus that spreads through bodily fluids, such as blood, which does not discriminate based on sexuality. It is true that gay men were a group of people who were more vulnerable to the disease, but so were other groups of people such as hemophiliacs and intravenous drug users. However, while the reviewer reproduces an understanding of AIDS that has been (re)enforced by the cultural memory of AIDS, they do problematize the notion that gay men were responsible for the AIDS epidemic: “though assignment of blame and culpability are an entirely different matter.” This indicates that the reader does link gay promiscuity to AIDS, but does not believe this link should be cast in terms of blame but rather in terms of the “tragically coincidental.” The reader thus subscribes to one aspect of the discourse of the cultural memory of AIDS while simultaneously distancing themselves from another.
Another reviewer shares the sentiment that it is wrong to assign the blame of AIDS to gay men, yet do so in more forceful terms:
Those people who still think gay and bi men got what they deserved are too dead inside to ever understand that those who lived on the edge and sought so desperatly [sic] to be touched, to commune with another, if only for a brief moment, were those who valued life, the human experience that is called life, the hardest.
Notably, this reviewer takes their condemnation of this part of the discourse reproduced by the cultural memory of AIDS further than the previous reviewer by casting the promiscuous behavior of gay men in the 70s in a positive light. They describe the casual sex practiced by these gay men in terms of communion while also linking this behavior to life rather than death. Specifically the latter rhetorical move, linking gay promiscuity to life, goes against the discourse of the cultural memory of AIDS and undoes the notion that gay men were marked-for-death. This reviewer still indicates that the reader was influenced by the cultural memory of AIDS while reading Dancer from the Dance as their review incorporates the discourse reproduced by the cultural memory of AIDS, yet they do so in order to oppose this rhetoric.
Conclusively, contemporary readings of Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran appear to be influenced by the cultural memory of AIDS as contemporary reviews of the novel reproduce some of the notions central to the cultural memory of AIDS. These notions are that AIDS is a gay disease, that the promiscuous lifestyle of gay men in the seventies caused AIDS, that the AIDS crisis was a necessary or inevitable part of the coming-of-age of the gay community. There are however some reviews which question (parts of) the cultural memory of AIDS, for example by rhetorically linking gay promiscuity to life rather than death. Further research could ascertain to what extent other media about gay men published before and during AIDS merit similar responses in contemporary audiences, specifically in audiences who have personal memories of the Covid pandemic, as the lived experience of a such a disease event could possibly interact with the cultural memory of AIDS in interesting ways. One thing this research has established is that the problematic aspects of the cultural memory of AIDS, such as the teleological link between gay promiscuity and death, are still being reproduced today, yet there seems to be some indication that the notion of blame is losing some ground. One can thus conclude that a lot needs to be done in order to rid the cultural memory of AIDS of some of its problematic elements but that change, albeit slow and small, is possible.
All reviews were taken from goodreads.com in spring 2026 and have been anonymized for privacy reasons.
Work Cited
Assmann, Aleida. “Memory, Individual and Collective.” The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, edited by Robert Goodin and Charles Tilly, 1st ed., Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 210–24. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199270439.003.0011.
Assmann, Jan, and John Czaplicka. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique, no. 65, 1995, pp. 125–33. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/488538.
Holleran, Andrew. Dancer from the Dance. Vintage, 2019. Originally published by William Morrow & Co., 1978.
Kagan, Dion, et al. Positive Images: Gay Men and HIV/AIDS in the Culture of “Post Crisis.” I.B. Tauris, 2018.
Surviving and Thriving: AIDS, Politics and Culture. Exhibitions. U.S. National Library of Medicine, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/surviving-and-thriving/digitalgallery_theme_6.html. Accessed 27 May 2026.
