Yesterday's Goss

The Baroness Putbus Admiration Socity

I've been reading the letters of Andrew Holleran (née Eric Garber) to George Stambolian in the 80s. After the first few (signed Eric) serious, professional, formal ones, they let their receding hairlines down and start queening out like the fictional correspondents whose exchange of letters frames Holleran’s epochal novel Dancer from the Dance (1978). Life imitates etc…

In the first letter (postcard), Holleran congratulates Stambolian on a recent little essay on Proust (below), and suggests nothing Proust said about homosexuality is “untrue” today (girl, speak for yourself! Holleran was already by then Marcel-maxxing, living in memories of when he used to go out [“For a long time I took a disco nap early…”]—with rural Florida as his cork-lined room. A mistake).

Here's some of Stambolian’s essay-in-question, which notably hedges its bets on whether “Proust was right” about love, homos, etc (novelists and novels, I hate to keep pointing out, can't be “right” about anything; fiction not being a hypothesis)—and puts Holleran in the running for “greatest Proust freak”:

The real fun of the letters (of which there are several dozen!) gets underway elsewhere, as Holleran adopts various feminine personae and writes in a gossipy (“dishy”) talky horny silly voice that unfortunately disappeared from his published prose (the greatness of Dancer, for me, being that it had such a wide range of gay voices, our whole mad—enduring— repertoire of talk… it must be said Holleran also does a regrettable bit of “negro” dialect). Here he's planning his contribution to the first Men on Men anthology, but distracted by such more burning topics as what the girls wore, pedos on vacation and BRUNCH DISH