A sometimes-unfocused but often witty and thought-provoking portrait of a showbiz life.
A gay man recounts his struggle to define himself while trying to find success as a dancer and singer in this debut memoir.
After a hardscrabble boyhood in San Francisco, 20-year-old Dane moved to New York City on a Juilliard ballet scholarship in 1975—the beginning of a long odyssey on the fringes of the arts and entertainment industry. He was a gifted dancer, but not quite superstar material; when his hopes of getting a spot in the storied American Ballet Theater company fizzled, he scrounged for other gigs. These included a contract with an Iranian ballet company in Tehran, which ended with his having to flee across the border to Turkey, and a stint with the all-male Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo troupe back in the United States. He lost both jobs because of poisonous office politics, he asserts, after his superior skills upstaged other, more powerful ensemble members. Seeking new horizons, Dane tried to launch a singing career with a Franco-Belgian record label that eventually went bankrupt; played the lover of then-unknown actor Madonna Ciccione in the low-budget indie film A Certain Sacrifice; produced his own play, which closed after three weeks; and made it through rough patches as a sex worker. He finally found steady employment in film and television as an extra in crowd scenes and in small parts as tough guys and waiters. Dane also had his share of romantic drama: His longtime boyfriend Gerard introduced him to the subculture of anonymous sex on the Hudson River waterfront and later succumbed to AIDS; and Bernard, another longtime boyfriend, made repeated suicide attempts.
Dane relates his misadventures in vivid prose with piquant character sketches—“Her bleached and permed locks and gruff demeanor create…a comical and fearsome impression of an aged peroxide abusing Shirley Temple doing her best Martha from ‘[Who’s Afraid of] Virginia Woolf’ ”—and evocative scenes of the not-so-fine arts: “This is no slick review,” he recalls of a strip-club audition, “this is take off your shirt, take off your shoes, hop around on one leg until you get out of your pants and underwear and then dance around naked and it really doesn’t matter what else you do.” It’s also a perceptive, if sometimes self-indulgent, portrait of a gay man in the post-Stonewall era, fighting to be himself as he weathers homophobic jibes and pressure to tone down the flamboyance (which he often resisted). There are some meandering passages in which Dane ponders his own image—“When did I become the person in this reflection?”—that bog the narrative down with an air of foggy narcissism. The memoir is more cogent and involving when the author looks outward at the social trappings of gender or the dank realities of sex: “He weighed a ton and smelled like an ashtray in a public toilet and I…couldn’t help but laugh to myself.” Readers will be captivated and amused by Dane as he pursues his starry-eyed hopes.
A sometimes-unfocused but often witty and thought-provoking portrait of a showbiz life.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-578-46328-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: HomoAmerican
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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