HOMOAMERICAN

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.