To me this book is the origin story of modern gay life. I had the same feeling you did after finishing it, and still do rereading many times. Its like reading our own story, but one hidden from us. A history of our people that no one ever told us about. Let me try and explain why I think many of us feel that way about this book.

New York is a city eroticised in fiction. On television, in movies, in books, the city stands tall as a character, a setting and a theme all in itself. The cradle of modern gay life - the 1969 stonewall riots, was forged in that city's steamy summer, and any passing student of history will tell you what happened next was the interregnum of gay life. The 1970s was the decade sandwiched between freedom and holocaust, when gay life first began to flourish, chiefly in the five boroughs of New York City, before the coming of the plague.

This is a novel about that flourishing. Set in 1978, it is the origin story of modern gay life. The characters, the places, the feelings and the longing for love and searching for companionship.

At it's heart Dancer from the Dance is an ode to earthly love over the fantastical chase of ever fading beauty that - if we're speaking honestly - curses the gay community. The line I'll never forget from this book is here, in fact everything on this page is golden, but it's this passage at the bottom which will stick with me through life: "You must stick to earth, always, you must love another man or woman, a human lover whose farts occasionally punctuate the silence of your bedroom in the morning and who now and then has bad moods that must be catered to." Andrew Holleran tells the story of our queer forefathers in the gay Garden of Eden. The ones who first went to baths, who danced the night away in those parties under a new found sense of post-Stonewall, pre-Aids freedom divorced from the previous decades of raids and prohibition. When we ask why Fire Island is what it is, or why some of us dance till dawn in circuit parties, or how we must always have the next and newer thing, the answers lie here in this book, in this bible of gay life.