International Gay & Lesbian Review

In September, the Light Changes

• Fiction
• Publisher: Hyperion Press
• Publication Date: 1999

If you love Andrew Holleran's beautiful, evocative writing, you won't want to pass up this collection of 16 stories that spans four decades and chronicles gay life in Manhattan, Key West, San Francisco, Holland, and Fire Island. Holleran (the writer's nom de plume), is the author of “The Beauty of Men” and “Dancer from the Dance,” and if you haven't read the latter, you may wish to start with this haunting, seminal novel that perfectly captures the gay urban mystique of the 1970s. In September, Holleran gives us, in elegant prose, three seasons of gay life. In The Boxer, a graduate student coexists in a house in Iowa City with four strangers. Calls from a boxer in Florida to one of The Cloud People gives him a subject of conversation with a poet and stir the first whiffs of longing. In Delauncey Place, the narrator is out and going to bars and already pursuing what is for him the unstinting promise of gay life: meeting a man he is completely taken with, but can't obtain. In The Penthouse, a summer story, Ashley Moore, a retired fashion star, holds court and the conversation is scintillating. But when men start shaving off their moustaches, an era seems to end. The collection is weighted in autumnal stories. In Innocence and Longing, an older man frequents a grocery store: It was the bag boys he was glad to see: their youth, their industry. He doesn't talk to anyone at the store, except for a mere good night, and when he finally breaks a jam jar, he has to tell a bag boy and stand there apologetically when in fact he imagined the broken jar was his heart, shattered in aisle six by the beauty of the young man. If Forster said, “only connect,” Holleran is saying that true connection eludes gay men. They're solitary creatures consigned to their elusive and ultimately frustrating search for beauty. In Amsterdam, a visit to a long-time friend ends in a progressively ugly break-up of the relationship. But he discovers his host's solution to his age and clinical depression while sucking off a young man in the dark room of the Nightsauna: “it seemed to join the two of us together, a young man who did not care, apparently, what I looked like.” Though not chronically arranged, we can view the arc of the protagonist or first-person narrator and that life is one of nostalgia and shrinkage and isolation. In the title and final story, the narrator stays on in Fire Island after the season ends. At first he appreciates his aloneness and the beauty of nature, but after he meets an extremely handsome, extremely well built, couple, he becomes obsessed with their self-contained life and perfection. On a lonely, stormy night, he gets up the nerve to visit them, asking for vegetable oil. When he is not invited to stay, this seals his sense of failure. Ultimately, it's a depressing verdict on gay men who pass their youthful prime. Combined with The Beauty of Men, Holleran's message is that gay men are consigned to lives of unfulfilled longing, frustrated desire, and closed hearts as we age mercilessly. Since the stories have such an autobiographical feel, one just wants to grab Holleran's face and tell him to get a life. And get over the un-possessibility of the beauty of men. Volunteer, join a group, learn to truly reach out, you can still learn to open and nourish your heart.

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