Andrew Holleran

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Andrew Holleran is the pseudonym of Eric Gerber (born 1944), a novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is a prominent novelist of post-Stonewall gay literature. He was a member of the Violet Quill, a gay writer's group that met briefly from 1980-81. The Violet Quill included other prolific gay writers like Edmund White and Felice Picano. Holleran, who has historically been very protective of his privacy, uses "Andrew Holleran" as his pseudonym.

Dancer from the Dance, his first novel, was published in 1978. Its narrative takes place among the discotheques of New York City and Fire Island, although it is Fire Island, with its literal distance from the mainland, that provides a pivotal backdrop for the novel. Dancer shares many of its locales, as well as its themes, with the acid, satirical Faggots, Larry Kramer's novel, which was published in the same year. The novels make a fascinating comparison: Holleran's is rarefied, literary, and dream-like, while Kramer's is satirical, biting, and humorous.

Holleran's second novel was Nights in Aruba, and his third is titled The Beauty of Men. Holleran's latest novel Grief: a Novel received the 2007 Stonewall Book Award.

Holleran teaches creative writing at American University in Washington, DC, and he continues to publish short fiction in gay short story collections like M2M: New Literary Fiction and frequently publishes articles in The Gay and Lesbian Review