I recently opened up my copy of Dancer From the Dance again. I was a debut novelist who had not even come out of the closet until the Clinton administration. He had lived through Stonewall and the protests of the ’70s he was an adult when AIDS was in full swing. But I do remember vividly thinking that I had so much less context than the man sitting beside me, who was writing before I was born. I know we talked about the things that authors love to talk about - our writing, how we construct characters. Looking back, I don’t remember much about the panel discussion. I had read Holleran’s masterful Dancer From the Dance and Nights in Aruba as a young man, and they had inspired me not just to write but to live life by my own rules as much as I possibly could. The topic of the panel was “Rebel, Rebel: The Outsider in Writing and Literature,” and I was over-the-moon excited to be sitting next to one of my favorite authors, Andrew Holleran. At the time, I was working on my second novel, and my first, Brothers, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. A million years ago, back in 2016, I sat on a panel at a literary conference in New Orleans.
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