Does Freddy Dance - Hardcover

Scanlan, Dick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555832873 ISBN 13: 9781555832872

Publisher: Alyson Books, 1995

Synopsis

Freddy's dance card is filled with partners who twirl him around, step on his toes, and sometimes break his heart. In "Family Album," a six-year-old Freddy unknowingly unearths the source of his mother's hidden despair; twenty years later, she reaches through her drunken haze to comfort her son against the fear of AIDS. In "Cigarettes," Freddy does some dirty dancing, stealing cigarettes for the bad boy next door in exchange for lessons on lust. "Tears of Two" finds Freddy grown-up and his father grown old, revealing a tender heart beneath his father's lawyerly shell. In "Red Light" and "Life Line," Freddy takes his chances with dangerous women in order to feel more like a man.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

New York journalist, short-story writer and actor Scanlan makes an auspicious debut with these 14 connected stories, which deftly blend humor, tenderness and tragedy to form an incisive portrait of a gay male. Freddy, the youngest of five kids, exhibits clear sexual signals early on: in "Family Portrait" (set in 1965), the six-year-old has already amassed more than 20 Broadway and movie albums (favoring Julie Andrews) and chooses an outfit for his doll as he and his mother fly to visit the grandparents. (In one of Scanlan's subtle references, readers realize that Granddaddy apparently molested Freddy's mother when she was a girl.) At 11, Freddy learns about smoking ("Cigarettes") from the knowledgeable teenaged boy next door, who rouses the youngster's sexual longings. Eventually, Freddy pursues his dream-he leaves the family home in Washington, D.C., and (rather too easily) becomes a TV actor in New York. Now 30-ish, Freddy branches out to Broadway; a boyfriend dies of AIDS; a new relationship is tentatively begun (at which point the prospective partner poses the eponymous query). Scanlan sensitively explores themes of parental anxieties (father is a stolid lawyer, mother a lush whose benders cause her to become literally lost), sibling relations and interpersonal dependence.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Scanlan's humorous novel tells the story of Freddy from boyhood in the burbs to middle-aged gay manhood in the Big Apple. There is little new in the story line (here are more identification with mother rather than father, fascination with fashion, female friends, and HIV anxiety), but Scanlan's writing is fresh and witty. So is Freddy, who goes into business with Claire, makes a big name for himself as a comic in the big city, finds love but loses his lover to AIDS, and carries on with grief and hope. Claire and Freddy's friend Bebe, with their different brands of madness, help keep the story from ever getting dull as Claire steals toilet paper from restrooms and Bebe has wild adventures in Guatemala, New Orleans, and New York. There is no pretense that this is socially serious fiction, which helps it succeed as light, refreshing reading. Charles Harmon

About this edition

• Publisher: Alyson Books
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 1555832873
• ISBN 13: 9781555832872
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 207