Mario López-Cordero's Blog

I came to Joan Didion late—having somehow evaded Slouching Towards Bethlehem in both high school and journalism school—but when I found her, I fell hard and fast, quickly reading through everything she's ever written.

Her non-fiction is amazing of course, but her novels were a revelation to me: sharp, cynical, and so stylish they gave me goosebumps. My favorite is Democracy, which features the unforgettable character of Inez Victor, a senator's wife, and the jaded, jaundiced survivor of a life lived in the public eye. The settings are glamorous and keenly rendered, as if they'd just fallen out of the pages of Vogue, the magazine where Didion was a features writer in the late 1950s and early '60s.

When I wrote about Devin Santos, the protagonist in Monarch Season, I thought a lot about Inez Victor. In some regards, I envisioned him as a latter-day version of Inez—jaded and cynical and swept up in a world not of his creation, the reluctant participant of a life he hadn't necessarily signed up for. Didion's sense for the stylistic also gave me the confidence to draw on my own experience as a magazine writer, using the sense for detail honed during years spent reporting to build a world I like to think could have fallen out of the pages of another glossy magazine.

I'll admit it—I didn't want to like Faggots. For starters, there was that title, which I have a hard time even typing. Then there was the snippets I'd always heard, the vague impression I got that the book was school-marmish scourge against any kind of gay Fire Island fun.

Well school-marmish it is not. And whatever agenda Kramer wanted to push, he did it with so much charm and wit that I couldn't help to laugh out loud in parts. Quite simpy, I loved it. If Dancer From the Dance is an elegy then Faggots is a stand-up act, one in which gay mores and customs of the time—1978—are the butt of the joke.

And they could just as easily be gay mores and customs of 2013. Kramer was using humor to address the same timeless things Holleran addressed through poetry and the two of them for me present two sides of a fascinating coin. Faggots deploys dialogue and sex to propel the action quickly and keep the reader engaged while Kramer slips in larger—and more troubling—themes about commitment, image, and the struggle to find love. It was a technique I knew I immediately I wanted to adopt.

You can't think of writing a novel about Fire Island without thinking of Andrew Holleran, who along with Larry Kramer practically invented the genre when their books about the place were released months apart in 1978 (the year after I was born).

Dancer From the Dance is an elegy for a place and time, a lament for a party told after the streamers have been taken down. It's lush and gorgeous and at times joyful, but also bittersweet and sad; prophetic in the way it would presage the AIDS crisis to come. It filled me with longing and heartache.

What also struck me was how relevant a lot of it still was. The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same. Many of the social aspects of gay life that were present in 1978 are still present today. I came away thinking that my approach should take another snapshot. How has that society evolved? How has it not evolved?

A line near the end of Dancer haunted me. It's spoken by Malone, one of the main characters, as a cautionary piece of advice to an admirer while they take in the scene around them: "Everything is beautiful here, and that is all it is: beautiful. Do not expect anything else, do not expect nourishment for anything but your eye—and you will handle it all beautifully." In other words, caveat emptor.