Between Dances

by Erasmo Guerra

This debut novel trumpets a sometimes raw, but always poetic, voice that resonates like a tragic Mexican ranchera. Set in a male-burlesque theater, the novel follows the mercenary life of a young Latino dancer who falls in love for the first time.

Will he quit his nights with the johns? Will his lover, who is also a dancer, leave the same hard-commerced life behind? Will they come to see the other men and the money as substitutes for the love that they had dared to exist? This coming-of-age novel is shot through with the pain of heartache and the realities of paid-for sex.

With the same exhaustive richness as Rechy's City of Night and Genet's The Thief's Journal, this debut novel traces the arabesques of the acrid smoke and loneliness found in the world of hustler's and johns, of porn theaters and crumbling hotel rooms, of cheap neon-lit thrills and violent bravado. We run the abandoned streets with this new writer, searching for the love that might lift and save us from where we find ourselves now from whatever we have become.

Genres: Gay

224 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2000

About the author

ERASMO GUERRA is a Lambda Literary Award winner. His nonfiction stories have appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, The Texas Observer and aired on NPR.

He is a member of the Macondo Writers' Workshop, headed by Sandra Cisneros. Born and raised on the Texas-Mexico border, he now lives in New York City and drinks too much coffee.

Find me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ErasmoGuerra...
Watch book excerpts and interviews on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/erasmogue...
Listen to book excerpts on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/erasmoguerra

Reviews

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the story of Marco and his friends/lovers Chris and Jaime, all three erotic dancers and call-boys in NYC at some recent time, I'd suggest the late '90s. Though some of the plot concerns their 'jobs', the novel is really about Marco and his life "between dances" shown by his interaction with Chris, Jaime and a few johns.

There are sexual encounters in the novel, but not explicit, and actually episodes telling us more about Marco. I like this approach. One gets bored with descriptive sex scene after sex scene common to so much m/m fiction. If it were a movie, I'd rate it PG depending on how much d&a are shown.

The author seems an experienced craftsman. The prose has a literary bent, reminding me somewhat of Counterpoint: Dylan's Story. My main problem was some dialogue in Spanish which I did not want to look up for disturbing the flow of the prose. Sometimes the meaning was clear, most often not.

The novel is compared to Genet's The Thief's Journal and Rechy's The City of Night. I think this comparison comes from the novel being about a seedier sides of Gay life, but I see a big difference. Genet's autobiographical work and Rechy's novels tend toward protagonists who are stuck in their lives and one expects then to go on behaving in the future as they have in the past. Marco makes me want to try to save him from his physically and psychologically destructive life. And, I think there is a good chance he could be changed and so saved. He's likable though I don't think I'd have sex with him.

I liked the book a lot and would like to see more novels come from the author's pen. He has published short story collections, but no other novels that I can find.

The only real negative I found were a number of typos in the text, most minor. In one place it seemed a paragraph was out of place and I lost the flow of what was going on for a bit.

Recommended!

[AthleticStilletto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only a writer with a magic wand could show us what goes on between dances. Erasmo Guerra can lift words out of his heart and hide them in ours without artifice. He can make exactly the right words appear in exactly the right places. He can play just the right music for us to dance to. He doesn't have to tell us how he did it, but it can only be that he sentenced himself to hard labor to become the great writer that he is.

This book is beyond wonderful.

[Bea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy shit. Damn good book. Not the type of story you read every day. I regret not having read this book sooner (like in high school). Love the characters and loved loved loved the ending. This book doesn't sugar coat shit and sometimes that's needed. It shows that relationships are hard and that it's not always the fairy tale you were shown/promised growing up.

[Edgar Sandoval · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this before I met Erasmo. I was impressed with him as a writer first & then with him as a genuine person. Must read! 📚

[Alana Voth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Between Dances, Erasmo Guerra's debut novel and Lambda Literary Award winner, is the story of "Marco," a young gay man from Mexico attempting find love in a hyper-sexualized world of strip clubs and hustling, and when I say love, I mean self love, the most difficult love to come by in the world.

Like many strippers/hustlers, Marco struggles to leave sex work behind and find a "real job." The money, of course, is hard to sacrifice. So is the attention. Like so many sex workers, Marco finds validation in feeling desired even while he resents the men who use him, and this applies to both tricks and lovers. Here's a young man who wants to make emotional connections despite the odds.

Guerra writes with a lot of care for his narrator and lays down so many great lines and images like, "He just hadn't expected his heart to empty out and burn down like a church on fire."

Between Dances chronicles a journey through an "underbelly" of society as told by a narrator with a warm and tender heart. There's no big happy ending here; instead it feels honest. And there's hope.

XO.

[Libretto · Rating 5 out of 5]

["]Between Dances["] there is truly great writing. Oh, the rhythm of the thing!

[Misty]

*DNF*
(53%)