He lost both jobs because of poisonous office politics, he asserts, after his superior skills upstaged other, more powerful ensemble members. These included a contract with an Iranian ballet company in Tehran, which ended with his having to flee across the border to Turkey, and a stint with the all-male Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo troupe back in the United States.
He was a gifted dancer, but not quite superstar material when his hopes of getting a spot in the storied American Ballet Theater company fizzled, he scrounged for other gigs. This edition is black cloth covered and gold embossed on the spine with a rich full-color sturdy dust jacket.A gay man recounts his struggle to define himself while trying to find success as a dancer and singer in this debut memoir.Īfter a hardscrabble boyhood in San Francisco, 20-year-old Dane moved to New York City on a Juilliard ballet scholarship in 1975-the beginning of a long odyssey on the fringes of the arts and entertainment industry. My stories are images of different selves developing in that dangerous void and a message to all people who live in disguise and have no reflection, to people who grow up in isolation and create their lives out of their own imagination.
While my stories recount the path that brought me here, mostly they tell the story of the man that I was becoming, pieced together, bit-by-bit, out of shadows, reinvented and reborn, in silence.Still, a recurring theme plays itself out in each episode of my life the cost of acceptance is always denial, so I am at odds with the world, or so it seems and as I grow older I realize that in ghettos and in stereotypes there is an underlying thread of a war, not with society, but with ourselves. I have lived as an openly gay man in Iran, was witness to the lavish extravagances and social horror of apartheid South Africa, was arrested on suspicion of murder in Paris and for prostitution in New York.
In ordinary circles my personal life was a minefield. Free of the confines of convention we wander along dangerous paths in search our own. I confronted the confines of society and pursued the promise and myths of liberation.As a result of my conspicuous rebellion, that of simply being myself, of not living in disguise, I began to discover another society - a Secret Society - of people who have grown up in this world, where lies of omission shape our destiny and keep us apart. Over the years and in my extensive travels, I have strived toward many means of expression and sometimes avenues of escape. HomoAmerican - The Secret Society is not merely the story of a gay man growing up in America, but a firsthand portrait of those turbulent and confusing times, observed through unfiltered eyes.
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